In the midst of Title X funding cuts to reproductive healthcare and antiabortion extremist attacks on clinics, the abortion rights movement needs as much visibility as it can get.
The United States for Abortion, a reproductive justice design initiative, lets supporters literally wear their support on their sleeve with pro-choice T-shirt designs sourced from independent designers across the country. The ongoing project—which just announced 10 new designs—is planning to incorporate designs from all 50 states, Puerto Rico and Indigenous Native nations, working at the intersection of graphic design and social justice.
I spoke with the United States for Abortion’s founders, graphic design professors Kathy Mueller and Ali Place. The goal of the T-shirt project is to create “pro-choice messaging to generate a new visual rhetoric that’s more inclusive and that acknowledges contemporary mechanisms for abortion and speaks inclusively about who gets abortions,” according to Mueller, a graphic designer and associate professor at Temple University.
By seeking out designs from around the country, the project is highlighting how abortion is increasingly becoming a states-based issue. The project hopes to point out the vastly different histories of abortion access and activism in different parts of the U.S. for different groups and demographics.
One hundred percent of all proceeds from the T-shirts are going to the National Network of Abortion Funds, a network of nearly 100 different abortion funds from around the U.S. that support people in need of reproductive care by connecting them to local resources. This localized grassroots model is fitting for the United States for Abortion’s T-shirt project that sources designs from around the country to highlight the different realities of abortion access across different states and communities.
The project is working to “represent the majority support that the country has for abortion rights” with a collection of shirt designs “that has a real plurality of voices of all different identities and perspectives that can hopefully create or reflect a real diverse variety of arguments who are in support of abortion rights,” Mueller said.
With the project’s carefully curated designs and designer guidelines, Mueller and Place are also hoping to reframe pro-choice messaging within the abortion rights movement. This includes fighting unintentional misinformation even among abortion supporters. For example, they asked contributors to avoid outdated visuals like coat hangers to reflect the fact that self-managed, at-home abortions with pills are actually very safe—despite stigma and fear around illegal abortions in states with bans.
“Our intention with creating this project was to identify the ways in which people with good intentions and pro-abortion politics were actually harming the rhetoric and the movement by perpetuating misinformation or perpetuating stereotypes that were harmful or dangerous,” said Place, an associate professor of graphic design at the University of Arkansas and author of Feminist Designer: On the Personal and Political in Design.
Place and Mueller screen every design submission to make sure they avoid well-meaning but incorrect information. (One submission, for example, about the difference between medication abortion and surgical abortion used an image of a scalpel, even though doctors don’t use scalpels for surgical abortions.)
Place and Mueller’s graphic design backgrounds come in handy for making T-shirts that are both visually appealing and factually accurate, helping the project “call attention to the ways in which we should be more mindful and more intentional about the way that we talk about abortion,” according to Place.
Another goal of the project, Place said, is to elevate voices that aren’t typically heard within the pro-abortion movement, such as pro-choice Catholics and Indigenous communities. Place and Mueller periodically send out calls on social media and the United States for Abortion website to recruit the most diverse community of design contributors possible.
Mueller herself designed the Pennsylvania shirt, while Place contributed the design for Arkansas. They both get comments every time they wear their shirts in public—mostly positive ones, thankfully!
“I’ve gotten a lot of positive responses from people, just like on the street, and that’s been really exciting,” Mueller said. “It really invigorates this work to know that the designs are resonating with folks on the street and on the internet.”
Place said that the positive comments, which she gets “far more” than negative ones when she wears her shirt out and about, “reflects the fact that the majority of the majority of Americans support abortion rights.” A new poll in March found that over 80 percent of Americans—including two thirds of Republicans—don’t want the government involved in how women manage pregnancies and abortions.
Antiabortion voices might be some of the loudest, especially with Trump earlier this year giving extremists a free pass to harass clinics and patients without being prosecuted under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act. However, these voices are firmly in the minority.
Meanwhile, the United States for Abortion’s T-shirts are continuing to grow a following and community. Some of the shirts are currently being displayed in the gallery exhibition “m(other)ing” at Virginia Tech.
“We have a long road ahead of us,” Place said, but she and Mueller are still working to expand the collection to draw attention “to the ways that [abortion is] different in every state, and the context is different in every state, and the rhetoric is different in every state. I think that’s a huge focus for us too, to expand these voices in the media in a way that continues to shift the dialog and shift the rhetoric.”
