The Abortion Querelle: Abortion Regulation Between Discursive Conflicts and Normative Scenarios

Seminar with Tamara Roma.

Abstract

This seminar explores the legal and discursive construction of abortion regulation, focusing on how rights, subjects, and norms emerge from intersecting histories, ideologies, and epistemic frameworks. Drawing on a Foucauldian historical-genealogical approach and post-structuralist discourse analysis, the presentation is methodologically rooted in feminist critique and women's epistemologies. This perspective foregrounds the embodied experiences, resistances, and silences that have shaped – and been shaped by – legal discourse on reproduction.

The first part offers a historical-comparative analysis of abortion regulation in Europe and the United States, tracing the evolution of legal formants – the foundational discursive elements of law – from the 19th century onward. Through a feminist historical lens, it reconstructs how these formants emerge within material struggles over bodies and power, and how they are reproduced, challenged, and transplanted across normative systems. This section also shows how key epistemic communities – legal, medical, religious, bioethical, and activist – historically consolidate, setting the stage for the following discursive conflicts.

The second part critically examines those epistemic communities, focusing on how feminist legal theory, bioethics, and social movements have constructed competing narratives around abortion, rights, and bodies. Using critical discourse analysis informed by postmodern legal feminism and feminist bioethics, it interrogates how discursive strategies produce normative exclusions and how language serves as a site of both regulation and resistance.

The final section presents a comparative legal analysis of contemporary developments, especially in light of the reversal of Roe v. Wade. It examines how abortion is regulated across different jurisdictions, how constitutional and supranational frameworks respond to competing rights claims, and how transnational discourses increasingly shape local legal configurations.

Ultimately, by proposing a decentered and critical understanding of law as a historically contingent and ideologically charged space, the research seeks to identify potential best practices among the cases analyzed, aiming to reimagine the norms that govern reproductive subjectivities and justice.

Bio

Tamara is a Ph.D. researcher in Human Rights: Evolution, Protection, and Limits at the University of Palermo, Faculty of Law. Her research focuses on abortion from a comparative law perspective between Europe and the United States. She is also particularly interested in the intersections of technologies – both biotechnologies and information technologies – with gender and law, with a specific focus on the crossroads of data protection and health frameworks, and the Digital Market.

Before her Ph.D., Tamara earned a Master of Arts in Historical Sciences and a Bachelor’s degree in History, both from the University of Bologna. She also completed an advanced course in Bioethics at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. Additionally, she served as a tutor of the course "Women and Law" within the Gemma - Erasmus Mundus Master's Degree in Women and Gender Studies, Department of Modern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures (LILEC) at the University of Bologna.

Joining on zoom 

If you want to attend the seminar online, please email Hannah Louise Smith for the Zoom link.