Workshop on: "Abortion Law in Action: Enabling Environments and the Politics of Access"

This workshop examines abortion law as a socio-legal field shaped not only by formal rules, but by the interaction of legal regulation and norms, policy implementation, health care provision, formal and informal, and advocacy. Although many European jurisdictions have liberalised abortion law, access to abortion care remains uneven, fragile and increasingly contested. The workshop focuses on the gap between abortion regulation and abortion provision, formal and informal, asking how abortion rights are enabled, constrained or undermined in practice across diverse contexts.

As its analytical lens, the workshop draws on the World Health Organization’s concept of the Enabling Environment, which locates access within a constellation of legal norms, institutional arrangements, health system capacity, professional practices and socio-political conditions. Using this lens, participants analyse abortion law as a dynamic governance domain in which criminal law, administrative requirements, funding structures, clinical protocols and multi-disciplinary professional discretion as well as advocacy efforts jointly shape pathways to care.

The workshop adopts a comparative perspective organised through curated panels that examine recurring configurations of abortion environments. These include settings characterised by liberal regulation and liberal provision ; liberal regulation combined with restrictive provision or access in practice; restrictive regulatory frameworks accompanied by pragmatic provision or informal accommodation; and mixed or hybrid regimes where regulation and provision are misaligned. Further discussion will address restrictive regulation with restrictive provision, and the role of efforts including decriminalisation, cross-border care facilitation, telemedicine, and informal support networks in mediating access.

Across these settings, the workshop asks: How are comparatively liberal environments sustained amid renewed political and legal pressure to restrict access, including pressures linked to welfare-state retrenchment? Through which legal, administrative and professional mechanisms as well as advocacy efforts are gaps between liberal law and restrictive practice produced and maintained? How do constitutional guarantees, stalled reform processes, and innovations such as telemedical provision reshape access, implementation, enforcement and clinical decision-making? What strategies of advocacy and evidence mobilisation influence governance choices, and how do enabling environments address access for marginalised groups, including minoritised people, undocumented people and those seeking later abortion care?

By foregrounding abortion law as law-in-action, the workshop moves beyond accounts of formal legal change and works towards a comparative typology and vision of enabling environments. It aims to identify conditions under which abortion rights are translated into meaningful access in practice, and points at which reform remains vulnerable to erosion or reversal. The final session will synthesise findings, refine shared concepts, and outline a collaborative research and publication agenda for participants in Oñati.