Gestational limits on abortion are often seen as a condition for decriminalisation. Focusing on the final reports of three institutional law reform inquiries into abortion in Australia, this article argues that gestational limits were recommended through foreclosing the subject position of the unwillingly pregnant woman who experiences gestational time as a threat to her bodily integrity and imagined future. Structural features of law reform commissions tethered models of decriminalisation to the era of criminalisation. Abortion was also rendered meaningful in the reports through discursive tropes that centred foetal viability and constructed later abortion in terms of a delay that required explanation, with the medico-judicial categories used to explain this delay – which distinguished between ‘medical’ and ‘psychosocial’ abortions – recentring the decision-making authority of doctors. Gestational limits on abortion rearticulate the exceptionality of abortion, reinscribing the illegitimacy of abortion and the people who have them, at least at later stages of pregnancy.

对堕胎的妊娠限制通常被视为合法化的条件。本文着眼于澳大利亚关于堕胎的三项制度性法律改革调查的最终报告，认为通过排除不情愿怀孕的妇女的主体地位，建议限制妊娠，因为她认为妊娠时间对她的身体完整性和想象的未来构成威胁。法律改革委员会的结构特征将非刑事化模式与刑事化时代联系在一起。报告中的堕胎也通过以胎儿生存能力为中心的散漫比喻而变得有意义，并根据需要解释的延迟来构建后来的堕胎，用于解释这种延迟的医学司法类别——区分了“医学”和“心理社会”堕胎——重新强调了医生的决策权。对堕胎的妊娠限制重新阐明了堕胎的特殊性，重新说明堕胎和堕胎者的非法性，至少在怀孕后期是这样。