Beautifying Abortion Clinics: An Architect’s Folly

All the water features and paint in the world won't change the reality

Bubbly water features, lush flora, verdant colors, and a sense of "humor" and "playfulness" designed to make women de-stress and relax. You’d be forgiven for thinking that’s architect Lori Brown’s description of a new salon or yoga studio, but Brown is talking about an abortion clinic. Brown, a feminist activist and associate professor at the University of Syracuse School of Architecture is leading an effort to transform abortion clinics into "beautiful," affirming and inviting spaces. In an article with a sympathetic Salon.com writer, Brown detailed how she teamed up with other activists to transform the look and feel of Mississippi’s only abortion clinic.

Ms. Brown talks about her decision to collaborate with the owner of the only abortion clinic in Mississippi: “it was so glaringly obvious that an architect and artists needed to be involved” and yet —

it was the one clinic that I went to that you would swear you were not in a clinic. It was yellows and lavenders and red. It was so upbeat. All the way through, from the waiting room to the procedure room to the recovery room.

The problem is, of course, that this Jackson, MS clinic is still a place where innocent children are killed. Choose all the perky and soothing hues you like, there’s not enough paint in the world to make clients feel “upbeat” about why they’re there.

Changing the environment of clinics is just one of the latest strategies of abortion advocates to dispel the shame surrounding abortion and make it seem like a normal (and empowering!) event in the lives of women. In Brown’s quest to make that a reality, she seems to assume that making abortion clinics “beautiful” will alter the truth of what takes place inside them.

As a post abortive woman, and as someone who has worked with thousands of other women who have suffered as a consequence of abortion, I find this disingenuous. Brown plans, for example, an environment of “lush flora and vegetation and inflatable and interactive sound barriers that add an element of playfulness to an often tense and confrontational zone.”

The “tense” and “confrontational” part is right. Entrances to clinics are, ipso facto, tense places. Most clients are conflicted or grimly determined; no client I’ve seen has entered a clinic with a smile on her face and a song in her heart.

As for an “element of playfulness,” inflatable things, lush vegetation and splashing water may be fun in another setting, but gurgling water will never replace the sound made by the vacuum aspirator that plays in continuous loop in the minds of so many post abortive women, year after year after year.

The article tells us that the “walls of the space can be playful, beautiful, functional and safe all at once.” Safe for whom, exactly? At best, exterior architectural and design upgrades can camouflage the reality of the abortion experience for first-time clients and the public. But they can never alter the truth of the lived experience—safe for neither mom nor baby.

Commenting on the interior layout of the many clinics she visited, Brown noted: “the ones that were so great were the ones that really thought about the entrance sequence and what a patient and her support group or partner or friends who come with her would experience when they enter and have to engage with the reception” because “what you encounter when you first walk in really sets the tone for what that experience will be like.” Is it possible Ms. Brown is so oblivious to reality as to think that natural light and comfy chairs are going to “set the tone” for what happens in the “procedure” rooms?

Brown’s highest praise went to this simple, but “thoughtful” innovation:

One clinic in particular was so thoughtful in that the doctor made sure, she was one of the ones who worked with an architect, that the patient would not leave through the entrance foyer. So that they had their own private exit so that they didn’t have to go back and be stared at in the waiting room.

A back exit not only protects grieving women (who may be bleeding heavily and in pain) from the guilt and shame of being “stared at,” as a bonus, it also protects conflicted clients and loved ones in the waiting room from seeing the tear-stained, grief-stricken faces of those who’ve just lost a child. Win. Win. But one wonders about the logistics of connecting women who’ve discretely exited into the back alley or parking lot, with their “support group or partner or friends” still waiting in the reception area. Does a nurse change out of bloody scrubs to whisper or pass a note to them?

Abortion is a life-changing event. It is a life-taking event. Women often say that something inside died after their abortion—their “soul,” their future, their hopes and dreams, their self- image as a good person. Attempts like this through architecture and design to disguise this truth do women more harm than good.

God understands the pressures that push women into getting an abortion; He understands the suffering and remorse they experience afterward and is eager to give His forgiveness and peace to anyone who seeks it with a sincere heart.

The last thing women in crisis pregnancies need are architects creating an illusion that clinics are beautiful, homey places that they’ll walk out of happier than when they arrived.

Theresa Bonopartis is the director of the post-abortion healing program Lumina and co-developer of the “Entering Canaan” post abortion ministry model.