Objectives: Self-managed abortion (SMA, ending one's pregnancy without medical assistance) is criminalized in some states, with some imprisoned for it. We sought to explore the attitudes of people living in these states about legality and criminalization of SMA.
Methods: We recruited participants via advertisements on Facebook targeted toward individuals living in states with multiple restrictive abortion policies. 54 participants of varied genders were purposively selected to participate in semi-structured qualitative interviews. Interviews were transcribed, coded, and analyzed with thematic analysis.
Results: Participants generally did not support outlawing SMA because they believed people are entitled to their bodily autonomy and should not be punished or imprisoned for acting on their own body. They conceptualized someone who ends their own pregnancy as desperate, poor, and lacking abortion/healthcare access, and thus should not be punished by law. They envisioned SMA as unsafe or potentially lethal. Some people who had safety concerns saw outlaw of SMA as an effective deterrent to a dangerous practice. Few believed in any punishment, and those who favored any state intervention preferred counseling or an education intervention. General abortion attitudes paralleled SMA legality attitudes, with a few notable exceptions. Cisgender men tended to be more ambivalent of the idea of criminalization than others.
Conclusions: With few exceptions, participants did not support outlawing SMA, and firmly held that imprisonment was grossly unfair. Woman-protective framing that has animated anti-abortion politics since the 1990s (Mason 2019) could breed support for the decriminalization of SMA.
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