June 25, 2025
Reflections from Geneva. Conference “Race and Sexual and Reproductive Health: Historical Perspectives”
Elisa Roncone, PhD candidate within the LEGABO project, shares her experience at the “Race and Sexual and Reproductive Health in Historical Perspectives” conference, part of the RE:SHARE project (18–20 June 2025):
It was my first time in Geneva. I arrived early at the Geneva Graduate Institute, wanting to find my bearings, take some photos, to capture an image of what it feels like to begin a PhD. In those first few months, everything feels different: the questions, the fears, the gratitude. And above all, I felt grateful. Grateful for the opportunity, and for the trust of Agata Ignaciuk —my thesis and project supervisor— who encouraged me to join academic spaces alongside Caroline Rusterholz and her team. From the very beginning, the welcome was generous. Naomi Samake-Bäckert and George Severs (both from the Geneva Graduate Institute) integrated me with professionalism and care. I felt I was already part of that small community.
Nicole Bourbonnais’s keynote (The Gospel of Family Planning: An Intimate Global History) became a grounding point. Nicole didn’t just speak about sources, frameworks, and archives. She began with her grandmother. With the intimate history that led her to research family planning. Hearing her say that “every country has its own Margaret Sanger” was eye-opening. I thought about how many “intimate” histories remain excluded from global narratives because they’re not white enough, because they don’t fit dominant frameworks of visibility.
When she spoke of Adaline Pendleton Satterthwaite, “Penny” —a physician and technical advisor to the Population Council in the 60s and 70s, who travelled the world keeping daily journals— I felt those pages, written from everyday activism, spoke directly to me. Not as a dead archive, but as a living testimony of a transnational feminist genealogy I want to be part of.
The roundtable with Edem Ntumy (Reproductive Justice Initiative), Jenny Douglas (Open University), and Christina Ganotakis (NAZ) was a key moment. They spoke about structural racism, the chronic lack of funding for Black Studies, and the urgent need to build a less white academy. One where Black researchers are not merely objects of analysis, but central voices. They said it with conviction. And it was felt.
I resonated with Roberta Bivins’s (University of Warwick) comment after a panel: “I was so ignorant before this panel started — and now I feel I’ve learned so much.” That sentence stayed with me throughout the three days of the conference.
Audience interventions were so precise and necessary that I thought: each question deserved to become a research line, a funded project, a collaborative network.
I still carry the question posed to us by Samuel Yosef (King’s College London) and Manna Mostaghim (LSE):
What does reproductive justice mean to you? How does it take shape in your context?
I don’t want my thesis to merely represent. I want it to be a tool —among others— to reflect on what a racially just reproductive health could mean, built from the neighbourhood, the consultation room, the archive. In relation.
Because if there is one thing I’m taking from Geneva, it’s this:
Reproductive justice is not declared or theorised in isolation — it is practiced through connection.
Between allies in political struggle, between professionals and patients, between movements, generations, and bodies.
May 16, 2025
Doctoral Thesis Defence – Ángela Lucía Agudelo-González
On May 16, 2025, in the graduation hall of the Faculty of Political Science at the University of Granada, Ángela Lucía Agudelo-González defended her doctoral thesis titled “Motherhood and Birth Control in Ibagué and Barranquilla During the First Half of the 20th Century.”
This research examined cases of abortion, infanticide, and abandonment in Colombia during this period, using judicial records as its primary source.
📣Congratulation Ángela!📣
May 16, 2025
Presentation on “The Spanish ‘Pro-Life’ Movement (1985–2000)”, Sorbonne University
On May 16, 2025, María Mundi-López and Agata Ignaciuk took part in the event Mobilisations conservatrices: labelliser, contextualiser, enquêter.
There, they presented the paper Contextualizing the Spanish “Prolife” Movement (1985–2000), which explored the early stages of the institutionalisation of the “pro-life” movement in Spain through two case studies. These cases illustrate different strategies used to create both material and symbolic barriers to abortion access during the first partial decriminalisation of abortion in Spain.
May 15, 2025
Shared Feminist Conversations: Christabelle Sethna
On May 15, 2025, we had the pleasure of hosting a new session of the Shared Feminist Conversations series, featuring Prof. Christabelle Sethna (Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies – University of Ottawa) in dialogue with Dr. Agata Ignaciuk (University of Granada).
The conversation revolved around her research Seeing is Believing: Televising an Illegal Abortion, in which she critically analyses the televised representation of an illegal abortion in 1970s Canada, within a broader context of conservative political strategies and feminist resistance.
It was a deeply thought-provoking talk, not only due to the richness of the content and the rigour of the analysis, but also thanks to the way Prof. Sethna shared the research process itself. Her generous and transparent storytelling turned the session into a space of collective learning, allowing everyone present to gain insight into her modus operandi as a feminist researcher.
May 14, 2025
Agata Ignaciuk on “Hoy por Hoy”: 40 Years of the Abortion Law in Spain
On May 14, 2025, the programme “Hoy por Hoy” on Cadena SER dedicated a special episode to the 40th anniversary of the 1985 abortion law, which partially decriminalised voluntary termination of pregnancy in Spain.
Among the guest voices, historian Ágata Ignaciuk stood out. She is a researcher specialising in the history of sexual and reproductive rights and health, as well as gender history in Spain and Poland.
Throughout the episode, Ignaciuk offered a rigorous and accessible analysis of the social, medical, and political context surrounding the approval of this law, and its limited impact on the lives of thousands of women in the Spanish state.
As the programme highlighted, the law only legalised abortion in three cases — rape, fetal malformation, and risk to the pregnant woman’s health — leaving out the vast majority of women, who continued to be forced to have abortions in secrecy or to travel abroad if they could afford it.
Her contribution placed these restrictions within the broader framework of institutional violence and the medicalisation of women’s bodies, and helped bring visibility to the feminist struggles that pushed for legal change, as well as to the ongoing resistance.
The episode also features testimonies by Consuelo Catalá, Llum Quiñonero, and Enrique Lebrero.
🎧 You can listen to the full episode here.
May 12, 2025
LEGABO – Doing Research on Abortion
A Morning of Shared Ideas with Christabelle Sethna
On May 12, 2025, the first workshop of the LEGABO project – Trials for Abortion in Democratic Spain: Reproductive Rights, Material Cultures and Legal Cultures of Abortion (1970s–2000s) – took place. The project is funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and the European Union. The meeting brought together LEGABO researchers, along with invited PhD students and scholars, to share progress, methodologies, and working approaches.
The session centred on the contribution of historian Christabelle Sethna, professor at the Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies at the University of Ottawa and member of the LEGABO team. She presented her current research on the evolution of legal abortion in Canada, the mobility of women seeking access to abortion, and the construction of the archive as a political and affective space.
Beyond the richness of the content, the workshop stood out for the warmth, openness, and collaborative tone that shaped the entire day. Sethna not only shared her research but also her way of doing it, sparking methodological and personal reflections on how we engage with our own sources.
The atmosphere was especially enriching when PhD students from the Department of History of Science shared their projects, exchanging ideas and feedback in a space of mutual listening and constructive critique.
🟣 For a more personal and reflective account of the workshop, you can read Sergio Castro Cortacero’s beautiful piece: Inside the LEGABO Workshop.
April 28–29, 2025
LEGABO Team Participates in the Workshop “Abortion in Europe. History, Policies and Practices”, University of Bergen
On April 28 and 29, 2025, the research team of the LEGABO project – Trials for Abortion in Democratic Spain: Reproductive Rights, Material Cultures and Legal Cultures of Abortion (1970s–2000s) – took part in the workshop held in Bergen, Norway, as part of a meeting dedicated to the intersections between history, law, and reproductive health.
On this occasion, Agata Ignaciuk presented the project’s historiographical and methodological approach, which focuses on the analysis of court files and high-profile trials as a way to reconstruct the material and legal cultures of abortion in democratic Spain.
The presentation also highlighted LEGABO’s interdisciplinary commitment, combining tools from the cultural history of medicine, gender studies, philosophy of law, and digital humanities to offer an innovative perspective on the history of abortion in Spain.
In the same session, researcher María Mundi-López, also a member of the LEGABO team, presented the paper “Between Access and Technique: History and Controversies of Abortion Policies in Spain (1965–2022)”, in which she traced the historical development of abortion techniques in Spain and their influence on current access inequalities.