Reproducing Crisis: A Walkthrough Review of Abortion Care Infrastructure Technologies

Reproductive care is facing a profound crisis as laws shift internationally disrupting its infrastructures—the relational networks of actors, technologies, and strategies that sustain embodied and emotional well-being. While access to reproductive care is threatened by scarce facilities, increasing costs, and misinformation, mobile applications have proliferated as stop-gap measures, promising to help individuals manage their own reproductive health care. In this work-in-progress, we present the preliminary findings of a modified walk-through of reproductive health applications, examining if and how they provide care around the experience of abortion. To frame our analysis, we conceptualize reproductive health applications as part of abortion care infrastructures. Early insights show that such applications only simulate fragments of care infrastructure (e.g., pill access information). Thus, abortion care infrastructures become disassembled and disembedded, amplifying individuality and favouring techno-solutionist infrastructures primed for future collapse. As technologies are increasingly introduced to address gaps in care infrastructures, this project troubles the shift towards technological infrastructures for care in the absence or collapse of institutional supports.