This project is a narrative interview study of fifteen women who have had abortions in England since 2008. It aims to answer the questions:

1. How do women in England make meaning about their abortion experiences?
2. What aspects of their identities and life experiences contribute to this meaning-making?
3. In particular, how does class structure this meaning-making?

England is in the midst of a long-term political project of austerity and neoliberal governance which has prompted renewed sociological attention to the issue of social class. In this context, discourse on abortion reflects and reproduces societal beliefs about gender, class and reproduction: who should reproduce; who has a legitimate ‘excuse’ not to reproduce; and what judgement should be passed on women who choose to end their pregnancies. Through the work of Beverley Skeggs and Michel Foucault, this study examines how women who have had abortions in this context make meaning about their experiences, and how class and gender are constructed in their narratives.

This study contributes to literature on the internalisation of neoliberal modes of self-governance in relation to reproduction. It argues that the process of requesting an abortion extends a demand to women to perform precarity in ways that are more possible for some women than others. Abortion narratives are therefore shaped by access to classed ‘discursive resources,’ and the women’s relationships to responsibility were also shaped by their class positions.

Finally, this study contributes to the rich literature on abortion stigma by applying the Foucauldian concepts of biopolitics and governmentality to abortion narratives, arguing that abortion experiences in contemporary England are shaped by the confluence of abortion stigma, the neoliberal injunction to self-regulate, and the societal construction of womanhood as biologically painful.

Using Foucault’s concept of ‘technologies of the self,’ I conclude that through these women’s accounts, the specific regulatory practices that produce middle-class womanhood can be better understood. The study therefore explores how wider processes of neoliberal governance might be insinuated, embodied, and resisted by individual women.

Despite previous research suggesting that social class influences experiences of and attitudes to abortion, there is a dearth of research which studies the intersection of abortion and social class in England. Across the UK, abortion rates and experiences differ by region and socio-economic status, reflecting broader health inequalities. Contemporary austerity in the UK creates an imperative for new research which contextualises the experience of abortion within this socio-historical moment, and the worsening inequalities which have accompanied it. Whilst work on abortion and social inequality exists, it has often approached class as an a priori category. I argue that contemporary post-structural work on class provides a framework to go beyond this approach by examining how these social classifications occur; who has the power to classify; and how these classifications might be resisted. This framework is demonstrated with emerging findings from a life history study of abortion experiences in England. The applications of this to the work on abortion are potentially rich, because the act of ending a pregnancy invites classification from many quarters, from the legal (legal/illegal) to the medical (early/late) to the moral (deserved/undeserved). This work, therefore, speaks to public health concerns about access to and stigma around abortion and social inequalities.

Statistics suggest that survivors of sexual violence from BME and LGBT communities are less likely to access specialist support than other members of the general population. This paper highlights specific barriers these communities face in accessing support services and how they could be addressed by these services, using data from a case study conducted in the city of Brighton and Hove, UK. It also takes the original step of comparing questionnaire and interview data from survivors with questionnaire and interview data from practitioners working with the BME and LGBT communities. Recommendations are identified for sexual violence services and social workers working with these survivors that are missing from existing literature. These include a critique of the empowerment discourse commonly employed by support services, use of intersectional feminist theory to inform practice, and recommendations for 'community-embedded' support services.