Avorter et accoucher autrement

This article results from the unprecedented meeting of two corpora of interviews car- ried out with women having given birth in France or having aborted in Québec in in- stitutions fostering an “alternative” care during these various times of reproductive tra- jectories, as well as with professionals working in those institutions. Pooling these re- search resources has enabled us to reveal continuities and discordances in the defini- tion and practical application of “alternativity”, notably regarding the demedicalisation applied to two ordinary episodes in the women’s lives : the termination of pregnancy and childbirth. Indeed, the practitioners working within these spaces of “resistance”, while sharing the same dispute as to the injunction to therapeutic accompaniment of procreative work – more specifically of the physiological process of pregnancy and two of its possible outcomes –, are led to participate in a differentiated construction of these acts and, by means of original methods, to perpetuate the traditional opposition between childbirth and voluntary termination of pregnancy.