‘Just Human Things That You Do’: Experiments Towards an Abolitionist Ethic of Care Among Healthcare Workers Caring for Pregnant Patients in Immigration Custody

ABSTRACT This study draws on data from a study about the experiences of pregnant people in United States immigration detention from 2017 to 2022. While the original research questions focused on the impact of US immigration enforcement on pregnant migrants, interviews with healthcare workers offered unexpected insights into their own responses to the moral distress they felt when caring for pregnant women in immigration custody. Their responses were varied, from distressed observation to humanitarian mitigation to circumscribed advocacy to active resistance; for a few labour and delivery nurses, this resistance entailed significant professional risk‐taking on behalf of their patients. Healthcare workers navigated the power dynamics of healthcare institutions which mandate compliance with law enforcement and their own fears, misgivings and conditioning as they attempted to blunt and subvert the violence and reproductive oppression of the carceral state's immigration enforcement regime. Drawing on recent literature on abolition nursing, medicine and midwifery, and in the context of Donna Haraway's philosophical contributions, this article will explore how healthcare workers engaged in a constellation of practices towards a situated, feminist abolitionist ethic of care.