Dr. Susanne Klausen launched her book Abortion Under Apartheid: Nationalism, Sexuality and Women’s Reproductive Rights in South Africa at the University of Johannesburg Auckland Park Kingsway Campus on November 4. In Abortion Under Apartheid, Klausen discusses how ideas about sexuality were fundamental to apartheid culture, and how the authoritarian National Party government attempted to regulate white women’s reproductive sexuality in the interest of maintaining white supremacy.
“I have had a longstanding interest in the politics of abortion dating back to my days as a member of the Reproductive Rights Movement when I was an undergraduate in Canada. When I first came to Southern Africa as an AIDS activist, in 1994, I realized that no one had yet written about the history of the struggle for safe, accessible abortion services in South Africa.” – Dr. Susanne Klausen.
See here for an interview with Dr. Klausen about her book on South African national radio SAfm.
Dr. Klausen is an associate professor in the Department of History, with research interests in Modern South Africa, nationalism and sexuality, and the politics of reproduction and fertility control. She is the author of Race, Maternity, and the Politics of Birth Control on South Africa (Palgrave MacMillan, 2004), and was a collaborator in the republications of Maud Graham’s A Canadian Girl in South Africa (Alberta University Press, 2015).