Childbirth and abortion in times of coronavirus: The impact of the pandemic on sexual and reproductive rights

Authors

Abstract

The sexual and reproductive rights of women, as well as the rights of their children, are being threatened due to the COVID-19 crisis. In these times of pandemic, both pregnant and postpartum women and their newborns have become victims of the consequences of the gyno-obstetric patriarchy paradigm. In this article, we analyze the negative consequences of coronavirus management in childbirth and abortion processes. Likewise, we defend that the crisis unleashed by COVID-19 can be an opportunity to make visible situations of sexual and reproductive injustice and bring about changes to guarantee the freedoms and rights of women and infants.

Keywords

abortion, pharmacological abortion, confinement, COVID-19, sexual and reproductive rights, social distancing, pregnancy, childbirth, obstetric patriarchy

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Author Biographies

Ester Massó Guijarro, Universidad de Granada. FiloLab

Ester Massó Guijarro is a professor of moral philosophy in the Department of Philosophy I at the University of Granada (UGR). She is a member of the ESPACyOS network on Health Ethics for Action, Care and Social Observation and the FiloLab Unit of Teaching Excellence. From 2012 to 2019, she was a professor of anthropology in the Department of Social Anthropology at the UGR. She holds a PhD (2009), a Licentiate of Philosophy and Social & Cultural Anthropology (2003) from the UGR and a Master of International Cooperation from the UGR and the University of Santiago de Compostela (2005). She has done several research stays at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon, Portugal; the University of Windhoek in Namibia; the Nordiska Afrikainstitutet of Uppsala, Sweden and the Institute of Anthropological Sciences of the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. She has also been a predoctoral researcher at the UGR and a postdoctoral researcher (JAE DOC) at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) of Madrid.

Rosana Triviño Caballero, Universidad de Alcalá

Rosana Triviño Caballero is assistant lecturer at the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences of Alcalá University, Madrid. She is member of the ESPACyOS network on Health Ethics for Action, Care and Social Observation and LI²FE (www.liife.org). She holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Salamanca (USAL, 2014), a Licentiate of Humanities from the Carlos III University of Madrid (UC3M, 2007) and a Bachelor of Physiotherapy from the Comillas Pontifical University (UPCO, 1998). She earned a Master of Political Science and Constitutional Law at the Center for Political and Constitutional Studies (CEPC, 2009) for which she was awarded the prize for outstanding research for her work on patient autonomy and treatment refusal grounded on religious beliefs. She has been a predoctoral researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). She has also done several research stays at the Uehiro Center for Applied Ethics, University of Oxford; Case Western Reserve University of Cleveland, Ohio; Princeton University and The Hastings Center of New York. In 2017, she was awarded a bioethics research grant from the Grífols Foundation to fund the ProtoAccess Project on protocols for accessing pregnancy interruption in the EU.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.5565/rev/enrahonar.1305

Published

2020-10-30

How to Cite

Massó Guijarro, E., & Triviño Caballero, R. (2020). Childbirth and abortion in times of coronavirus: The impact of the pandemic on sexual and reproductive rights. Enrahonar. An International Journal of Theoretical and Practical Reason, 65, 117–130. https://doi.org/10.5565/rev/enrahonar.1305

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