Introduction

Around the world, abortion remains a highly politicised reality, co-opted into party political agendas, decolonising rhetoric, religious pronouncements and rejections of Western secularism, often in the name of a return to pronatalist national, cultural or religious values. Laws seeking to enable access to safe abortion, as well as those seeking to prevent other forms of violence against women, have come into force in many places over the last five decades, demonstrating important progress underpinned by decades of womens rights activism (Karim, 2022). This legal progress has been true of the two countries where I have spent most of my life; England, which legalised abortion in 1967, and South Africa, which legalised abortion in 1996. However, many countries where I work across Africa, Latin America and Asia still have criminalised legal contexts for abortion, fueling unsafe abortion practices with reforms often blocked by religious voices (Obengo, 2016). Current laws allowing access to abortion often remain sites of contestation in many contexts with risks of backlash and reversals an ever-present concern for activists, as seen in the 2022 overturning of constitutional protections by the Supreme Court in the USA and further restrictions to abortion access in Poland. In these contexts, religious voices are playing significant roles in anti-abortion rhetoric and frequently have a large constituency that gives social and political, as well as spiritual, power to these religiously infused narratives.

This chapter is based on the premise that while laws enabling access to safe and affordable abortion are essential, on their own they are not enough. Political, cultural and religious discourses (Bloomer et al, 2017; Palm, 2019) also need sustained engagement and transformation as they continue to be used to undergird abortion stigma in the lives of women and girls in many contexts (Kumar, 2018). Religious-related abortion stigma is identified as fueling unsafe abortions in many contexts due to the shame, silence and concealment practices that often emerge as a result (Clements, 2014; Peters, 2018). This is the case in the South African context, where some of the most liberal abortion laws in the world were brought in by President Mandela as part of a social justice framework in the 1990s. However, two decades later, South Africa still has high levels of unsafe abortion, obstructed access within health services, often framed morally as conscientious objection, and religiously driven abortion stigma (HEARD, 2016; Stevens and Mudarikwa, 2018).