Book Review: Feminist Judgments of Aotearoa New Zealand Te Rino: A Two-Stranded Rope
| Author | Aoife O’donoghue |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663918822415 |
| Published date | 01 April 2019 |
| Date | 01 April 2019 |
On one side, there is the desire for control by restricting access to abortion via the law,
funding, time limits and counselling; and on the other, there is diversion through promo-
tion of sex education and contraception. This, Miller argues, obfuscates the fact that
individual women choose to have abortions and it will always be required regardless of
restrictions or diversions.
In the conclusion, Miller advocates for a rethink of pro-choice politics and scholar-
ship. She argues that there are multiple pregnancy subjectivities. By disrupting the
rhetoric behind choice and motherhood as a placeholder, of the foetus as an autonomous
subject with varying value based on race and class, abortion can be depoliticized and
emotional scripts can be disposed of. When there is no fixed norm, shame and guilt could
disappear from the affective landscape of abortion. Miller highlights various unapolo-
getic narratives, such as #shoutyourabortion, which began to challenge these normative
assumptions and emotional inevitabilities. With pregnancy viewed as a subjective con-
dition, women can have the freedom to respond to it as they need. Abortion can be
an ‘occasion for happiness or hope just as easily and legitimately as grief or sadness’
(p. 280).
This book encourages its readers to interrogate assumptions that are made when
arguing for abortion access. Miller reveals the various ways that arguments used prag-
matically to bridge the gap between ideologies, or in a common-sense way, may lead to a
reification of normative femininity and motherhood. Her arguments about the perpetua-
tion of shame and guilt through arguments for interventions, such as sex education and
contraception, was an important demonstration of this. Australia was a great case study
as the book had plenty of real-world examples and debates. This book did focus on the
Anglosphere, so it would be interesting to see whether these dynamics were reflected in
the Global South, or places where abortion access continues to be restricted.
ALANA FARRELL
University of Birmingham, UK
ELISABETH MCDONALD, RHONDA POWELL, MA
¯MARI STEPHENS, ROSEMARY HUNTER,
Feminist Judgments of Aotearoa New Zealand Te Rino: A Two-Stranded Rope. Oxford: Hart, 2017, pp.
549, ISBN 9781509909759, £90 (hbk).
The potential for some to suggest feminist judgment fatigue emerged almost immedi-
ately upon the completion of the first project in Canada (Rewriting Equality, 2006),
certainly after the publication of the English book in 2010 (Hunter et al 2010). Projects,
however, continue to flourish in Australia (Douglas et al 2015), Northern/Ireland
(Enright et al, 2017), the United States (Stanchi et al, 2016), Scotland,
1
India,
2
within
international law (Hodson and Levers, 2019) and further still into different kinds of
judgments projects including children (Stalford et al 2017) and wild law (Rogers et al
2017). Why is the method replicated? This anthology from Aotearoa New Zealand
Book Reviews275
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