This was all before our current legislative moment, so the need to travel for reproductive healthcare is only going to increase exponentially. I was learning more and more about what women went through to get abortions. When I photographed that first abortion story, I met women who were coming from a couple of hours away. Along with an acute shortage of OB-GYNs to provide women's healthcare in general, especially in the south, there are further restrictions on who can provide abortions and where, making access harder to come by, especially in rural areas. Working at the clinic in Montgomery, I was able to follow a doctor who traveled more than a thousand miles from New England to give abortions. Even when I took these pictures back in 2019, then there were already lots of people who crossed state lines for abortions. While I was in Alabama, I started reporting and photographing at a clinic that serves women from as far as Texas and Florida. Women are often complicit in white supremacy and the patriarchal agenda - it's all just so enmeshed. The legislature was primarily white men making laws about women's bodies, and the governor at the time was Kay Ivey. The Alabama legislature was pushing what was at the time the most prohibitive abortion legislation in the country. The first time I did an abortion story was in Alabama in 2018. It was hard to access, and it was hard to make dynamic pictures. What was the process of photographing abortion? It's not only controversial, but it happens behind closed doors. We spoke with Gordon in April about how her photography evolved from covering white supremacy to reproductive rights, and the misinformation she’s aiming to confront with her work. Wade, the landmark case that made abortion legal nationwide in 1973. The Supreme Court has yet to rule on a Mississippi law that bans abortion at 15 weeks, a decision that will have national implications and could overturn Roe v. Texas outlawed abortions after fetal cardiac activity can be detected, usually around the sixth week of a pregnancy, and an Oklahoma law will make performing an abortion a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison starting this summer. Since Gordon began her photo series, some states have passed even more restrictive laws. Abortion takes place behind closed doors - for medical privacy and for safety - but I also believe something is gained by creating visuals for this process." "Most people don't know what a fetus looks like. “With all of these pictures, my goal as a photographer was always to show you something that you didn't know,” she added.
Her work documenting abortions led her across the US, sometimes following the doctors and patients who travel outside their home states to provide or seek abortion care. “Someone goes to a doctor’s appointment, and then they come back.” “One of the hardest thing about photographing abortion is that it's not high drama,” she told BuzzFeed News. Traveling to clinics with a camera, Gordon realized that the graphic images that anti-abortion protesters often display were wildly misleading, and that she didn’t actually know where to go to see accurate photographs of abortions. Her work in the United States has focused on the uneasy intersection between personal freedom and government oversight, including access to abortions.
Photographer Glenna Gordon has traveled the world, documenting everything from Nigerian weddings and abandoned oil tankers on the African coast to white supremacist groups and the rise of Donald Trump.
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