The pleasure and joy of abortion accompaniment: an interview with Dr. Katrina Kimport
A recent Ibis paper, “The pleasure, joy and positive emotional experiences of abortion accompaniment after 17 weeks’ gestation,” investigated the positive emotions, pleasure, and joy of abortion involvement as part of an ongoing partnership between researchers from Ibis Reproductive Health, ANSIRH, and College of Charleston, and leaders from three abortion accompaniment collectives. Ibis Senior Development and Communications Coordinator, Elana Tsogt-Erdene, sat down with the paper’s first author, Dr. Katrina Kimport, to discuss this study, the activism of abortion accompaniment, and the role of researchers. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Elana: To start off, could you tell me a little bit about the article and how it came to be?
Katrina: So, there’s the very long origin story and then there’s the shorter origin story. I’ll share the shorter one, which is that there was this rich and really unprecedented data set that Ibis scholars had collected in a phenomenal partnership with three accompaniment groups that are based in South America.
The data was of people who have been engaged in abortion accompaniment in-person for abortions after 17 weeks’ gestation. I was already collaborating with Ibis scholars Heidi Moseson and Chiara Bercu, and also a scholar at College of Charleston, Julia McReynolds-Pérez, to work with this phenomenal data set to make the best use of it. As we were spending time in the data, trying to answer some questions that had oriented the data collection in the first place — about the experience, about best practices — one of the themes that we kept seeing was discussions of joy, of happiness, of pleasure in doing this work. And we realized that that wasn’t something that was showing up in the literature, maybe at all, but certainly not in a large way. So we decided to really try to think about that part of these interviews and that was the germ that became this paper.
Elana: What specifically was it about the joy and the pleasure part that stood out to the researchers and made you all want to explore this further?
Katrina: One of the ways that we were employing this data set was with a very inductive approach: walking in and thinking about, okay, we have some sense of the literature and what conversations are happening, but really trying to let the data speak for itself.
And one of the things that emerged in this process was themes of joy and pleasure. One of the things that happens in analysis of research, especially in qualitative accounts like an in-depth interview about somebody’s personal experience and when we’re talking about abortions that are particularly stigmatized (whether that’s because of legal restriction or cultural disapproval), is that doing the analysis of that data can from a researcher perspective include a lot of emotionally difficult things. You’re reading about people who have sometimes experienced trauma that has contributed to why they’re in the situation where they need abortion care at this point in pregnancy, the challenges and barriers they have faced, the financial cost, the emotional cost. This [emotional difficulty] is something that, as a qualitative researcher in the sexual and reproductive health space, is familiar to me about navigating qualitative research.
And yet when I spent time in these data, I didn’t come out feeling bummed. I didn’t need a sort of a break and a reset after spending time in these data. In some ways, that was one of the first signs that something new and interesting was in the data. Once we started paying attention to that, we started to recognize the really unapologetically affirmative experiences that were happening in these accounts. This was not something the data collection was specifically trying to explore. And yet it came through in the interviews. And so we stood back and we said, “okay, well, let’s figure out more about that. What’s happening here?”
At the same time, we were reading the literature. We read work by Baird and Millar who are scholars in Australia who had been making a really strong case about the way that abortion research itself tended to center what we might call “the negative,” the ways in which getting wanted abortion care is made more difficult and the harms of all of these obstacles. They made the case that, even with the best intentions, illustrating all of the difficulty of getting abortion care could in aggregate have the inadvertent effect of making abortion associated with negative things.
And so, we were inductively looking at what’s in the interviews and engaging some of the conversation that’s happening in the literature, always actively reflecting as researchers about things like, how do I feel about doing this analysis? What are the effects of spending time in this? And how is that actually something that’s telling me something about these data? All of these actions together brought us to the point of wanting to think about and center interviewee discussions of the positive emotional experiences of accompaniment.
Elana: The part you mentioned about how scholarly research focusing on this negative narrative around abortion contributes to the cultural understanding and experiences of individuals really stood out. The connection to this dominant narrative in popular culture and media that’s like, oh, well, nobody wants to get an abortion and it was a relief, but it’s something that I struggled with or it’s something difficult and traumatic and dark and shameful. So reading some of the excerpts from these interviews where the accompaniers are talking about their experiences and how they’re amazing and empowering and validating. That was so powerful.
Katrina: All of those things are true. All of that research has important contributions to make. And also, what you’re describing experiencing in reading our article is the realization that when we put all the earlier research together, the social story is still missing something. That just tells us that we need to look for other stories: what new things might we learn?
Elana: For those who may be unfamiliar with abortion accompaniment, can you explain what it is and talk a little bit about who accompaniers are and why they choose to do this work?
Katrina: Yes! At the time of the data collection in all three countries, abortion was heavily legally restricted. Abortion accompaniment is a response to unsafe and/or inaccessible abortion whereby volunteer activists guide abortion seekers through an abortion over the telephone, through texts, or in person, relying on pregnancy-duration specific WHO endorsed protocols. Abortion accompaniment is not unique to these three countries, and is something Ibis has a depth of research on*.
In this study, there were interviews with 28 people who had accompanied abortions in person after 17 weeks’ gestation, which is a multi-day accompaniment. They are present for the duration and it’s an unpaid, volunteer role. The accompaniers in this study identified as activists, and they support people who want to abort their pregnancies regardless of reason or circumstances.
*Note: for more information on abortion accompaniment, see our brief on feminist medication abortion accompaniment, the Studying Accompaniment model Feasibility & Effectiveness (SAFE) Study page, and the Regional Second Trimester (R2T) Study page.
Elana: I remember reading a paper that called abortion accompaniment a “feat of feminist engineering.” Do you think that something like abortion accompaniment exists in other areas of activism? Are there areas where this is applicable or like exist elsewhere?
Katrina: It’s a really interesting phenomenon. One way of thinking about it is that this is direct service activism. It’s both very firmly rejecting the constraints of the existing community that somebody is in. And it’s a type of activism that doesn’t intend to engage the political process. Historically, scholars of social movements tended to be very focused on the politics of the state, so activities targeting politicians, targeting laws, etc. They often overlooked the way that there could be activism that wasn’t exclusively about trying to change particular laws, but believed in community and social change that could happen outside of the formal political system. That tends to be activities and activism that’s engaged by people who are socially marginalized. That the literature itself tended to overlook activism engaged by populations that are often socially overlooked was an interesting replication.
In sociology, there was what we call the cultural turn, which was increasing scholarly attention to the activist engagement of people who weren’t targeting the state. So that could be targeting culture and seeking cultural change. Things like self-help movements are a direct-action focused engagement that doesn’t target the state. There are lots of examples of cultural change-focused activism outside of abortion. What these efforts share is a focus on the people most affected and trying to make meaningful change in their lives with a belief that this activity has broad ripple effects rather than targeting the state directly.
Importantly, this doesn’t mean that there’s not a desire for political change, but it means that the intervention point is not in electoral politics or typical politics or challenging the state.
Elana: Going back to what we were talking about with the narrative around abortion, both in scholarship and in popular culture being very negative, why do you think that is? And how do you think that came to be?
Katrina: I think that there are probably multiple contributors. And it probably doesn’t have much intentionality behind it. I don’t think that people set out to produce a negative social idea of abortion through research. I think it is an unintended consequence of a number of decisions. Probably one of the primary contributors is the fact that all of our work and all of us as researchers are operating in a culture or cultures where abortion is politically and socially contested. We cannot be entirely outside of the social norms and expectations of our communities. They are a part of what we live and breathe. We exist in cultures that have suspicion of, negative framings of, unchallenged social disapproval of abortion. As researchers, we have to grapple with that even as we deploy methods that are intended to get us outside of our individual subjectivity. There’s just a limit. We are human. And so I think that’s one contributor.
Another contributor is the scholarly focus on documenting the barriers to abortion and the harms of limiting abortion access. Again, those are important contributions to understanding what happens to abortion seekers, what happens in our societies to people who have the capacity for pregnancy. But these important contributions have not been complemented by research looking at other aspects of abortion. A lot of our orientation as researchers is towards trying to identify problems and suggest opportunities for interventions or changes, which functions as a researcher bias towards then documenting negative aspects.
I don’t think there’s a villain here or a strong intentionality. Some of this is just the effect of the current conventions in scientific investigation and the prevalence of anti-abortion norms in the cultures we work in.
Elana: What kind of abortion research would you like to see, especially in this vein and what research questions should we be asking about abortion?
Katrina: I hope what this paper illustrates is that there are a lot of unanswered questions that are quite rich and exciting about the possibilities of joy and pleasure in obtaining abortion care, in offering abortion care in our current regulatory environment, and in having an abortion outside of the formal health care system. I also think there’s an opportunity for scholars who are studying a range of aspects of abortion to include some questions or attention to positive aspects of people’s care experience, people’s searching experience.
I hope that this paper can open new avenues of research or at least additions to existing inquiries.
Elana: What should people take away from this article?
Katrina: I hope academic readers take away the importance and value of being reflexive as researchers about our assumptions in our study designs and that, when we allow space in our data collections for the unexpected and in our analyses inductively learn from the data, we might be really surprised. That is a methodological orientation that I think ultimately grows our scientific knowledge in exciting ways.
Elana: What do you hope people who are not researchers or academics take away from the paper?
Katrina: I hope that reading the paper can be an opportunity to think about — to the extent that the findings are surprising — uninterrogated ideas about what abortion means and what abortion research will show us. When we think about what our own uninterrogated assumptions are, that can open us up to new opportunities to think about the world in general and abortion in particular.
I think another takeaway is the way that what might seem to be a very small action in this entire enormous world can be felt and experienced as profoundly important. The paper shows how seemingly small gestures could be deeply meaningful. I think that that’s another encouraging takeaway for some readers to think about: what these accounts document is how the effort of accompaniers can have a really dramatic impact on a person’s life.
Elana: I think that was definitely the case for me. In reading this article, it was an opportunity to think about the biases you hold or the unchallenged truths, ideas about what something is and how it’s experienced and how it’s supposed to be. The ideas presented in the experiences of the women who were highlighted, it was different and it was very empowering and very feminist.
Katrina: If we sit back and think about it, of course it makes sense that people get value out of doing this activist work. Because if they didn’t, why would they do it, right?
Accompaniment is a very intensive and demanding contribution. And the assumption that people would do this without any emotional benefit? When we think about that assumption we realize that’s really silly — of course, that can’t be the case. In that way, these findings really shouldn’t be surprised at all. And so, in some ways, maybe the surprise is that we’re surprised. That’s one of my favorite parts about doing research: finding those surprises and then realizing how familiar they actually are.
About the Project
The Regional Second Trimester (R2T) Study is a result of a collaborative research partnership between researchers at Ibis Reproductive Health; Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH) at University of California, San Francisco; and College of Charleston, as well leaders of three accompaniment group collectives: Con Las Amigas y en la Casa, Las Comadres, and Colectiva Feminista La Revuelta.
