Abortion Access & Reproductive Justice in Michigan

Documentary Focus

Motivated by the overturn of Roe v. Wade and the subsequent threats to access to reproductive health care and abortion care across the country, our archival project focuses on the historical trajectory of reproductive healthcare and abortion access in Michigan. Starting from the 1930s, with the initial prohibition of abortion in the 1931 Michigan Penal Code, to the passage of Proposal 3 in November 2022, our archive highlights significant individuals, events, and patterns in the pursuit for reproductive justice in Michigan. We aim to illustrate the myriad forces and figures that shaped the landscape of reproductive health care we see in the state today. 

Archival Practices & Concepts

Several archival concepts and their considerations relative to the archival practices we employed were central to the organization, structure, and features of our archive:

• Provenance & Original Order: We abandoned traditional historical practices of original order (see Caswell 2016; Millar 2010) in favor of a timeline and narrative writing in order to reintroduce context. While initally we considered organizing items by type or theme (e.g. protests & direct action, legislation & court cases, etc.), it became clear that it would be difficult to contextualize the sources sufficiently in such a format. As such, we chose a timeline format to organize events and items chronologically, which we found a more effective way to display items, events, patterns, and change over time. 
• Privacy, Legality & Ethics: The topic we chose for our project has been and was particularly sensitive during the creation of our archive. Given the ways that archival documents can implicate individuals and lead to legal and social repercussions (George 2013; Hodson 2004), we took questions of privacy and legality seriously in the construction of our archive. As such, critical to ensuring that individual testimonies or writings about experiences with or even views on reproductive care, are documented and included with knowledge and consent. While such concerns were not our direct responsibility, as we used materials from existing collections that have already been accessioned and likely vetted for such potential issues. However, an awareness and attentiveness to these concerns as we selected documents necessary, as the political, ethical, or moral stances upon which documents or their inclusion in an archive or collection, were, in some instances, not consistent with the political commitments and stances of our project. 
• Arrangement & Description: Given the sensitivity of the subject matter of our archive, arrangement and description were also significant. With an awareness of the ways that description informs user and reader understandings of archival documents (Duff and Harris 2002; Wood et al. 2014; Yakel 2003), we worked to ensure that items were described respectfully, clearly, and accurately. Additionally, given the many instances where item description via metadata was not sufficient to offer an understanding of an item, we offered further context or discussion of the implications of an item via the narrative text provided on each timeline page.

Record Selection Criteria

Most of our archival materials came from collections at the Bentley Historical Library. Other sources included other archives in Michigan, including those housed in the Wayne State University library, as well as items that we collected and documented ourselves in the lead-up to election day in November 2022. We had multiple criteria for record selection and inclusion in our digital archive. Thematically, we focused on records that were illustrative of significant changes and developments related to access to reproductive health care and abortion in Michigan. As such, we also anchored our project geographically,  only including records that were related to Michigan— including organizations based in Michigan, changes to Michigan legislation regarding reproductive health care in Michigan, events that took place in Michigan, and indvidual activists based in Michigan. Given the activist bend to our archive, we also centered records from individuals and organizations that championed reproductive healthcare and justice throughout Michigan's history.

Target User Groups

Our target user group are Michigan residents and engaged citizens. Our aim is to provide an overview of the key figures and events in the history of reproductive healthcare in Michigan. We further hope that the archive might prove useful to students and educators interested in leveraging this information for research projects or incorporating such information into curricula. Such users are likely most interested in significant legal rulings or legislation, direct action and protest, key activists, and reproductive health care providers. As such our primary task has been to highlight these actors in the structure and formatting of our archive. Further, since some of these documents, especially legal documents, might be difficult for our audience to decipher or understand without context, effective  descriptions of the documents was also necessary (see Smith and Villata 2020). Given the diversity of our intended users and the various purposes for which they might use our archive, we walked a careful line to ensure that the information we included was accessible, while still rigorous and consistent with academic standards. Most often, this meant using accessible and engaging language in describing and contextualizing items, while also documenting our items thoroughly and using academic materials and citations in the text we included on each archival page. Additionally, given the sensitivity of our topic, we also provided users a content warning and were careful in the phrasing of our descriptions and writing, in an effort to exact a "trauma-informed archival practice" (Wright and Laurent 2021). 

Perspectives

Our archive currently represents the perspectives of feminist groups active in Michigan for the latter-half of the 20th century. These are disproportionately the voices and perspectives of affluent, urban, white women. In our search through several archival databases, there was little to no representation of women of color, rural women, lower-income women, or gender diverse individuals. This is unsurprising, given the racism of many second and third-wave feminist movements throughout the 20th century (Breines 2006; Simons 1979), of which many of the organizations and individuals mentioned in our archive were part, or aligned themselves with. The geographical bias of the project is a result of the ways that activism and organization followed urban and political centers across the state, and further aligns with persisting issues in access to reproductive health care, with a dearth of resources in rural areas in Michigan and the country (Committee on Health Care for Underserved Women 2014). While we have documented the ways that the reproductive health care organizations targeted resources to poor and lower-income women, the lack of representation of poor and low-income women themselves are reflective of the economic barriers that prevented women from having the free time or resources to engage with such organizations (Craddock 2020). Finally, the exclusion of queer, transgender, and other gender diverse individuals is likely an indicator of the threats and discrimination that prevented such individuals from publicly expressing or claiming these identities (Pohl 2019). Further, it also illustrates that increasing recognition of the fact that cisgender women are not the only individuals who might need abortion or other reproductive health care is only something that has recently garnered widespread support (O'Connor 2019).  

These biases and exclusions mean that significant parts of history remain untold and unrepresented (see also Hartman 2008). On one hand, these archival gaps are reflective of the ways that racism, homophobia, and classism prevented many from participating or being represented in these movements as they unfolded. On the other, they are also likely indicative of collecting priorities or what is considered archival (Foscarini 2017; Ham 1984). While our digital archive is a testament to the ways that many institutions have come to prioritize the collecting of women's history, the intersectionality of such movements, and the subsequent collecting of materials created by or that represent women of color, low-income women, rural women, and gender diverse communities is lacking.