Picturing Abortion: A Conversation with Carmen Winant

Floor 3, Theater and Online, via Zoom

For her installation The Last Safe Abortion (2023), artist Carmen Winant assembled 2,500 photographic prints to form a collective portrait of the ordinary, daily tasks required to provide abortion health care. Drawn from the archives of university special collections and clinics (and supplemented by photographs made by the artist), these images depict staff, physicians, and volunteers taken over a fifty-year period before the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022.  

In this program, Winant extends this project by bringing together a group of clinicians, patients, and activists from the MYA Network to discuss how photography is central to understanding the medical, political, and social realities of abortion care. 

Speakers:  

Joan Fleischman received her MD and MPA from Harvard. In 1999, she founded Early Options Clinic and she has spent the past twenty-five years pioneering normalized abortion care.  

Michele Gomez, MD promotes social justice in her work by being an abortion provider and training family medicine residents to learn how to provide abortions through the TEACH (Training in Early Abortion for Comprehensive Healthcare) program. 

Ashia McChriston is a small business owner, nursing student, and mother. She is a former Early Options patient.  

Simona Sudit is an aspiring storyteller and lifelong New Yorker who works on the business side in tech. She is a former Early Options patient. 

Jessica Valenti is a feminist author and columnist. Her book Abortion Everyday is forthcoming in October 2024.  

Carmen Winant is an artist and writer based in Columbus, Ohio.  She is the Roy Lichtenstein Endowed Chair of Studio Art at Ohio State University.