Summer Payton

Interior as Pregnant Body reimagines abortion care through a feminist spatial lens. Building on existing research that problematizes medical control in childbirth, my project explores agency and setting in relation to abortion. If, as research suggests, people have greater agency during births at home and in birth centers (“domestic” settings), is the same true for abortion care? The delivery of abortion care in New York withholds control and agency from pregnant people, transforming their bodies into sites for medical intervention. Drawing on precedents from the traditional clinic, the domestic interior, and the participatory clinic, I designed Lauren’s Place, a three-floor readaptation of a Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, brownstone that provides surgical and medication abortion services in a carefully designed environment. A new typology, Lauren’s Place offers a model of care that balances the intimate with the collective, the private with the public. My project reveals the practical, conceptual, and ideological limitations of the traditional abortion clinic, through which our notions of abortion and the pregnant body have been constituted. In doing so, it serves as a call to designers to respond to inadequacies in other normative typologies across the private and public spheres and as a vivid reminder of our power as designers to shape the provision of care both for ourselves and for others.