Abortion, decriminalisation and the medico-legal paradigm

The medico-legal paradigm enmeshes legal with medical power, making abortion lawfully available only under the supervision of medical professionals. This article examines the recent parliamentary debates over abortion decriminalisation in New South Wales, Australia's most populous state, to argue that the decriminalisation of abortion in Australia represents a continuance with, rather than a break from, the medico-legal paradigm. The medical power embedded in laws that criminalised abortion in the nineteenth century, and liberalised abortion in the twentieth century, was not the same as that imagined by parliamentarians debating decriminalising abortion in the twenty-first century. Norms constituting abortion seekers and their doctors have shifted significantly. Nevertheless, the medico-legal paradigm continues to govern how lawful abortion is imagined. The medico-legal paradigm converts abortion seekers' desires for abortion into a need for healthcare and imagines the autonomy and agency of abortion seekers as enabled only through their subjection to medical power. This conversion, I suggest, dampens the potential abortion holds to open up and challenge norms of gender, sexuality and reproduction. •Abortion, decriminalisation and the medico-legal paradigm.•The medico-legal paradigm is a mode of regulating abortion normalised through a series of sedimented discourses.•Abortion decriminalisation is a distinct mode of regulating abortion through the medico-legal paradigm.•The medico-legal paradigm restricts the political imaginary of abortion and subjects the agency and autonomy of abortion seekers to medical authority.