Contested Spaces: Abortion Clinics, Women's Shelters and Hospitals

Politicizing the Female Body

Lori A. Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317160328
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture Criticism

In this book, Lori Brown examines the relationship between space, defined physically, legally and legislatively, and how these factors directly impact the spaces of abortion. It analyzes how various political entities shape the physical landscapes of inclusion and exclusion to reproductive healthcare access, and questions what architecture's responsibilities are in respect to this spatial conflict. Employing writing, drawing and mapping methodologies, this interdisciplinary project explores restrictions and legislatures which directly influence abortion policy in the US, Mexico and Canada. It questions how these legal rulings produce spatial complexities and why architecture isn't more culturally and spatially engaged with these spaces. In Mexico, where abortion is fully legal only in Mexico City during the first trimester, women must travel vast distances and undergo extreme conditions in order to access the procedure. Conservative state governments continue to make abortion a severely punishable crime. In Canada, there are nowhere near the cultural and religious stigmas to abortion as in the US and Mexico. Completely legal and without restrictions, Canada offers an important contrast to the ongoing abortion issues within the US and Mexico. Researching the spatial implications of such a politicized space, this book expands beyond a study of abortion clinic and includes other spaces such as women's shelters and hospitals that require multiple levels of secured spaces in order to discuss the spatial ramifications of access and security within spaces that are highly personal, private, and sometimes secret or even hidden. In questioning what architecture's responsibility is in these spatial conflicts, the book looks at how what architecture 'does' can be used to reconsider the spaces and security around such contested places, and ultimately suggests what design's potential impact might be. In doing so, it shows how architecture's role might be redefined within social and spatial practices.

1

Introduction

2011 was a watershed year in the United States for the reduction of women’s reproductive rights at the state level. With more than 1,100 provisions introduced by legislators, the end of the year saw 135 of these provisions enacted. This is a marked increase from the 89 in 2010 and the 77 in 2009. Of these enacted last year, 68 percent restrict abortion access. These restrictions took many forms including time sensitive abortion bans, longer waiting periods, ultrasound requirements, varying insurance restrictions including complete prohibition of insurance coverage for abortions in a few states, stricter clinic building regulations, limits to medication abortion, reduction in family planning and abstinence-only education requirements.1 Combine these new restrictions with the first three months of 2012 where the required contraception coverage in President Obama’s healthcare mandate and certain states’ transvaginal ultrasound abortion requirements have made significant headlines with outbursts from both political sides.2 These examples are further evidence that there is a continued backlash against women’s health needs and the ability for women to have full autonomy over their own healthcare decisions. Women are clearly not fully participatory citizens with complete control over their own bodies as these issues make evident.

As a feminist architect, I seek intersections between architecture and the political in order to provoke change both out in the world and within my own discipline. This book emerged from the desire for architecture to be political, something it is not good at being, and to deal with issues that are inherently politicized within our contemporary culture. Working on a few design competitions foregrounding particular gendered spatial relationships including a floor of single-room occupancy units for homeless women in downtown New York and a housing competition for a single mother and her child allowed me to conceptualize idealized spatial needs and test these through design. As well I seek and find local partnerships in need of design expertise and work with these various groups on a pro bono basis helping them realize their spatial needs. A few of these yet-to-be-built design projects include a renovation of a hospital chapel, the Library of Feminism for the Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation, the renovation of the ground floor of an elderly housing tower for the Syracuse Housing Authority and the recently completed renovation of a kitchen, dining room and storage spaces for a local women’s shelter. In each of these cases, my role was one of collaborator and partner envisioning how their spaces could be much better suited to their needs, sometimes with minor alterations and other times with more radical reconfigurations. These building projects fulfill a desire to work locally but there continues to be a drive to work toward larger-scaled social and political projects hoping to produce greater societal changes.

Fig 1.1 March for Women’s Lives April 25, 2004 Washington D.C.

Source: Lori A. Brown, 2004

When considering what spaces are inherently contested and politicized, abortion clinics seemed like an obvious choice. Integral to abortion is how clinics intersect with public space and the First Amendment of the US Constitution guaranteeing an individual the right to freedom of speech and peaceful assembly.3 As polarizing an issue as abortion is in various parts of North America, abortion provides an interesting platform to think through complex relationships of space, a woman’s body, varying degrees of federal and state control, the fluid and ever-shifting terrain of reproductive healthcare access, potentials of design thinking in transforming spatial relationships and ways to radically rethink these issues to provoke change.

Fig. 1.2 Pre-Easter anti-abortion protestor sidewalk queue in Louisville, KY April 2012

Source: Nelson Helm, 2012

Another series of related questions more specific to the discipline of architecture include: What is the value of design thinking for the greater public in terms of abortion and public space? What role could architects have in exploring overlooked spaces like abortion clinics and women’s shelters? How can design positively impact access? Although not explicitly aligned with the types of non-places theorized by the anthropologist Marc Augé, these types of spaces have an affinity coinciding with what he states: “[n]on-places could be seen, approaching them from another vantage point, as the heirs to everything that has created discomfort or annoyance in the history of human spaces.”4 Although the spaces of abortion and women’s shelters are themselves not the creator of discomfort, the idea of these spaces definitely fall within this idea and the physicality of their existences clearly create discomfort for a large segment of the population.

Another motivation for the research is to reinsert architecture back into contemporary culture and the built environment of everyday space. As I have recently written, I am interested in foregrounding the expanding types of practices at varying scales occurring within architecture today. Practices calling into question or critically dismantling power dynamics, those giving voice and representation to people who are often silenced or not represented, others helping to bring communities into action through collaborative design processes and those practices revealing the deeply embedded sociopolitical relationships structuring our spaces are all part of the larger idea of how I am defining practice.5 This research falls within these broader definitions.

Fig. 1.3 Pre-Easter anti-abortion protestor sidewalk queue in Louisville, KY April 2012

Source: Nelson Helm, 2012

Fig. 1.4 Pre-Easter volunteer clinic escort queue in Louisville, KY April 2012

Source: Nelson Helm, 2012

What does it mean for the practice of architecture that architects are only directly engaged with from 2 to 5 percent of all building construction?6 Where does this leave the discipline that is supposed to design and be responsible for the world’s built environment? Although Fisher’s introductory essay for Expanding Architecture Design as Activism is really focused on public-interest architecture, I believe the point he makes is pertinent to the larger argument regarding the lack of architecture’s political and public presence, even absence, for those who are not wealthy—for the 99 percent. Or in other words, everyone but a limited few.

Architectural and cultural critic Reyner Banham’s “A Black Box” criticizes architecture for its entrenchment within itself and the solipsism the discipline instills and perpetuates from the very beginning of architectural education, especially within design studio pedagogy and culture. The discipline, as he argues, operates on such a narrow value-system with “unspoken—or unspeakable—assumptions on which it rests.” Architecture, no longer acknowledged as the “dominant mode of rational design,” is seen as the “exercise of an arcane and privileged aesthetic code.” He goes even further lambasting architecture as too proud and too accepting of a “parochial rule book [that] can only seem a crippling limitation on building’s power to serve humanity.” However, he ends the essay with a glimmer of hope that if architecture would allow itself to be “opened up to the understandings of the profane and the vulgar, at the risk of destroying itself as an art in the process …”7 architecture may find an engaged existence in the world.

Architecture that engages in contemporary issues contributes to concerns out in the world. In Architecture and Participation, the editors skeptically question the general coinage of participation as an uncritical engagement with the user. Instead they are interested in exploring the “politics of participation,” the “contested” terrain that participation opens up within participatory processes and the unexpected results from such a process. In the editors’ framing of the book, “participation is not always regarded as the guarantee of sustainability within a project but as an approach that assumes risks and uncertainty.”8 These uncertainties and places of potential conflict “forc[e] it to engage with issues that in the long term will make architecture more responsive and responsible.” This results in both an “alternative means of production … [that] leads to alternative aesthetics and spatialities.” This type of participation suggests an “expanded field for architectural practice; it is a means of reinvigorating architecture, bringing benefit to users and architects alike.”9 As one of the book’s editors, Jeremy Till, argues in his essay “The Negotiation of Hope,” one result of architecture’s denial of the political is its need to present itself as knowledgeable and specialist and the more it focuses on aesthetics over the user, the more and more detached architecture becomes from everyday needs and the “social life-world.”10 Focusing on space that is so highly politicized and contested, this research does precisely the opposite. I as the architect seek to find openings and gaps of possibility for re-inserting architecture into places ignored by the discipline. Being at the margins offers a way to exert productive pressure to improve our environment.

THE PROJECT’S EMERGENCE

I think it is important to briefly mention how the scope of the project evolved because it speaks to a honing of research and potential impact of the book. When I first began preliminary research on the space of abortion, I imagined working with my regional Planned Parenthood and their local affiliates. I proposed interviewing patients, doctors and staff to better understand how people experience and live through their spatial constraints. At the time I was most interested in two particular aspects of these spaces. One was the patient’s movement and flow through public space and how a person navigates the potentially complicated landscape outside clinic doors in the legally defined public realm. The second was how the clinic’s spatial interior organization influenced a patient’s experience from the moment she entered through the front doors into the waiting room until her name was called and her experience while “in the back.” I was aware that my proposal had gone through at least a few of Planned Parenthood’s bureaucratic layers and after waiting for a year and half, I finally received a no.

Not happy about their decision at the time, I did not want to give up on the project because although it was not entirely clear what I would now be researching, I felt that there was something important and necessary in looking at a type of space that most architects ignore. The “no” required I rethink and refocus the research and I realized the issues I needed to investigate really begin at the state level. Although abortion was legalized in 1973 through the Supreme Court Roe v. Wade decision, state legislatures have ultimately become the arbiters of access. A clear example can be seen by Mississippi and South Dakota, two of the most restrictive states in the country for abortion access. Each state legislature has publicly declared their goal to make their state what they refer to as “abortion-free” with absolutely no providers.11 One can see through years of proposed and passed legislation both states are incredibly close to doing so.

As a result of these interests and the confluence of events, the project began to more broadly examine each state’s influence and manipulation of reproductive healthcare laws and what impact they were having on a woman’s right to physically access abortion. This required that I begin to think about the project on a much greater scale, no longer at the localized site of an individual clinic but at the scale of the state and how the state’s legal exploitations of certain...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• About the Author
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Social and Spatial Practices
• 3 Legal Frameworks Understood Spatially
• 4 Case Studies and Spatial Awareness
• 5 Landscapes of Access: United States, Canada and Mexico
• 6 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index