Likna examines the paid receipt that freed her from imprisonment in a locked patio of a USA-based Nonprofit Hospital in Haiti. Traced photograph with altered facial features (original photograph by China Tolliver)

A reproductive-justice project to abolish hospital prison and reckon with obstetric apartheid

Project Partners

Alissa Jordan, PhD
Center for Experimental Ethnography
Ani* (Pseudonym)
Nurse Midwife
  • Receipts

    If you’ve been kidnapped by a hospital, receipts are the only visa you can hope for. These fragile pieces of beige and white paper carry the heavy blue ink of the doctor’s notes. Ink so heavy it can tear through the leaf of paper like tissue.  On the page are also marks from administrators. They…

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  • Kin Ties and Collateral

    Guerlande is a nurse. She worked hard to earn a degree in nursing, in the process of her training she witnessed her superiors holding women and their babies, and she was intimately familiar with the violence this wrought in patients’ lives.” “If they go to the hospital to give birth, there are hospitals in Haiti,…

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  • Pri Libete

    Enben, anba yon sistèm kote lavi ou koute la libète ou, kijan manman ka gen konfyans nan sistèm medikal la? Likna se yon lòt manman te pale avè nou sou kesyon sa. Li sòti okap, epi li te siviv kèk   mwa andan yon loptial misyon, oubyen mwen oblije di, yon lòpital prizon. Likna pat…

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  • Escaping, Care, and Calling It Out

    For David, Guerlande, and Naomi hospital imprisonment, much as they tried to avoid it, was becoming how birth is experienced in their family. What do they and others do to resist the valuations on human bodies that become devaluations of life itself? Guerlande remembers an incident that always stirred her emotionally. It makes her voice…

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