Please join us in the Fall 24’ Articulating Abortion Lecture.

In this lecture, Prof. Durba Mitra (Harvard University, WGS) will reflect on the history of abortion in South Asia and the legacies of racism and sexual control rooted in colonialism that shape present-day debates about reproductive rights and bodily autonomy. Colonial-era abortion bans in the nineteenth century catalyzed the massive expansion of infrastructures of knowledge about sexuality that became foundational for new forms of policing and carceral power, from practices of community surveillance to new evidentiary forms that made deviancy visible through evidence of the body. She offers a genealogy of the coloniality of abortion as a lens to understand the intimate relationship of carceral power and the control of reproduction in our present.