Reproductive Justice is Under Threat. What Can Art Do?

BASED ON DEMOGRAPHIC ANALYSES of the last United States presidential election, Norma McCorvey would probably have voted for Donald Trump were she alive today. The “Roe” of Roe v. Wade (1973), McCorvey was a non-college-educated white Christian woman who lived in the South. Born in Louisiana in 1947, she spent most of her life in Texas working as a janitor, housecleaner, waitress, and receptionist after dropping out of high school. She was married at 16, had her tubes tied by the age of 23, and said she never used contraception.

At the same time, she might not be that easy to pigeonhole: she in fact voiced her support for Hillary Clinton ahead of the 2016 election. McCorvey was also a lesbian, a sex worker, a sexual assault survivor, and an addict. She was raised mainly by her mother, Mary Sandefur, an abusive alcoholic who “beat the fuck out of her” for being a “die-hard whore,” as Sandefur herself told Vanity Fair in 2013. At the age of 10, she robbed a gas station with another girl and ran away to Oklahoma City; she was sent to reform school when a maid at the hotel where they were staying caught them kissing. She lived with her partner, Connie Gonzalez, another working-class lesbian, for 35 years despite her self-proclaimed belief that homosexuality was a sin.

What makes McCorvey such a resonant figure for the Trump era is precisely the contradictions she embodied. Many accounts describe her as narcissistic, “difficult,” and aggrieved—though her grief and grievance perhaps come as no surprise, given her lifetime of exploitation, manipulation, and abuse at the hands of her family, religion, the law, the state, and the pro- and antiabortion movements. Famously, in 1995, McCorvey “flipped” her position on abortion after converting to Christianity, because she felt condescended to and tokenized by the middle-class feminist movement. In response, she became a vocal part of the antiabortion right. In 2016 she made a “deathbed confession” to the documentary crew of AKA Jane Roe, declaring that she never actually believed in the antiabortion cause and only said what they paid her to say in a transactional relationship. She died several months later a woman who bore three children, raised none, and never had an abortion.

McCorvey’s biography brings into focus the contradictions and class antagonisms that surround not only abortion, but also broader questions of reproduction, care, and whose bodies and labor we value. These contradictions feel urgent and raw as we stare down two seemingly irreconcilable truths: A majority of US voters chose to protect abortion access in 8 of the 10 states where it was on the ballot. At the same time, and in many of those very same states, voters elected the man who claims credit for overturning Roe v. Wade, and who will potentially oversee the passing of a federal abortion ban. Certainly we are divided, but how those divisions cleave around bodily, social, and economic freedom is more complicated than our two-party system suggests.

I BECAME INTERESTED in Norma McCorvey after my own experience with making art from abortion while an undergraduate student at Yale University in 2008. My project, Untitled [Senior Thesis], involved a precise bodily intervention over the period of an academic year: From the 9th to the 15th day of every menstrual cycle, I used semen (collected from “fabricators”) to privately self-inseminate; on the 28th day of my cycle, I would ingest an herbal abortifacient, and experience cramps and heavy bleeding. This bleeding could have been either a normal period or a very early-stage self-induced miscarriage: The process was intentionally carried out so that not even I knew which. I used the term “self-induced miscarriage” because I was interested in what it meant to attempt reproduction “wrongly” on the body, specifically the queer body, and to use my biological capacities to create art.

As far as I know, I am the only artist who has made artwork from the intentional bodily act of abortion (others, please get in touch). That work caused enormous controversy, which was difficult to navigate for many years. I was denounced by both the left and the right, received death threats, and was told by the then dean of the Yale Art School that I would “never have a career as an artist.” After these reactions, I wondered whether abortion and the self-management of one’s reproductive capacities could ever be a palatable subject for the art world.

But in recent years, I’ve been heartened to see the groundswell of artists making work about abortion and reproductive freedom, as well as a resurgence of curatorial interest in such works past and present. I find myself especially struck by how many of the interventions contemporary artists are making today resonate with the complexities of religious belief, queer solidarity, women’s labor, and cultural value—impasses deeply ingrained in the story of Roe.

Art is a good vessel for narratives as complex as Roe’s, as complex as our less-than-black-and-white times. Artists deal in representation. Politics function through representation. The sustained labor of the curators and artists who have been doing work related to abortion for years makes clear that art about the subject can be more than a fundraising mechanism, market bump, or avenue for visibility. It can
be a means to explore stories as complex as McCorvey’s, as well as other, deeper questions about reproduction and social order in the world we have—and the world we want.

VIVA RUIZ OFTEN introduces themself as “a queer community-educated artist and advocate, descended from factory-working Ecuadorian migrants raised in Jamaica, Queens.” They have been making work about abortion since 2015 through their ongoing project, “Thank God for Abortion,” which they described in an interview with me as “inspired by my own abortions and how grateful I was to have them.” The project was conceived as a response to the closing of abortion clinics around the United States well before the 2022 Dobbs decision overturning Roe: “People die without access to abortion. Roe never meant access for everyone. Legality is different than access.” It was also inspired by what Ruiz perceived as the seeming indifference to abortion in the queer community, an attitude often laced with misogyny and narrow ideas about what queerness means.

“The project started because people I thought I had everything in common with were still shocked about abortion,” Ruiz told me in an interview. Even “people who had been part of the sexual revolution: gay men who had been deeply engaged in HIV activism. They were discounting pregnant people—some of whom are gay men, are people who can get HIV—and not seeing the intersections, which serves the right.” With “Thank God for Abortion,” they said, “I wanted to send up a flare.”

“Thank God for Abortion” began as “looks” for the clubs and wearables to host parties in. It quickly grew to encompass performance, starting with “Joyful Noise,” the first-ever abortion-themed float in the 2018 NYC Pride March, and then visual art: installations and altars made from posters, flags, bullet-proof shields, and costumes, shown in both galleries and spaces for reproductive care. The titular phrase, hovering in the project’s emblem above doves and outstretched hands, is an incantation and provocation akin to what the queer collective General Idea called an “image virus.” Ruiz, who grew up Christian and identifies as Christian now, draws on both queer camp and the pageantry of Catholicism: “The church armed me for this moment.”

Their project highlights something that feels novel, but is actually a foundational truth: that abortion access, queer community, and Christianity have long been profoundly intertwined. McCorvey was referred to her lawyer, Linda Coffee, by another lawyer, Henry McCluskey, who had arranged the adoption of McCorvey’s second child (the one before the Roe baby). He had a reputation for taking on cases for lesbian and gay clients, and in 1969 successfully challenged a Texas statute against sodomy. The two lawyers had met at church in Dallas as children. Both were gay and young, and both were responsible for landmark litigation over choice and bodily autonomy that hinged on the right to privacy—the overlooked queer origin of the right to abortion.

TO TALK ABOUT ABORTION, urgent as that is, is to isolate an appendage on the vast body of reproductive discourse. It’s the discursive clitoris: a hot-button issue that invokes, for anyone who has ever had one, a broader system of cost, care, and access, as well as philosophical questions around what it means to “reproduce.” Biological reproduction entails not only the having and not having of children, but also sustaining oneself and others through community and care—usually unpaid “labors of love.” Our lives encompass a reproductive surround. Everywhere we look, there is aesthetic or mechanical reproduction, which refers to copying an image or object, as in the reproduction of a physical print, photo, or commodity. There is social reproduction, which names the ideological conditions that must be in place for the structures and institutions of power to persist. Reproduction is a condition—the condition—that we share.

These intertwining forms of reproduction are in many ways the subject of photographer Carmen Winant’s practice. “The last safe abortion,” a series she conceived during the pandemic for a 2023 exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Art and subsequently showed in the 2024 Whitney Biennial, documents the labor that powers abortion care. The work comprises almost 2,500 photographs of the everyday tasks and community-building activities of physicians, staff, and volunteers—answering phones, sterilizing equipment, celebrating birthdays—that keep clinics going. Installed in grids of 4-by-6-inch lab prints (the kind you might once have gotten at a drugstore), the photographs were taken over the 50-year period before the overturning of Roe v. Wade, sourced from clinic storerooms, university archives, and personal collections, supplemented by photographs Winant took herself. Winant told me she sees “The last safe abortion” as a continuation of her work “on feminist healthcare.” It follows a project on her birth and birth care work, My Birth (2018), as well as a project on domestic violence advocates and support workers, Looking Forward to Being Attacked (2018).

McCorvey herself carried out tasks like those pictured in “The last safe abortion”: she had worked as a receptionist at an abortion clinic called A Choice for Women, in Dallas, in April 1995, when she made the flip to antiabortion work. McCorvey felt shunned by the mainstream feminist movement, which did not consider her a good spokesperson, and she remained fairly poor, having made very little from the advance on her book I Am Roe (1994)and the royalties from the made-for-TV movie Roe vs. Wade (1989), for which Holly Hunter won an Emmy. The Christian antiabortion organization Operation Rescue opened an office next door. McCorvey was antagonistic at first, though perhaps eventually, just lonely, for she soon began talking with Flip Benham, national director of Operation Rescue at the time, about their lives, then about the Bible. A month later, she converted. Her swimming pool baptism aired on national television.

Just the previous year, a group of Black women—Dr. Toni M. Bond Leonard, Reverend Alma Crawford, Evelyn S. Field, Terri James, Bisola Marignay, Cassandra McConnell, Cynthia Newbille, Loretta Ross, Elizabeth Terry, Mable Thomas, Winnette P. Willis, and Kim Youngblood—had voiced their own critique of the mainstream feminist movement and the rhetoric of “choice,” which did not account for the many women of color, poor women, disabled women, queer women, and trans people who were unable to access abortion even in places where it is legal. They coined the term “reproductive justice”—a combination of “reproductive rights” and “social justice”—that points to how something can be legal without being just. The term often focuses on abortion access, but it can also describe other forms of access, such as that to IVF and gender-affirming care, both now under increased threat.

In different ways, these two events of the mid-’90s were reckonings with all that was missed by Roe and the mainstream national conversation about abortion that it galvanized. Can art—wrapped up as it is in the market and reliant as it is on a shorthand that equates visibility with power—meaningfully address these inequities?

CERTAINLY, A NUMBER of recent exhibitions grappling with art about abortion and reproductive care are taking up the task. Among them are the open-call “Currents: Abortion”(2018) at A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn; “On Abortion: And the Repercussions of Lack of Access” (2020) at the Museum of Sex in New York; “Reproductive: Health, Fertility, Agency” (2021) at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Photography; and “Unconditional Care”(2023) at Idaho’s Lewis-Clark State College. That last show saw artworks by Michelle Hartney, Katrina Majkut, and Lydia Nobles censored under Idaho’s 2021 No Public Funds for Abortion Act. Together, the shows make clear that artwork about abortion is becoming important in a way it has not been before. Yes, the art world has always moved through its topics du jour in quick succession, with frustrating shortsightedness. Nevertheless, such visibility can at least be an opportunity to channel the vast resources of the art world into supporting some kind of change.

That is the approach that Jasmine Wahi and Rebecca Pauline Jampol, codirectors of the Newark and New York nonprofit Project for Empty Space, have been taking. Their show “Abortion Is Normal” (2019–20), featured more than 50 artists in a multipart exhibition that raised more than $300,000 from the sale of artworks for the Super PAC Downtown for Democracy; it appeared first at Project for Empty Space in Newark, then at Galerie Eva Presenhuber and Arsenal Contemporary Art in New York. The turnout was huge. The first iteration saw 30,000 people a day, “representing the mixed demographics of Downtown Newark,” Wahi and Jampol recalled in an interview with me. “To put the title wall ‘Abortion Is Normal’ there sparked a number of conversations. The two exhibitions in New York also brought out thousands, reinforcing the idea that we need this content.”

Their more recent traveling exhibition, “Body Freedom for Every(body),” takes place in a 27-foot-long box truck with a rotating display of more than 100 artists. Last year, it made 11 stops across the country. Like “Abortion Is Normal,” “Body Freedom for Every(body)” features several blue-chip artists, but also emphasizes lesser-known queer artists and artists of color. The success of these projects—both widely covered by the press—stems perhaps from Wahi and Jampol’s curatorial strategy: Leaning in to existing dynamics of visibility and power set by the market to highlight reproductive justice. “Body Freedom for Every(body)” made its last stop in Miami Beach in early December, coinciding with Miami Art Week. After all, they note, “Florida is a place that also has an abortion ban in place.”

“Is It Real? Contemporary Artists Address Reproductive Freedom,” an independent exhibition that opened this past October at Lagoon Studio in Dallas and hopes to travel, highlighted 31 artists and collectives (it included works by Viva Ruiz and me). Curators Emily Edwards and Sara Hignite titled the project “in homage to Juanita McNeely’s essential 1969 expressionist painting about abortion, Is It Real? Yes It Is!, to honor the artist’s legacy of feminist and disability activism, and emphasize the mirrored (sur)reality” of these pre- and post-Roe times. Expanding on this premise in an interview with me, they emphasized that “as curators living and working in Texas, it was imperative that we center Southern voices around reproductive freedom, since this had never been done before. […] Southerners live with this extreme anti-abortion legislation every day, and have for years.”

One standout among many nuanced works there was Ari Brielle’s three-channel video installation Screaming in the Palm of My Hands, which was her 2023 MFA thesis at the University of Texas at Arlington. The video intercuts live performances by Nina Simone, Beyoncé, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe with local Texas newsclips from the ’80s and ’90s about birth control and in vitro fertilization; and with research on Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy, the enslaved women “experimented” on by gynecology founder Dr. J. Marion Sims. The artist also narrates her own experience of endometriosis. The result is a nonlinear exploration of Texas history, medical history, music history, and personal history. “The throughline is mothering,” Brielle told me, “who I come from, but also who birthed this country.”

Reflecting on their fellow Texan, the Dallas curators described Norma McCorvey as “someone misunderstood and spoken over her whole life. So it was important to us that artists in the show felt very seen and heard… Some of the artists said they felt like it was the first time their work was taken seriously—which has helped them keep making it.” As an example, “Is It Real?”arranged for artists in the exhibition to speak at local universities, which was a way for the participating artists not only to feel heard, but to listen. Ruiz and I gave a talk at Texas Christian University, and it was moving to connect with students interested in reproductive justice there, as well as faculty navigating the current political climate to find ways to teach about it.

How do we not only represent reproductive justice in the art world, but reproduce it? This is the question at the heart of so much contemporary artwork and exhibition-making around abortion, and it is also a question that brings us back to teaching. I know of only one fine arts class currently being taught that centers these themes; it’s a class called “Art about Reproductive Justice” taught by painter Luca Molnar at Stetson University in Florida (again others, please get in touch). As a private university, Stetson doesn’t have the same restrictions on content as state-funded institutions; that didn’t stop Governor DeSantis from having his office contact Stetson’s president though, demanding that the school issue an apology after Molnar’s students put together a survey asking how their peers needed support in the wake of Florida’s abortion ban. (The school refused.) When I spoke to Molnar about her class, she described how content-driven rather than medium-driven art classes give students the opportunity to talk about big ideas. It made me wonder: Can reproduction itself—broadly construed—be a medium? Imagine the art world we would have if it could.