The 4th Trimester Bodies Project
Finding support after giving birth can be difficult for people with marginalized identities. After a traumatic birth experience, ash luna struggled to find support as a nonbinary parent of a child with a disability. So they set out to create their own community. This effort transformed into the 4th Trimester Bodies Project. In this presentation, luna discusses the creation of the 4th Trimester Bodies Project and what we can learn from the stories shared there.
What began as a photo and an invitation for others to share their stories turned into a project with 4,000 families and 2,000 interviews. The project offered a feminist, intersectional, and reproductive justice lens to birthing experiences. After discussing why they started the project, ash luna devotes time to addressing the themes that came up in the interviews. She worked with Rachel Newhouse on data analysis.
The stories of birthing people highlighted the importance of partnership and support. They also reflected on how giving birth changed their bodies and how they adapted. Birthing people emphasized the importance of health care providers honoring their agency. Importantly, they shared their stories with ash luna with the hopes that it could help others.
On June 9, 2013 just four and a half months after Nova came home from the NICU, I captured this photograph of us in my studio and posted it online. I very vulnerably asked others to join me, to allow me to photograph their bodies, their babies, their stories. I invited them to share those true stories with me and ultimately, with the world with an initial goal of one hundred photographs and stories, which would become a gallery show. I began photographing friends and then friends of friends and then somehow six weeks later, Huffington Post caught wind of what I was working on, and I woke up the following day with over 6,000 emails in my inbox from parents all over the world asking how they could participate.
SOURCE: Center for Bioethics and Humanities at University of Colorado Anschutz • AUTHOR: Ash Luna • LAST UPDATED: December 6, 2021
