Reproductive Justice

Carmen Winant (2022) how race, class, gender, sexual orientation, educational attainment, politics and zip code shape reproductive health care experiences and health policy.

About the Commission

The Gund Foundation Photography Commission was initiated in 1990 in order to spotlight the critical and significant work of the Foundation’s partners within the greater Cleveland community.

Each year, provided with a theme representing an important grant making priority, photographers are given the artistic freedom to interpret it in alignment with their individual creative practice. What has emerged is a project unique in the photographic world, both in its longevity and purpose. In its over 30-year history, the Foundation has worked with many exceptional artists who, in turn, have partnered with a wide array of individuals and organizations to capture compelling images of people, places, and the remarkable work being accomplished. While the photographs are of Cleveland, the images stand in as a microcosm of the world around us. A sampling of the work can be seen throughout the website.

A complete collection of the commissioned photographs can be viewed here.

CARMEN WINANT
CARMEN WINANT
About the Artist

I think of the women who came before: A Pictorial Quilt of Reproductive Justice in Cleveland

I began this project as I often do: with an outsize sized idea informed by my own fascination with and dedication to evolving feminist values, histories, and coalition-making strategies.

When I’m lucky and my eyes are open, a project about an “idea” rapidly becomes a project about people. There is no such thing as feminism with feminists, there is no such thing as reproductive justice without reproductive justice workers. I learn and re-learn this lesson on every project: that human beings make these organizations work and run, and that they – who are both pictured in this work and enable its conditions – are the most fitting subject of creative inquiry-making and mutual care networking.

The annual theme of 2022-2023 George Gund photography commission is reproductive justice; as the artist selected to contend with this subject, and as a resident of Ohio, I sought to better understand the clinics and health center landscape around Cleveland. It was important to at once make photographs of the people doing this work in the present moment as well as to reach back in history – in some cases, to before the point that abortion was legalized in 1972 – and braid together those found and authored images in larger sets. Time was not to function linearly, but more like a constellation in which photographs of reproductive care works across decade met one another.

I began conversations around this project after the Dobbs decision was leaked and just weeks before it was formally announced. Because I live in Columbus (just a few miles from the statehouse), I was at that point already subject to the so-called “heartbeat bill” which denies legal and safe abortion between five or six weeks after conception (and around which no exceptions are made for “hard cases” such as rape, incest, or a fetus determined to possibly have Down syndrome). Folks were mobilizing, but there was, and is, also so much despair. While this project works to picture reproductive justice workers for all they do – from pap smears to birth work to gender affirming care – to not name abortion as an urgent part of this picture, at this moment, would be entirely misguided .The stripping of that essential right undergirded my desire to make this project, and learn from the workers who are and were engaged in care, advocacy, and struggle.

The project started slowly: I asked friends and comrades who they knew in Cleveland who were engaged in this work. When I met people, I asked them too. Barbara Tannenbaum, the curator of photography at the Cleveland Museum of Art, pointed me to Roberta Aber, who pointed me to Bonnie Bolitho and Betsey Kaufman, the former CEOs of greater planned parenthood in Canton and Cleveland, respectively, who hosted me at their home many times. I found my way to the Western Reserve Historical Society, which holds the regional planned parenthood papers, and to Cleveland State University’s Special Collections, where a generous librarian Elizabeth Piwkowski helped me locate and scan a portion of the Womanspace photographs from their albums. Perhaps most meaningfully of all, I found my way to Preterm, a clinic that has been opened since 1974.With the utmost generosity, Sri Thakkilapati and Colleen Damerell surfaced their archival material for me, allowing me to scan photographs from their collection as I needed. I also recorded audio interviews with Sri, along with Chrisse France (the former director of preterm), and Bonnie and Betsey. This work does and cannot exist without these acts of trust and openness; they make everything possible, and I am so, so grateful.

Perhaps the greatest challenge of all was making my own pictures for this project, an exercise that I have fallen out of practice with. While I am trained as a photographer, and teach photography to students at OSU, I moved away from shooting pictures for my own

work in favor of using archival materials over fifteen years ago. In making this project, I returned to shooting 35mm film – at Preterm, with Bonnie and Betsey, the staff of Birthing Beautiful Communities in Cleveland, and with Iris Harvey, the President and CEO of Planned Parenthood of Greater Ohio, in a health center in Akron. While historical legacy is crucial to this work, too it matters to see it in real time and space, and make sense of reproductive justice care work on a continuum.

It is my hope that this work points to the normalcy of this healthcare work, thereby working to undermine its stigma. These are pictures of (almost exclusively) women staffers answering the phone, readying rooms for patients, having birthday parties in the office, and inputting appointment information into computers. For lack of a better word, this work is unsensational, and the pictures I have made, as with the pictures I have drawn from in the archive, meaningly – powerfully – reflect just that.

CARMEN WINANT, Photographer

Dr. Sri Thakkilapati

Interim Executive DirectorPreterm

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Women who had the means would leave the state to have a safe abortion, and women who didn’t ended up in the emergency rooms and in OB/GYN wards. Most of our physicians were obstetricians who were seeing these women come through the hospitals where they worked. They were dedicated to having nobody suffer. They knew there were safe alternatives. They carried on.

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My trajectory towards reproductive justice began when I was in high school. My best friend got pregnant. This was 1973. I lived in a small Ohio town. Roe had just become the law of the land, but there was no clinic anywhere — none that we knew of. The was no place for her to go. Her options were to marry this man that she didn’t want to marry and have this baby, or get an abortion, which we didn’t know how to do. She had the baby in March. It ruined her life. She stayed married for a year or two and then left. She never really recovered. She had such limited choices. That stuck with me.

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We made our clinic into a feminist workplace, a feminist culture. We are not governed by profit. There is a norm of compassion. The importance of our staff’s wellbeing is just as important as that of our patients. What do they need to survive? Can they pay their electric bills, their childcare bills? What if their kids are sick, or their mother is in jail? The system isn’t set up to support women in this way, which poses a challenge: how do we have attendance accountability and a consistent workforce when we know this is the system our staff is dealing with? When humanizing our workers is a priority? We made staff loans available.

"We need to keep things running while maintaining our feminist values from the inside out."

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We offer a non-judgmental space. To talk to women about their decision, we validate their feelings, we ask them what they want their experience to look like. We acknowledge their emotional and spiritual knowledge. We operate against the idea that you can just treat the body, not the whole person. That idea, of not talking to the person, to whom you are delivering care, has been made normative. It stems from the colonial practice of medicine, one that was developed through experimentation on, and authority over, non-white patients. Medicine has not fully reconciled its origins, and the effect can be so alienating for a patient. We work to refuse this, to offer whole-person care.

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Preterm was founded in 1973, shortly after the Roe vs. Wade decision; it opened in 1974 with a $50,000 grant from the Gund Foundation and a loan from Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Our founders were positioned to get to work on this right away because they had, in some sense, already been doing the work. A group of five women, including Mickey Stern and Sally Tatenal, had been doing abortion referrals out of state, usually to New York state, for several years. They Gave people a place to call, stewarded them to good clinics. They had two phones, which were always ringing. It is hard to imagine what it must have been like then — now we have had five decades of legal, safe abortion access – the level of fear and stigma that people had. They were so thorough, this group vetting abortion providers, making sure they were real physicians. They had a three-page checklist; they visited providers out of state and only referred to people who met these standards.

People face so many limiting forces

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It is about race, class, access to eduction. So much more than gender. People face so many limiting forces. This is not a matter of individual people having a hard time. This is about how the system acts on people and the situations it puts them in. There is no support for people to have children. We see so many patients who have abortions because they cannot afford to have a baby. They don’t have a support system; their partner is in prison; whatever the case may be. That was a bit shift for me. I’ve gone from seeing this as an individual issue to a larger systems issue. There is no liberation from sexism without liberation from racism, without liberation from the oppressive economic system that we are embedded in.

“We are determined to provide the last safe abortion in Ohio. Our phones are ringing. If we do the last legal abortion in Ohio, that is what we will do. We will stay open for as a long as we possibly can. We will do abortions for as long as we possibly can.”

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feel more frightened than I ever have about the future of abortion. We don’t know what is going to happen. We have national – and state-based lawyers, we have policy wonks, researchers, and advocates. But I am worried. I feel fear, and sometimes despair. it was always hanging over our heads, the horror of it. how do I keep going?”

“It is such a basic thing. It is everything. Can you control your own body?”

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I had the FBI call me one day and say that somebody that they were tracking was planning to come to Cleveland – for me. How do you go about your business when you get a call like that? I was living alone then. Another time somebody called the phone and said that he was coming down with a shotgun and he would kill our nursing clinic staff. The FBI got involved in that one too. When the Operation Rescue people were going to come to my house, the cops told me to tell everyone on my block, which I did; I went door to door. Once I could see someone walking up to my front door at night with a giant cross. I turned out all the lights, I left out of the back. Of course, it was scary, but I was undeterred. We all were.

“I used to come up in the elevator with women who were clients. We had to pass through the protestors together. They would say to me. “They have no idea what life is like. How can they judge me?” It is so clear that they don’t value women and are threatened by our continued ability to determine our own futures. It is so painfully clear. That misogyny fuels so much of what is happening now. They don’t want to grant that agency.”

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It is hard to stay positive knowing that there is a good chance we could lose abortion in Ohio. The political climate is so scary here. The gerrymandering, the rule changing, the partisan court. The fight sometimes feels daunting. You know what? They cheat because they are in the minority. They have everything in place now to do their worst. The most powerful people in the state think every single day about how they can shut us down, show down clinics. In moments like these, I think about what the women before me went through. What they built. They just figured it out, you know? How to make a feminist nonprofit in the mid-1970s in Cleveland, one that has lasted fifty years. How the fuck did they do that? They were so thorough, so determined. They had so much care and so much grit.

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