Travelling the Divide: Visualising Abortion Access & Absence Across the American Landscape
The reversal of Roe v. Wade has fractured abortion access in the United States along state lines, forcing many to undertake long, potentially risky and inconvenient journeys to receive essential reproductive healthcare. This research examines how restrictive abortion bans, cultural stigma, and unequal access to medical services shape the need for reproductive travel and its consequences.
By framing mobility as a political act, this project contextualises contemporary abortion travel within a longer history of movement as resistance in the United States, whether driven by choice or necessity.
Using a practice-based approach grounded in visual research methods, this research documents both historical and present-day abortion journeys to surface narratives often excluded from public discourse and institutional archives.
A cross-country, interstate road trip serves as a method of witnessing and mapping these contemporary divides. By combining documentary methods and critical cartography, the research reclaims travel not just as a record of movement but as a design method for confronting spatial inequality and centring lived experience.