Authors:
Suh, Siri
Corporate Author:
Social Science & Medicine (1982)
Published:
2020

This article draws on an ethnography of Senegal’s post-abortion care (PAC) program, conducted between 2010 and 2011, to illustrate how PAC indicators obscure the professional and technological complexities of treating abortion complications in contexts where abortion is illegal. The author argues that PAC strategies, technologies, and indicators must be situated within a global framework of reproductive governance, in which safe abortion has been omitted from maternal and reproductive health care associated with reproductive rights. Ethnographic attention to daily obstetric practices reveals not only how anxieties about abortion ironically suppress the rates of manual vacuum aspiration utilization that purportedly convey PAC quality, but also how they simultaneously give rise to and obscure obstetric violence against women.