‘Everything I can do at home, I will do it at home’: the materialities, temporalities, and spatialities of telemedicine abortion care

The advent of telemedicine abortion in 2020 in the United States meant that abortion care was increasingly pushed out of clinical settings and into the home. Yet, within the context of abortion inequalities and restrictions in the US, there is often more focus on provision of and access to medication abortion via telemedicine than there is on what happens after the abortion pills are acquired. This paper brings together and advances scholarship in abortion, care, and home geographies to address this empirical gap by exploring the material, temporal and spatial dimensions of telemedicine abortion care at home, and examining how these dimensions shape the embodied, emotional, and affective experience of abortion care. Telemedicine abortion allows individuals to self-manage the timing, symptoms, and space of their abortion, thereby creating a caring atmosphere. A geographical perspective on telemedicine abortion reveals that taking the abortion pills at home shapes the experience of abortion care.

https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2024.2441774