Routes of Care documents the physical distances pregnant people travel for abortion care in post-Roe America, as well as the visual culture connected to reproductive rights. In 2025, I undertook two documentary road trips:

Houston, TX → Wichita, KS (over 1,100 miles round-trip)
New Orleans, LA → Carbondale, IL (roughly 650 miles round-trip)

I selected routes based on real clinic availability and cross-state travel patterns from abortion-restricted states to states where abortion remains legal. Each route takes eight to nine hours of driving, one-way without stopping.

I documented the trips using a Nikon L35AD point-and-shoot camera and Polaroid film.

These journeys became a way to translate abstract policy into lived experience. The resulting work uses fictionalised but plausible narrative fragments to reflect the realities of traveling out of state for a medical procedure.

Alongside the photographs, a series of blackout poems made from the Dobbs v. Jackson decision examines how the Court’s language shapes the cultural imaginary of abortion. Objects gathered on the road, like receipts and hotel keys, anchor the project in the everyday reality of long-distance travel.

The project aims reframes design research as a form of witnessing, revealing how abortion access in the United States is often governed by geography, distance, mobility, and time.

MLS 2025

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Routes of Care: Mapping Access & Absence Across post-Roe America

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