Undoing Erasure

Chapter 1

Using a process of exposing and archiving the erasures in our own time as well as the past we explore the question: how to visualize erasure? 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 also represented 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 cancellation with another overabundance—a display of many dried plants that were bundled and hung to be partly visible through the translucent map 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. 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. ¹ Since pregnancy and childbirth were painful and dangerous, our ancestors sought relief. Contrary to the belief held 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. Researchers looking into the history of abortion and women's health quickly discover that humans have been controlling their fertility by using herbs that grow naturally in the wild for as long as they have existed. Maybe even earlier, before humans. The book, Sex, Herbs and Birth Control: Women and Fertility Regulation Through the Ages, 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. ² 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. Organized by Trigger Planting 2.0's curator and Director of Access, Engagement and Exhibitions at Milstein Center for Teaching and Learning at Barnard, Miriam Neptune and her colleagues, the Trigger Planting 2.0 Library was also responsible for much of the exhibition's anti-erasure content.

The original Trigger Planting installation was shown at the Frieze art fair at The Shed in 2022, as a response to the leaked version of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision, the supreme court ruling to end the federal protections on abortion through Roe v. Wade. Created by Baxi, Newton and myself with support from A.I.R. Gallery and National Women's Liberation the installation consisted of a 45 x 19 foot wall on which live plants with a history of being used for abortion were placed on top of a map of the US on the states that were or would be anti-abortion, those with trigger bans. Although it already seemed like a fait accompli, less than a month before the overturn of Roe took place on June 24, 2022 the original Trigger Planting was a desperate effort to show the public the ancient history of abortion herbs as a context for what was about to be erased.

Each of us on the original Trigger Planting team brought complementary practices to the question of erasure for Trigger Planting 2.0. Ten years before Trigger Planting 2.0 I had begun to learn about the ancient practices of herbal contraception and abortion while researching the history of women's medical treatment. Motivated by the painful subpar gynecological treatment currently experienced by many women, it seemed as if our healthcare was moving backwards. I also discovered herbal gynecology in response to the work of J. Marion Sims, a 19th century doctor ³working in the Southern US who operated on enslaved women without anesthesia to increase their fertility in response to the law passed in 1807 that forbade the importation of enslaved peoples into the US. In her book about Sims, Medical Bondage: Race, Gender and the Origins of American Gynecology, Deidre Cooper-Owens brought areas of erasure to light about enslaved women and their forced collaboration in the professionalization of gynecology in the US that led me to ask: how did medicine arrive at the point where doctors experimented on patients with no concern for their consent or suffering? This and related inquiries into the racist roots of American gynecology in the 19th century led to my deep dive into women's medical histories that brought me to the first Trigger Planting project and subsequently Trigger Planting 2.0. When I began this research over ten years ago, I never imagined the situation the US would face in 2026. ⁴

Independent of but related to my own research and practice, Landon Newton had been creating gardens and exploring herbal gynecology and growing abortifacient and contraceptive herbs for years while also making prints, drawings and sculptures that traced the ancient and recent histories of reproductive plants. Our work gave Trigger Planting and Trigger Planting 2.0 its historical roots. ⁵ The architectural practice of Kadambari Baxi, architect and Professor at Barnard College, focuses on maps and information in relation to the built environment to represent political and social meaning. Her inventive forms of data visualization transformed the facts of reproductive rights erosion into design elements that confronted visitors with the massive loss taking place. ⁶ Miriam Neptune, as both curator and Director of Library Access, Engagement and Exhibitions at Barnard College, recognized the potential of the original Trigger Planting and created space for 2.0, bringing her ongoing commitment to pedagogy and student engagement that shaped the installation and its relationship to the Barnard community throughout its planning and run.⁷

In unison these complementary practices—architectural, curatorial, historical, horticultural—created an installation that presented the long narrative of reproductive erasure together with its contemporary rendition. Trigger Planting 2.0 was always meant to represent multiple generations concurrently: the long history of herbal reproductive knowledge developed over millennia, and the currently evolving catastrophe of abortion rights in the United States. With this expanded timeframe in mind, research for the installation also turned 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 that began with the following: On March 19, 2018, The Governor of Mississippi signed a bill banning abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy. ⁸ Almost immediately, Jackson Women's Health Organization sued for a temporary restraining order to block the ban through the Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR), their legal representatives for the lawsuit.⁹ Given the pro-abortion movement's anxiety and dread around the question of the continued legality of abortion, the Center's timeline took on an ominous quality. Often changes in law leave us with general, abstract ideas about how they will impact us. However the overturn of Roe that led to the closing of the Jackson Women's Health Organization is a prime example of a real world, on the ground withdrawal of rights. Although we knew the outcome, we agreed the CRR's timeline could become a structuring element of Trigger Planting 2.0¹⁰ The closure of the network of such clinics across the country since Roe represents an enormous breakdown in support for abortion care. Both practically and symbolically such closures aim to erase both the need for and the very existence of reproductive control and care.

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 TRAP laws ¹¹ 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.

Located in a Pepto Bismol colored building known as the Pink House, Jackson Women's Health Clinic was a one story commercial structure that retained some hints of antebellum 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. Built in 1957, certainly not as an abortion clinic, all of these details suggest previous efforts to continue the plantation myth ¹² on an otherwise quiet residential side street. Its appearance together with its fraught history seemed to coalesce its presence as an icon of the erasure Dobbs would represent. Like the herbs bundled and hung in the installation's alcoves—present but only partly visible, abundant yet mostly unacknowledged—through photos the Pink House had become a kind of non-site ¹³ where visibility itself was a contradiction. 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 centuries-long erasure of information about reproductive healthcare.

As it turned out there were dozens of photos of the building available online, especially in Google Maps, 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 its caretakers began to hide it and protect it, first by attaching black netting to the exterior fence as if it were a site of mourning while sequestering its clients. 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". Feminist word play, ironic slogans, angry ultimatums and supportive chants—"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"—made a line of protest posters and graffiti that could be viewed as a pro-abortion, surrealist exquisite corpse poem.¹⁴ Some of the photos in the documentation of the clinic showed that a garden planted in front had been completely overturned and destroyed. Ironically, the cutting, digging up and other destructive behavior toward the gardens, bushes and plants was an ongoing form of protest by anti-abortionists during the years of the clinic's struggle to remain open. However there was never any indication that the surrounding plantings included herbs that could be used for abortion, however inadvertent and wild they may have been! ¹⁵

This collection of found clinic photographs itself became a narrative, and gradually the raw material for a series of collages—echoing the changing abortion laws printed on top of the map of US states. Sometimes the image of Jackson Women's Health was cut out completely, leaving an empty space as if it had been demolished and removed. In one case that emptied space was filled with images of Brett Kavanaugh's highly privileged, yet fraught history revealed during his explosive hearing in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee. In another image the space was mournful with the inside of a courtroom draped in Ruth Bader Ginsburg's honor after her death. Both of these events would, of course, have an enormous impact on abortion law. 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.

This physical arrangement—collages alongside herbs alongside books—was not merely compositional. It was meant to make an argument about the nature of erasure and its opposite. The philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce ¹⁶ distinguished the index as a trace or sign that indicates its object through direct physical causation: a footprint in sand, smoke rising from fire. Each element of Trigger Planting 2.0 operates as a different trace or sign, and moving through the installation, visitors traversed a progression of three distinct records of evidence about suppressed knowledge.

The dried herbs speak for themselves-- not simply a representation of reproductive knowledge—but rather that knowledge in material form. Physically present in the room, the herbs carry the weight of their own botanical existence and are evidence of a history that Alito claims does not exist.

The map operates differently. Rather than mere representations, the abortion laws printed across each state are actual legal language. The excess of language that forbade abortion functions as a sign or index that these laws are traces of legislative acts, of specific moments when certain assemblies of men voted to restrict reproductive rights.

The collages occupy a third position in this progression. Photographs are already indexical signs—light traces of the thing itself, what Roland Barthes called an emphatic this has been ¹⁷ but the collages alter that trace or index. By cutting into, obscuring, and displacing the photographic surface of the Pink House, they transform images that showed a presence into traces that represent an absence. The building that was the last abortion clinic in Mississippi is made to represent its own erasure.

Chapter 2

What the New York Times investigations revealed was that the legal assault on Roe was itself a form of systemic erasure. The network behind the Dobbs decision shared a world view with its many forefathers who suppressed information about abortion and contraception over centuries. 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 the 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 rights 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. ²²Amid 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—the point at which the growing fetus could survive outside the womb--as a central component of abortion limits.²³

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, ²⁴the Mississippi bill was based in legal language, which, although challenging, appeared to many 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.

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 Anthony Kennedy, 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 kind of blocked investigations that roiled Justice Clarence Thomas' Supreme Court hearings in 1991. ²⁵Mitch McConnell and his Republican caucus stepped up to block further investigations of Kavanaugh just as they had Justice Clarence Thomas years before amid Anita Hill's allegations of sexual harassment against him, to make sure the complaints in both cases were refuted and suppressed. 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.

Meanwhile, 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. ²⁶ Related laws in these states such as “heartbeat bills”, the Hyde Amendment, and limited access to Medicaid have succeeded in making abortion de facto illegal for all but the most privileged. ²⁷

Why did the ADF choose 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. Mississippi was also one of 12 states with trigger bans, intended to prohibit abortion entirely if Roe v. Wade was overturned. ²⁸ In addition to all this and the fact that the then governor of Mississippi, Phil Bryant, 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. ²⁹ And, 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. ³⁰

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 relatively 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 Ginsberg died on September 18, 2020 and despite the upcoming Presidential election in November of that year, as is well known, 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 for the court to agree to hearing Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization in May 2021. By then Biden had been president for more than 5 months yet the new Democratic administration seemed helpless to stop the movement toward Roe’s overturn.

Once the court had agreed to hear Mississippi's appeal the conservative group behind the effort to destroy Roe had a new 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 Society, 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." ³¹With encouragement from other ADF supporters, Scott Stewart wrote a new petition to the Supreme Court that included a passage to completely overturn Roe by surpassing the 15 week abortion ban. ³²Although 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." ³³

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. ³⁴

Moving past the number of blatant lies or half-truths in this statement it is well known that opponents of Roe have long tried to manipulate public opinion about a fetus' development in the womb. Although arguments about fetal development sometimes seem as if truth is based on right wing propaganda 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! ³⁵ 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 what 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.³⁶

Despite Justice Sotomayor and others including Justices Kagan, Breyer and even Chief Justice Roberts adding support to the fact that multiple studies have negated the existence of fetal pain, the rebuttal to the ‘so called’ "scientific advances (that) show that an unborn child has taken on the human form and features months before viability" did not convince the pro-life justices, most of whom had already made up their minds before the leak of Alito’s memo was released. And despite the Solicitor General Scott Stewart's risk, writing with a focus on the issues that would appeal to Alito and Thomas 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 24, 2022.

Circling back to the beginning of this essay, Alito assertion that abortion is "not part of our history and tradition" contradicts the historical record. The case for widespread herbal reproductive practice is not marginal or contested; it is extensive, cross-cultural, and well-documented. Millenia of records show that the use of herbs for abortion in the ancient cultures of Egypt, Greece and Rome as well as Medieval and Renaissance Europe was widespread and that reproductive control and abortion are clearly part of history—human history, women's history. However since ancient times, at least in the public realm, men had already dominated women's access to their reproductive autonomy. Monica Green details this long struggle in her book Making Women's Medicine Masculine: the Rise of Male Authority in Pre-Modern Gynecology. ³⁷ This is not to say that all information about abortion and contraceptive herbs disappeared, but it became more inaccessible, existing underground among herbalists and midwives who did their best to preserve it and pass it along orally as well as historians and anthropologists who preserved this history in writings that were mostly obscure and often repressed.

In many cultures before the middle of the 19th century women also had autonomy because they were not considered pregnant until quickening, which is the term for when the fetus begins to move—Roe v. Wade mentions it as from the 14th to the 16th week. So if a woman didn't get her period, during the months before quickening she could control her fertility privately by "bringing on the menses"—that is bring on her period with the help of herbs. "In the Common Law it is undisputed that at common law, abortion performed before Quickening—the first recognizable movement of the fetus in utero—was not an indictable offense." ³⁸

Since the British legal system which allowed abortion before quickening also held in the British colonies in America, similar laws applied after the founding of the United States, with some exceptions, until 1847 when the American Medical Association was established. Despite the ongoing expansion of male control up through the 19th century, women, as midwives, still primarily took care of one another's reproductive needs. But as capitalism began to dominate economic activity in the US as the 19th century progressed, the medical field became more professionalized, and male medical practitioners began to look for new opportunities. Discounting the work of midwives as unscientific they believed women's reproductive health was a totally open field for them to experiment within and control. This was the case with both the doctors who founded the AMA and the doctors of the anti-bellum South earlier in the 19th century, as revealed by Deirdre Cooper Owens see footnote 4.

When the AMA set out to regulate health care it was also about gaining power for male practitioners to control, discredit and take over women's reproductive work (and limit their competition within the medical field). In a final power grab they began to accuse midwives of performing abortions and started a campaign against them. In 1857 Dr. Horatio Storer started what's been called the "physicians' crusade against abortion". In 1860, governors of every state in the U.S. received the letter from the recently established AMA. Storer ghostwrote a letter, supposedly from the president of the AMA, in which he stated that the organization opposed abortion. Storer used the language of morality, writing: "The evil to society of this crime is evident from the fact that it's instances in this country are now to be counted by hundreds of thousands. In reality, there is little difference between the immorality by which a man forsakes his home for an occasional visit to a house of prostitution that he may preserve his wife from the chance of pregnancy, and the immorality by which that wife brings herself willfully to destroy the living fruit of her womb. The child is alive from the moment of conception." ³⁹

The letter was pivotal and Storer was making a few key arguments for why abortion should be illegal across the country. He introduced a new idea that life began at conception. Storer campaigned on a moral argument that also tapped into the racial fears of the moment that would eventually inspire a pseudoscientific perspective that combined racism and eugenics.

And in 1873 Anthony Comstock an anti-vice activist and United States Postal Inspector founded the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice dedicated to upholding Victorian Morality. He opposed obscene literature, abortion, contraception, gambling and prostitution. His campaigns as well as his affiliations with the police enabled him to brag that he was responsible for 4000 arrests and 15 suicides! His efforts combined with those of the AMA to lead to the criminalization of abortion and contraception in the US except when a physician deemed either was necessary; with the passage of this law, women lost what had, up to then, been their common law right to abortion before quickening. ⁴⁰

It is this moment — the 1873 Comstock Act and the AMA's preceding campaign against midwives and abortion — that Alito reaches for when he claims abortion has never been part of American history and tradition. His originalism selectively reads the legal record produced by this very suppression as evidence of a timeless moral consensus. What it actually records is a power grab: the successful effort of a small group of male medical professionals and anti-vice activists to criminalize what had, for most of American history, been a private matter of common law. The tradition Alito invokes is that of erasure!

In fact, when Alito wrote that abortion is not part of our history and tradition he was referring specifically to a time when this legal crusade was taking place, also concurrent with the passing of the 14^th amendment which he does sight as being equally without support for abortion. While Alito, with his originalist stance was clearly looking for the support of the Founding Fathers, in fact more than a century earlier in, 1748, Benjamin Franklin inserted an abortion recipe in a popular textbook he published without prompting any scandal.⁴¹

"In critiquing the arguments for Jackson Women's Health, “Alito notes: 'Not only are respondents and their amici unable to show that a constitutional right to abortion was established when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted, but they have found no support for the existence of an abortion right that predates the latter part of the 20th century…’ Considering this quote it is important to keep in mind that “for most of US history, women were not considered legal persons who could possess individual rights of any kind, to abortion or otherwise…Of course a right to an abortion wasn't deeply rooted in the country's history in the 1860s, when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified. Women weren't legal persons then." ⁴²

"In Dobbs, the conservative Justices embraced past practices as the nation's history and tradition, counting abortion bans enacted with the support of the nineteenth-century anti-abortion campaign without scrutinizing evidence that the campaign mixed arguments for protecting unborn life with arguments that banning abortion would prevent ethnic replacement and would enforce wives' marital and maternal roles."⁴³

Meanwhile, after Roe’s overturn, the Jackson Women's Health Organization was left with 10 more days to finish their clinic’s appointments and prepare to move. Before long, one could see contractors and painters hard at work on the clinic's exterior (and a lot more inside.) The Jackson clinic had been sold and was being transformed into a completely different use and environment--Hunt's (Consignment) Furniture store.

The question that haunts this essay is its immediacy rather than its history. How is it possible that in 2026 women are presenting at emergency rooms with ectopic pregnancies that physicians are legally prevented from treating, that miscarriages are being investigated as intentional abortions, that the Teen Pregnancy Prevention programs that might have reduced the need for abortion have been eliminated? ⁴⁴ How have so many members of the American public adapted to what can only be described as a medically sanctioned campaign of harm?

What makes the current moment worse: what has been a historical situation has now been written into law and happening to those who seek care at hospitals in states where physicians cannot treat them without risk of prosecution! They have been deprived not only of care but the conditions under which care could be recognized as their right. This dispossession falls, as it always has, most heavily on those already subject to racial and economic violence. The women whose stories Loretta Ross, Dorothy Roberts, and Deirdre Cooper Owens tell—Black women, Indigenous women, poor women, women for whom reproductive autonomy was never guaranteed even under Roe. For them, Dobbs did not represent a new crisis so much as the intensification of conditions that had long limited their reproductive rights. The erasure this essay has traced is not experienced equally.

The herbs still grow. The knowledge persists. Trigger Planting 2.0 provided a space in which suppressed histories could be made visible and held alongside the present emergency—speaking to one another across time. The erasure is not complete.

Footnotes

1.Many books and essays were included in this research. Some of the most frequently used in addition to those cited in the footnotes include: Banu Bargu, Disembodiment: Corporeal Politics of Radical Refusal (Oxford University Press, 2024); Naomi Braine, Abortion beyond the Law: Building a Global Feminist Movement for Self-Managed Abortion (Verso, 2023); Mary Fissell, Pushback: The 2500-Year Fight to Thwart Women (Hachette, 2025); Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (Autonomedia, 2004); Maud Grieve, A Modern Herbal, 2 vols. (Dover Publications, 1971); Laura Kaplan, The Story of Jane: The Legendary Underground Feminist Abortion Service (University of Chicago Press, 2019); Terri Kapsalis, Public Privates: Performing Gynecology from Both Ends of the Speculum (Duke University Press, 1997); Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics (Duke University Press, 2019); Daniel E. Moerman, Native American Medicinal Plants: An Ethnobotanical Dictionary (Timber Press, 2009); John M. Riddle, Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance (Harvard University Press, 1992); Eve’s Herbs: A History of Contraception and Abortion in the West (Harvard University Press, 1997); Sage-Femme Collective, Natural Liberty: Rediscovering Self-Induced Abortion Methods (Sage-Femme Collective, 2008); Londa L. Schiebinger, Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (ACLS Humanities E-Book, 2004); Renee Bracy Sherman and Regina Mahone, Liberating Abortion (Harper Collins, 2024); Soranus, Soranus’ Gynecology, trans. Owsei Temkin (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991); Jessica Valenti, Our Bodies, Their Lies, and the Truths We Use to Win (Crown, 2024); Mary Ziegler, Roe: The History of a National Obsession (Yale, 2023) and Personhood: The New Civil War Over Reproduction (Yale, 2025); and many more.

2.Koblitz, Ann Hibner. Sex, Herbs, and Birth Control: Women and Fertility Regulation through the Ages. Kovalevskaia Fund, 2014.

3.Deirdre Cooper Owens, Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017). Two additional sources were also consulted: Loretta Ross and Rickie Solinger, Reproductive Justice: An Introduction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017); Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Penguin Random House, 1997).

4.A bit more on the story behind Trigger Planting: I began to do further research about the history of women’s medical treatment in collaboration with artist-activist Eugenia Manwelyn and as we discovered more about herbal abortion we began to plant some of the herbs. As our work progressed we started to organize and document the information and began to share it in informal workshops. Soon after I was invited to participate in a show on the theme of abortion at the historic A.I.R. Gallery, the original feminist coop in NYC that opened in 1971, being organized by longtime member Barbara Zucker for January 2018. Eugenia Manwelyn and I worked together with Zucker and AIR Gallery director Roxanne Fabius to prepare an installation for the show, which included planted herbs and a public workshop. Following this we titled the project “how to perform an abortion”, created a website and participated in more exhibitions and an artists’ residency. In 2019 when Eugenia and I were invited to develop a project for the Department of Art and Design at SUNY Purchase which included a garden and an exhibition curated by Rachel Owens; we invited Landon Newton, whose work we had become familiar with as part of an exhibition at the Queens Museum, to become part of the team. In 2020 Kadambari Baxi joined the team when we were asked to create a project for an outdoor exhibition at Unison Arts in New Paltz, NY. (Eugenia Manwelyan also became an emeritus member at that time.) In April of 2022 A.I.R. director Roxanne Fabius reconnected with me to propose a project for the Spring 2022 NY Frieze Art Fair that included our work on abortion herbs. I asked Newton and Baxi if we could all work together and the outcome was Trigger Planting, 2022. At the end of the Frieze Fair the plants that we had acquired and planted for our installation, an indoor wall garden that was only on display for 10 days, were replanted on the site of another garden project at Denniston Hill, in Rock Hill, NY. Cuttings from these plants taken in September 2024 became the dried hanging plants in Trigger Planting 2.0. https://www.howtoperformanabortion.com/

5.Landon Newton has been immersed in horticulture since childhood. Connor and Newton first connected through Newton’s 2018 exhibition at the Queens Museum and began working together in 2019 for Reproductive Justice Abortion Garden and Waiting Room at SUNY Purchase. https://landon-newton.com/ https://www.instagram.com/theabortionherbgarden/

6.Kadambari Baxi and I had been collaborating on projects for twenty years before Trigger Planting 2.0. Although Baxi was not directly engaged with abortion herbs until Found (abortion) Monument in 2021, her broader practice has long focused on fair labor practices, climate justice, and human rights in the built environment, each of which holds a relationship with erasure and denial of justice. During the winter and spring months of Trigger Planting 2.0, Baxi also worked with her Barnard students to research international reproductive rights and produced a new, fully global map that expanded the installation’s scope and reach. https://www.kbaxi.net/

7.Miriam Neptune was an inspiring and supportive presence throughout the planning and run of the installation. She worked together with Baxi to become a primary source of pedagogical and sociocultural interpretation for the Barnard community’s engagement with the exhibition’s content and intentions, facilitating many aspects of the installation’s realization and presentation.

8.Center for Reproductive Rights, “Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization: Case Documents and Timeline,” scroll down to Timeline, accessed February 12, 2026.

9.Ibid.

10.Ibid.

11.https://abortionlibrary.org/targeted-regulation-of-abortion-providers-trap-laws/, accessed April 24, 2026.

12.https://www.aaihs.org/slavery-the-plantation-myth-and-alternative-facts/, accessed February 13, 2026.

13.Robert Smithson, “A Provisional Theory of Non-Sites” (1968), reprinted in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 364.Note: Smithson’s non-sites were material displacements—rocks or earth removed from a location and exhibited elsewhere—that maintained a relationship to a particular site through documentation. The Pink House images work in reverse.

14.https://www.britannica.com/art/exquisite-corpse

15.Lorie Brown, Zoom conversation, November 5, 2025. Brown is the author of Contested Spaces: Abortion Clinics, Women’s Shelters and Hospitals (London: Ashgate Publishing, 2013). During her research for this book she visited Jackson Women’s Health Center many times beginning in 2006. In 2014 she created the following project about the Jackson Women’s Health Organization: https://arpajournal.net/privatechoices-publicspaces/.

16.Charles Sanders Peirce, “Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs,” in Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler (New York: Dover, 1955). For the application of Peirce’s index to photography specifically, see Rosalind Krauss, “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America,” October 3 (Spring 1977): 68–81, and October 4 (Fall 1977): 58–67.

17.Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 77.

18.The Center for Reproductive Rights timeline was limited to dates of legal decisions that related directly to Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. For Trigger Planting 2.0 we added the confirmations of Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. Tracing the history of the stealth activities that led to the overturn of Roe started well before that date, some of which is revealed in this essay.

19.https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/15/us/supreme-court-dobbs-roe-abortion.html, accessed January 10, 2026.

20.https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/28/magazine/roe-v-wade-christian-network.html, accessed January 10, 2026.

21.Elizabeth Dias and Lisa Lerer, The Fall of Roe and the Rise of a New America (New York: Flatiron Books, 2024).

22.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliance_Defending_Freedom, accessed January 20, 2026.

23.https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/28/magazine/roe-v-wade-christian-network.html, accessed January 10, 2026.

24.Angela Hume, Deep Care: The Radical Activists Who Provided Abortions, Defied the Law, and Fought to Keep Clinics Open (Oakland: AK Press, 2023), 137–150.

25.https://frontlinetv.com/supreme-revenge-full-film, accessed November 5, 2025.

26.https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/28/magazine/roe-v-wade-christian-network.html, accessed January 10, 2026.

27.https://www.guttmacher.org/2023/01/inequity-us-abortion-rights-and-access-end-roe-deepening-existing-divides, March 28, 2026.

28.https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/28/magazine/roe-v-wade-christian-network.html, accessed January 10, 2026.

29.Ibid.

30.Ibid.

31.Ibid.

32.Ibid.

33.Center for Reproductive Rights, “Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization: Case Documents and Timeline,” scroll down to Timeline, accessed February 12, 2026.

34.United States Supreme Court, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, No. 19-1392, Brief for Petitioners (July 22, 2021), 4, https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/19/19-1392/184703/20210722161332385_19-1392BriefForPetitioners.pdf.

35.https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9320804/, accessed February 16, 2026.

36.Center for Reproductive Rights, “Oral Arguments Transcript and Replay,” https://reproductiverights.org/cases/scotus-mississippi-abortion-ban-dobbs-jackson-womens-health/, pp. 17–22, accessed February 12, 2026.

37.Monica H. Green, Making Women’s Medicine Masculine: The Rise of Male Authority in Pre-Modern Gynaecology (Oxford University Press, 2008).

38.Roe v. Wade, VI 133–135, 1972.

39.Rund Abdeltath et al., “Before Roe: The Physicians’ Crusade,” Throughline, NPR, retrieved February 21, 2026.See also: Leslie J. Reagan, When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867–1973 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).James C. Mohr, Abortion in America: The Origins and Evolution of National Policy, 1800–1900 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).Horatio Robinson Storer, Why Not? A Book for Every Woman (orig. pub. 1868; repr. Kessinger Publishing, 2010).

40.“Anthony Comstock,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, accessed May 31, 2023.

41.Rund Abdeltath et al., “Before Roe: The Physicians’ Crusade,” Throughline, NPR, retrieved February 21, 2026.

42.https://womenintheology.org/2022/07/18/an-historians-reaction-to-dobbs-v-jackson-womens-health-organization/, accessed March 17, 2026.

43.Reva B. Siegel, “‘How History and Tradition’ Perpetuates Inequality: Dobbs on Abortion’s Nineteenth-Century Criminalization,” Houston Law Review 60 (2023): 901.

44.Jessica Valenti, Abortion, Every Day, Substack post, April 14, 2026.

I’d like to thank Andrea Blum and Amy Sinclair for their advice and editing in the process of writing this essay.

Maureen Connor 4/27/26