Where Bodies Are Necessary

The task of design to combat reproductive injustice forms the premise of a small exhibition ongoing at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. I admired this display of speculative student proposals for reimagined places and spaces of reproductive care—ranging from recovery centers outfitted with play spaces for children accompanying their mothers to abortion clinics with adjoining education facilities—then headed across the street to Barnard College for a talk that promised to expand on the theme.

Inside the echoey atrium, three academics, sitting shoulder to shoulder, shared their diverse viewpoints and experiences with those in scarce attendance. Said Lori A. Brown, a professor at Syracuse University, “I wanted to take on something overtly political within architecture, and abortion clinics are one of the most contested spaces in this country.” Questions like “How do you actually get into an abortion facility when there are loads of protestors standing outside?” motivated her. So did policy changes: new building codes and legal requirements that often force small, independent abortion clinics to shutter; covert tactics as such are the lynchpin of the meticulously coordinated anti-choice movement. Naomi Braine, who teaches sociology at Brooklyn College, emphasized the need to “think beyond the limitations imposed by the law” and draw on an extensive history of the transnational movements that have made access to self-managed abortions available globally. “Every day, abortions occur in built environments that were not designed for them,” she said, a point picked up on by Lynn Roberts, an associate dean at the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health & Health Policy, to underscore the power of protest: “We have to fill the spaces with our bodies when necessary.”

The barriers to accessing basic reproductive healthcare in a country where such services are not treated as a right are legal, political, social, and spatial, and so naturally, the solutions must be too. As the event came to a close and the energized panelists personally thanked each of us for attending, few as we were, I felt our intimacy was not a promotional flaw, but a great strength of a movement devoted—by bleak necessity—to exploring new ideas together.