Erasure Essay (working title) DRAFT
As Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the Dobbs vs Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision that overturned Roe vs Wade “Abortion is not part of our history and tradition.” As a history and tradition essential to the lives of women, abortion has been subject to erasure for centuries. The position of the female body in relation to western power and legal structures is arrogantly affirmed in Alito’s argument. While the information and education needed to counter this erasure is itself subject to structural oppression, in the exhibition Trigger Planting 2.0 as part of an exploration of the changing nature of reproductive rights we also embody and articulate this missing knowledge through a process of exposing and archiving the erasures in our own time as well as the past. How to visualize erasure? This becomes one of the paradoxical questions raised by Trigger Planting 2.0.
The enormous map of the USA at the entrance to the installation greets visitors by showing the abortion laws for each state by color and through text. A stunning field of contrasts and contradictions, it becomes obvious that certain information is repeated over and over on states with similarly oppressive laws—a block of states that effectively blots out the Southeastern third of the United States. This excess of language that forbade abortion was also a form of erasure—a contradiction that both obscured and denied necessary forms of care. Part of the ambiguity of the exhibition was to balance the excess of this language of erasure with another overabundance—a display of many plants that were bundled and hung to be partly visible through the translucent banner and located behind it, within the alcoves that are part of the exhibition venue, Milstein Center for Teaching and Learning.
In fact, the profusion of dried bouquets were made from many of the same herbs that had a long history of being used for abortion and contraception, an essential component of long-hidden history. Many of these herbs and similar ones still grow wildly and abundantly today. Herbs are an ancient method of reproductive control, now mostly absent from the historical record. Although this knowledge has been long standing within indigenous communities and non-Western plant-based traditions around the world, a new awareness of this history is growing as options for fertility control decrease, especially in the US. Calling attention to this long history and its revelation that reproductive care has not always been dominated by patriarchy was a central focus of Trigger Planting 2.0. Fn 1
Since pregnancy and childbirth were painful and dangerous, our ancestors sought relief. Contrary to the belief by those opposed to abortion that herbal practices began the ongoing destruction of the life of unborn humans, I believe the discovery of the abortifacient power of certain herbs became an ancient, life-sustaining innovation. Although we don’t know the exact origins of the first herbal medicines, archeological and anthropological records tell us such treatments were discovered accidentally, by sampling plants and other natural materials, and by observation, discovering their effects—both beneficial and harmful. Over time, generations of humans identified certain herbs that treated and prevented unwanted pregnancies.
One of the first of the many erasures I discovered was that females have been controlling their fertility by using herbs that grow naturally in the wild for as long as humans have existed. Maybe even earlier, before humans. The book, Sex, Herbs and Birth Control: Women and Fertility Regulation Through the Ages, date, by Ann Hibner Koblitz discusses what people of all sexes, raised on farms, have long observed--that grasses and herbs cause spontaneous abortions in rabbits, sheep, cows, and other mammals. But there are also many examples of herbal abortion in historical and medical records, from ancient Greece and the Roman Republic and one of the earliest from Middle Kingdom Egypt on a papyrus from 1800 BCE.
In fact Trigger Planting 2.0 took advantage of its site, the Milstein Center for Teaching and Learning that hosts the Barnard Campus library to provide a copy of Hibner Koblitz’ book to peruse. Fn2 It was included in the Trigger Planting 2.0 library, a collection of books and pamphlets placed on shelves below the assemblages of dried plants that provided sources and explanations for the many historical, care-focused and justice-based reproductive issues and processes the installation presented. In general, the Trigger Planting 2.0 Library was also responsible for much of the exhibition’s anti-erasure content.
I began to learn about these ancient practices while researching the history of women’s medical treatment, motivated by the painful subpar gynecological treatment currently experienced by many women, including myself as well as the sense that our healthcare was moving backwards. I also discovered herbal gynecology in response to the work of J. Marion Sims a 19th century doctor fn3 working in the Southern US who operated on enslaved women without anesthesia to increase their fertility in response to the illegality of importing enslaved peoples into the US in 1807. When I began this research over ten years ago, I never imagined the situation the US would face in 2026.
Meanwhile, Trigger Planting 2.0 collaborators Landon Newton and Kadambari Baxi had also been focusing their research and practice on the subject of erasure fn4. Landon Newton, who had been immersed in horticulture since childhood, had herself been researching the history of these herbs, planting gardens and making prints, drawings and sculptures about the ancient history of abortion. We connected through an exhibition she had at the Queens Museum in 2018 and began working on projects together in 2019 fn5. Kadambari Baxi and I had been collaborating on projects on and off for 20 years, and although she wasn’t directly engaged with abortion herbs until the three of us created Found (abortion) Monument in 2021 at Unison Arts in New Paltz, New York, her recent and current projects focus on fair labor practices, climate justice and human rights in the built environment, all issues that engage with forms of erasure. Fn6
Participation in Trigger Planting 2.0, with its focus on current and recent history fn7 turned my attention to the abortion clinic at the center of the Dobbs overturn of Roe v. Wade, Jackson Women’s Health Organization in Jackson, Mississippi. At the time planning began for Trigger Planting 2.0 in Winter 2024, the Center for Reproductive Rights had published a timeline that followed the overturn of Roe v. Wade that began with the following: On March 19, 2018, The Governor of Mississippi signed a bill banning abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy. Almost immediately, Jackson Women’s Health sued for a temporary restraining order to block the ban through the Center for Reproductive Rights, their legal representatives for the lawsuit. Fn8.
Given the pro-abortion’s anxiety and dread around the question of the continued legality of abortion, the Center’s timeline took on an ominous quality. Although we knew the outcome, we agreed it could become a structuring element of Trigger Planting 2.0. The closure of the network of such clinics across the country since the overturn of Roe represents an enormous breakdown in support for reproductive care. Both practically and symbolically such closures aim to erase both the need for and the very existence of reproductive control and care. Fn9
Often changes in law leave us with general, abstract ideas about how they will impact us. However the closing of the Jackson Women’s Health Organization is a prime example of a real world, on the ground withdrawal of rights. Fn10 Although we had all been somewhat overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of data, we were parsing that included the constantly changing bans and laws for the large map and the broad array of herbs historically used for abortion we could choose from we were also looking at the ever increasing numbers of clinics that were closing, still during the summer of 2024 as our preparations became more intensive.
The Jackson clinic, which had been the sole abortion venue in Mississippi since 2006, had been targeted by anti-abortion forces for more than a decade as the last holdout in the reddest of states. Especially after the passage of TRAPP laws, in most nearby states, it became the sole remaining clinic for most of the South. The Dobbs bill that placed the 15 week ban on abortion, known as the Gestational Age act, was clearly unconstitutional, in conflict with Roe and Casey whose legal limit for abortion was viability—23-24 weeks of pregnancy when the fetus could potentially survive outside the womb. But four years later, instead of limiting abortion to 15 weeks rather than 24, the Supreme Court Justices voted to overturn Roe v Wade, and Casey completely.
How did it happen that a fifteen week ban was transformed into the overturn of Roe? As of this writing the detailed answer to this question has emerged slowly since it happened in 2022. To my knowledge it was first revealed in a NY Times article published at the end of 2023, “Behind the Scenes at the Dismantling of Roe v. Wade” by Jody Kantor and Adam Litvak fn11. Informed mostly anonymously by Supreme Court insiders, it traced the court’s covert dealings leading up to the overturn. The information was much further elaborated by another New York Times article from 2024, “The Untold Story of the Network That Took Down Roe v. Wade” by Elizabeth Dias and Lisa Lerer, fn12 excerpted from their book The Fall of Roe: The Rise of a New America. Fn13 Dias and Lerer’s article outlined and their book detailed the actions of the small but extremely powerful right wing group responsible for Roe’s defeat.
I recommend reading both New York Times articles listed above and linked in the footnotes for more complete information about the entire scheme. Meanwhile I’ll outline some of the events as they relate to this essay’s topics of erasure, loss and recovered histories. I consider this essay and the information it contains an important component of the Trigger Planting 2.0.
In fact, the decision to center Roe’s overturn in Mississippi began shortly after Trump was elected in 2016. Powerful well-funded anti-abortion organizations like the Alliance Defending Freedom and the Federalist Society that had played a key role in Trump’s election, had been waiting impatiently for this opportunity to begin working in secret with conservative politicians and lawyers to establish a network that would push challenges to Roe. Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), possibly the most organized and influential Christian legal interest group in the United States is most known for overturning abortion rights, opposing same sex marriage and other LGBTQ as well as for its network of allied attorneys, and connections to powerful members of the right. It names House Speaker Mike Johnson, Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett and former VP Mike Pence as affiliates. fn14 Amid these clandestine plans to overturn Roe, another prominent attorney partnering with ADF, Misha Tseytlin, who was at the time serving as Solicitor General of the State of Wisconsin, proposed introducing state legislation to reduce the period allowed for abortions from 24 weeks to 15 weeks, planning to challenge and ultimately erase viability as a central component of abortion limits. Fn15
Far from the days of violent attacks and fire-bombings of abortion clinics and the execution of doctors by Operation Rescue and its affiliates in the 80s and 90s, the Mississippi bill was based in legal language, which, although challenging, appeared to abortion supporters as simply another would-be attempt to overturn Roe. No one realized yet that this was a stealth operation that would play a secret but primary role in the Dobbs decision, with all the subsequent violence such an outcome would produce.
Jackson Women’s Health Clinic was located in a Pepto Bismol colored building—known as the Pink House—a colonial cum shopping center-like building that, despite its commercial appearance, retained some hints of anti bellum architectural detail—a hip roof, a row of thick square columns balancing an iron fence across the building’s façade, some classical moldings and trim—suggest previous efforts to continue the plantation myth fn16 on an otherwise quiet residential side street. It’s appearance together with its fraught history seemed to coalesce its presence as an icon of the erasure Dobbs would represent. For a time an embattled fortress, it came to embody the evanescence of so many abortion clinics that followed Roe’s overturn as well as the ongoing loss and erasure of information about reproductive healthcare over the centuries.
As it turned out there were dozens of photos of the building available online that followed the entire progress of the overturn of Roe, well before April 2018 when the first bill was passed by the Mississippi Legislature. Even before the clinic became a symbol of the end of Roe the building with its pink exterior made a powerful statement of resistance. Then slowly it’s caretakers began to protect it, first by attaching black plastic drop cloths to the exterior fence as if it were a site of mourning while hiding its clients from view. Then signs stating demands and appeals began to appear—"This Clinic Stays Open”, “This Clinic is a Refuge”, “Trust Women”, “Stop the War on Women”, “Stop Being Dicktators”, “No Preying Allowed”, “My Body Not Yours”, “Men Will Always Be the Gatekeepers of Life”, “We Love Abortion Providers” “Never Feel Guilty, You Have A Right To Be Here” “Power to the Pink House”. I noticed that at some point in the documentation that even the garden planted at the front of the clinic had been completely overturned and destroyed. The irony of that devastation wasn’t lost on me when I later found out that the cutting, digging up and other censoring behavior toward the gardens, bushes and plants was an ongoing problem during the years of the clinic’s struggle to remain open. However, I never found out if any of them were herbs that could be used for abortion, however inadvertent and wild they may have been!fn17
Gradually views of the clinic’s exterior became so disrupted it appeared to be wearing a mask like the rest of the world (it was during the covid years) and further disappearing behind signs about the pending legislation. As I searched for how to present the haunting presence of Jackson Women’s Health in the context of Trigger Planting 2.0 I began printing the found photos of the Pink House on heavy card stock, cutting into them using scissors and an exacto knife, folding them to exaggerate the physical presence of the building and bring it into the space of the installation, and collaging other images and materials, all to reinforce the clinic’s sense of disappearing, of being erased.
For the installation of Trigger Planting 2.0 selections among these collaged images became illustrations for the aforementioned timeline of Roe’s demise written by the Center for Reproductive Rights. Juxtaposed with dates and events culled from the Center’s timeline (and our additions to it), images of the collages were printed on postcards and posted adjacent to the hanging bouquets of herbs and books already placed in the Milstein Center’s built in alcoves. Fn18
As is well known, the passage of the Gestational Age Act by the Mississippi Legislature on March 19, 2018 was soon followed by several other major events. While a federal district court blocked Mississippi’s abortion ban on March 20, 2018, in July Donald Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh for Associate Justice of the Supreme Court to succeed retiring Justice r fn 19, thus beginning a transformation of the Supreme Court that would reinforce ADF’s campaign against Roe. Although Kavanaugh’s contentious confirmation hearings with Christine Blasey Ford’s accusations of attack and attempted rape were damning they were ultimately mired in the same “he said she said” conflicts that roiled Justice Thomas’ Supreme Court hearings in 1991. Mitch McConnell and his gang of good ole boy male republicans stepped up to defend Kavanaugh just as they had Justice Thomas in 1991 amid Anita Hill’s allegations of sexual harassment against him to make sure the complaints in both cases were refuted and suppressed. Fn20 With Kavanaugh’s confirmation, in addition to Trump’s 2017 appointment of Gorsuch, the president had now achieved the desired high court conservative balance with five Republicans potentially able to out-vote the four Democrats currently on the bench.
In an effort to represent these disturbing and disruptive events I began using scissors and an exacto knife to cut open the doors and windows and make things inside visible, sometimes cutting the image of Jackson Women’s Health out entirely, leaving an empty space as if it had been demolished and removed. In some cases I filled that emptied space with images of Brett Kavanaugh’s highly privileged yet fraught history that came out during his explosive hearing in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee or images of the inside of a courtroom draped in Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s honor after her death both of which would have such an impact on abortion law. I didn’t yet know just how much the secret plans to overturn Roe were foreshadowed in these captioned postcards.
Across the country, anti-abortion activists had already helped pass laws in nearly a third of states that banned abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy, defying the standard set by Roe. Most of those bans had not been challenged by abortion rights lawyers, who feared they might be upheld by the Supreme Court, leaving them in effect in states where Republicans controlled the legislatures, like South Carolina, West Virginia and Wisconsin. Fn21
Why Mississippi, given the other possibilities? The state stands as the most religious state in the US with 59% of the population calling themselves “very religious.” It had some of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country—including state-mandated biased counseling, a legally required 24 hour delay period, and a ban on telemedicine for abortion care that had already made it difficult to access abortion care in the state even before the Gestational Age act. Mississippi was also one of 12 states with trigger bans, intended to prohibit abortion entirely if Roe v. Wade was overturned. Fn22 In addition to all this and the fact that the governor of Mississippi was eager to sign such a ban, ADF had an ally in the statehouse whom they could count on to push an anti-abortion bill: Representative Becky Currie, a nurse, an observant Christian and at the time a three-term legislator who was one of the state’s most ardent advocates for the cause.fn23 Although Mississippi legislators feared being sued for directly challenging Roe, ADF lawyers stepped up to serve on the Mississippi Attorney General's legal team to defend the ban free of charge. fn24
While the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upheld the ban on Mississippi’s Gestational Aid act in December 2019, keeping hope for Roe’s future high, Mississippi filed a petition for an appeal to the Supreme Court in June 2020 at a time when the global community was deeply under covid lockdown. Ruth Bader Gindberg died on September 18, 2020 and despite the upcoming Presidential election in November of that year, Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court on September 26. Confirmed on October 27, 2020, her approval brought the conservative tally to six justices. It took another seven months, May 2021, for the court to agree to hearing Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and by then Biden had been president for more than 5.
Once the court had agreed to hear Mississippi’s appeal the conservative group behind the effort to destroy Roe had an additional challenge. Another southern supporter of ADF and the Federalist Society, Lynn Fitch had been appointed Mississippi Attorney General in January 2020, and she was looking for a solicitor general to lead the state’s most important cases which would now include Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health. From a list of recommendations from the Federalist, Scott Stewart who had worked in Trump’s Justice Department and was out of a job after the 2020 presidential election, caught her attention. “Over the past decade and a half, the job of state solicitor general had become a coveted slot for ambitious young lawyers, even a path to more prominent posts like judgeships. For Stewart, the opportunity was ideal — representing a Republican state when there was a Democratic president offered the potential for high-profile conflict. And there was the lure of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, the Mississippi case…which had been appealed up to the Supreme Court. Dobbs could be Stewart’s first chance to argue a case before the justices.” Fn25 with encouragement from other ADF supporters, Scott Stewart wrote a new petition to the Supreme Court that performed a bait and switch, Fn.26. that particularly targeted Justices Alito and Thomas, the court’s strongest opponents of Roe by including a petition to completely overturn Roe that recommended surpassing the 15 week abortion ban. Although some in the anti-abortion movement thought the petition would be too aggressive for the justices, fearing that… “if this test case lost it could set their movement back years,” others felt that challenging the 24 week viability line was just what was needed. ADF had written Mississippi’s Gestational Age act “describing the fetus as “an unborn human being”, highlighting specific details of prenatal development as potential evidence.” Fn27
Reading the quote below from the Brief for Petitioners from On Writ of Certiorari of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization shows just how bold the Mississippi Attorney General and her Solicitor General were in their request:
QUESTION PRESENTED Whether all pre-viability prohibitions on elective abortions are unconstitutional.
….The march of progress has left Roe and Casey behind. Those cases maintained that an unwanted pregnancy could doom women to “a distressful life and future,” that abortion is a needed complement to contraception, and that viability marked a sensible point for when state interests in unborn life become compelling. Factual developments undercut those assessments. Today, adoption is accessible and on a wide scale women attain both professional success and a rich family life, contraceptives are more available and effective, and scientific advances show that an unborn child has taken on the human form and features months before viability. States should be able to act on those developments. But Roe and Casey shackle States to a view of the facts that is decades out of date. fn28
Moving past a number of lies or half-truths in the second half of this statement where they should have begun with the phrase extremely privileged women, it is well known that opponents of Roe have long tried to manipulate public opinion about a fetus’ development in the womb. Although the arguments about fetal development sometimes seem as if truth is based on right wing public relations rather than experimental results, it is a scientific fact that the heartbeat bill is a misnomer. So are the sounds emitted by the sonogram machine! They are not heartbeats! Fn29 The same is true for the belief that fetuses experience pain.
In relation to the fetal pain argument, during the Oral Arguments that took place during the hearing following the Supreme Court’s acceptance of the “Petition For a Writ of Certiorari” Justice Sotomayor questions Solicitor General Scott Stewart about just this issue.
MR. STEWART: Casey gave one paragraph to the workability of Roe. it gave a brief factual view to things that have changed since Roe. Those, of course, are not going to take account of the last 30 years of advancements in medicine, science, all of those things.
JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: What are the…advancements in medicine?...
MR. STEWART: I think it's an advancement in --in knowledge and concern about such things as fetal pain, what we know the child is doing and looks like and is fully human from a very early –
JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: You know -- the minority of people, a --a gross minority of doctors who believe fetal pain exists before 24, 25 weeks – (is) one not well founded in science at all…
MR. STEWART: We --we pointed out as an example, Your Honor, of where Roe and Casey improperly preclude states from taking account for these things. And they should be able to be concerned about the --about a fact of a-- an unborn life being poked and then recoiling in the way one of us would recoil.
JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: Virtually every state defines a brain death as death. Yet the literature is filled with episodes of people who are completely and utterly brain dead responding to stimuli. There's about 40 percent of dead people who, if you touch their feet, the foot will recoil. There are spontaneous acts by dead brain people. So I don't think that a response…by a fetus necessarily proves that there's a sensation of pain or that there's consciousness. So I go back to my question of, what has changed in science to show that the viability line is not a real line, that a fetus cannot survive? And I think…that you had no expert say that there is any viability before 23 to 24 months. Fn30, 31
Despite Justice Sotomayor and others including Justices Kagan, Breyer and even Chief Justice Roberts adding support to the knowledge that multiple studies have negated the existence of fetal pain, and with it the “scientific advances (that) show that an unborn child has taken on the human form and features months before viability” did not convince the justices. And despite the Solicitor General Scott Stewart’s risk of writing with a focus on the issues that would appeal to Alito and Thomas (see fn. 23) had paid off: The Supreme Court Justices opposed to Roe v. Wade were a super-majority, and the leak of Alito’s draft in May kept Breyer and Roberts from further negotiating with other Justices (Kavanaugh and Barrett) to compromise by merely sticking to the original 15 week ban. As we know, the Court chose to overturn Roe on June 22, 2022.
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