Last week, Oklahoma, a state where abortion practitioners can be legally prosecuted, signed a bill to ban abortions after six weeks. On the same day, it was leaked that the US Supreme Court intends to annul the 1973 law that legalized abortion in the United States, leaving individual states free to decide how and what or if at all.
At the same time, Reuters news agency posted an extensive photo report about Dr. Shelly Tien.
That wasn’t just nice compensation for the large number of photos of Kevin Stitt, the beaming Oklahoma governor who signed the first bill under the guise of love for unborn and innocent patriots. It was also very brave. Not from Reuters, but from Tien.
She is an abortion doctor who flies across America to help women in places with limited access to abortion. Not supposedly, but real. Tien is one of fifty American doctors who do this and who adhere to the law as drawn up in the various states.
She is fully recognizable in the report. That is not without danger. Abortion clinics around the world are targeted by anti-abortion activists, and they are usually highly secured. In 1998, a New York state abortion doctor was shot dead, three others preceded him.
But here it is: Ten, 40 years old and tired. It’s the end of a long day at the Trust Women’s clinic in Oklahoma City, she just had her last abortion and is now resting at her desk. It’s a beautiful photo, because of her posture and those staring eyes that show it was heavy, and because of the bright blue of her surgery clothes, which shows up here and there in details. It’s a photo that doesn’t show exactly what Tien does, but that she is dedicated.
It’s a very different photo from the one the series kicks off with. Journalist Gabriella Borter and photographer Evelyn Hockstein traveled with Tien from Florida to Alabama and Oklahoma. They captured in words and pictures what it is like to travel from clinic to clinic, usually entering through the back door because the main entrance is occupied by protesters, and then assisting all those women, sometimes as many as eighteen in a day. In that first photo you see Tien performing a surgical abortion on an unrecognizable woman, one of which is looking for a support from a nurse. Her other hand reaches up, as if bracing herself.
It is immediately the most intense image in the series, which is quite special, because you can view it in two opposing ways. Those who are against abortion might argue that this is exactly what they want to prevent and that they want to protect women against it, while for others it is proof that abortion is a serious procedure, about which no one decides lightly and that is always as safe as possible. has to be done.
That is what drives Tien: the idea that as an abortion doctor she can prevent women from having to resort to unsafe abortion practices, which leads to misery. She doesn’t want to think about what her life will look like if the US Supreme Court does indeed invalidate that abortion law from 1973. Until then, she just keeps working.
Hence this photo. You might think that abortion just disappears when you cheerfully sign misogynistic bills in front of the camera and don’t pay attention to what goes on outside your limited imagination, but I’d rather watch Tien ten times.