Abortion, emotions, and health provision: Explaining health care professionals' willingness to provide abortion care using affect theory

This article interrogates health care professionals' (HCPs) decision to withdraw from or provide abortion care using cultural theories of affect and emotion. It argues that emotional reactions to imagined futures influence the actions of health care practitioners. This proposition draws together cultural theory of affect with qualitative evidence from a scoping study of abortion care and Ireland. Our analysis suggests that discussions as to why care is or is not provided need to look at the emotional entanglements and affective feel of (written) legal frameworks from the position of the subjects of those frameworks as well as the frameworks themselves. In doing so, our interrogation provides critical insight for considerations of abortion access in the Irish context and globally. This is an important contribution given the concurrent global debates about why abortion care is or is not provided and how to ensure abortion is completely accessible.