This summer, ACP Board Member Abby Minor had the pleasure of talking with current Grant Partner Daena Horner of Holistic Abortions, a grassroots project focused on shifting the ways abortions are seen and supported in North America. Engaging in popular education, narrative shift work, and training resources that prioritize accessibility, inclusion and autonomy, Holistic Abortions is promoting decolonized models of community care that honor the lived experiences and traditions of the people having abortions.
ACP’s 2024 Grant Partnership with Holistic Abortions supports the group’s newest zine, The Scoop on Herbal Abortion. Check out all the Holistic Abortions zines here!
AM: Hi Daena, I’m so glad to have a chance to hear about your work with Holistic Abortions. Let’s start at the beginning: What kinds of experiences informed your decision to create the Holistic Abortions project? How did you arrive where you are now?
DH: Hi Abby; thanks so much for this question. It’s funny to think of all the twists and turns and what seemed like roadblocks, but were actually important detours, that result in us landing in a good place with good people to build a community with. Holistic was a little sprout pushing through the soil after spending the time underground developing and nourishing seeds planted and nourished by the countless others practicing and protecting home abortions and holistic care. It came about as an organic and inevitable culmination of collaboration and wild imagination between friends and colleagues who wanted to challenge the dominant narrative about how people talked about, presented and experienced abortion.
I, like so many people, rely on a plurality of medical modalities for my health and wellbeing. If I get sick I may drink some ginger tea with honey, eat some caldo or chicken noodle soup, and maybe take a decongestant or analgesic. I’ll avoid caffeine and sleep as much as possible. It’s a combination of allopathic medicines, herbal remedies and healing recipes handed down from our grandmothers. For most of history abortion existed in a multiplicity of practices resulting in a type of care that acknowledged and addressed the spectrum of experiences and effects on the entire body (physical, emotional, and spiritual).
My own clinical abortion was not those things. It was a medical procedure and little more. The pain of this procedure garnered nothing more than a “Aren’t you glad you’re not pregnant though?” and a silent recovery room where after not being allowed food all day (it was now after 4 pm) a second bag of goldfish was reluctantly shared. The entire experience felt like a passive aggressive exercise of power over me for making a mistake, or maybe it was a type of mutated punishment of centuries past where the female body is not to be sexual outside of reproduction. Either way, as someone who had always been pro-abortion, and had fundraised for local funds for years, the clinical abortion was a disillusioning experience. I had expected it to be different. I wanted it to be different. I believed it could be different. So, I started connecting with others who believed the same and were working towards making those changes.
Reading your words, I’m struck by the fact that our own experiences are so often what radicalize us. I had a very similar, disillusioning clinical abortion experience; and like you, I found myself thinking–this could be so much different, so much better. People should never have to settle for just ‘getting through’ any reproductive experience. That’s what led me to get involved with ACP. I know this is kind of a big question, but–now that you’ve been doing this work for some time, how would you like to see the abortion care landscape change?
Let’s dream and imagine together. Let’s pretend that the politics and judges don’t make the rules for a privatized health care system. Let’s imagine free abortion care on demand. I want to see more safe and effective methods and modalities available for people to choose from. I want to see people able to make consensual, informed decisions about their reproductive lives. People deserve to experience stigma and judgment free spaces and consultation when accessing the care they need to build the families they want. What can a localized, decolonized community health care look like and how can that be applied to abortion care? What would a fully loving and supported abortion feel like in those unique communities? These are the imaginations that inspire and motivate the mission of Holistic Abortions.
You have so much powerful work going on at Holistic Abortions. Can you talk a bit about how your zine projects have come together? These are beautiful, colorful zines with titles like Grow Your Abortion: Herbs to Make you Bleed, and Creating Rituals for Pregnancy Loss. What’s that creative process like?
Thank you for lifting up our zines! The folks in zine culture are so talented and creative. It is such an honor to be able to share information in this way with people. The creative process for each zine looks a little different. Mostly they arrive as a response from the feedback and questions we get in workshops, classes, and conferences. Together the zines make up a colorful and creative answer section to our most Frequently Asked Questions. We were talking so much about “building relationships” with plants, especially the ones people might be working with to help us bleed, and eventually someone asked, “Okay, but how do you build a relationship with plants?” And that was the beginning of the Grow Your Abortion zine. It is not a ‘how to’ for herbal abortions, it is an invitation to interact and grow these plants as a way to understand them and their medicines.
Creating Rituals for Pregnancy Loss also was put together as an answer to people asking how to honor their abortion in a way that isn’t appropriating the cultures and practices of others, since for many people these ceremonies didn’t survive the pressures of colonial assimilation and patriarchy.
The newest zine, The Scoop on Herbal Abortion, attempts to address the most common misinformation and fallacies perpetuated about herbal abortion. As interest about using herbs in this way has increased, especially in more mainstream medical and research communities, we felt it was really important to start with a shared understanding about some of the biggest misconceptions. With the help of the ACP seed grant we were able to collaborate with some super skilled artists and provide a number of digital and print copies for others to help distribute and help us to reframe this sacred practice and center the voices, experience and expertise of the people who know, use, and respect this medicine.
The front cover of the zine “The Scoop” is centralized. It is against a multicolor, abstract background. The cover shows a large image of a drawn ice-cream cone in the foreground, with sprinkles in the background. The words “The Scoop” are typed over the ice-cream. The zine was created by Grantee, Holistic Abortions.
All of us at ACP are honored to support this latest zine project! Thank you for bringing it into the world. What’s next for you, now? What other projects are you dreaming towards?
Oh, well the work is without end isn’t it? When folks aim for the social justice and autonomy that can only come with liberation, legal abortion access for all is not nearly enough. Our cultural and narrative shifting work is a challenge to the simplified black and white stories of pro or anti that have permeated the mainstream conversation. The Holistic team commits to continuing the hard conversations with doctors, researchers, and organizations that can (hopefully) create the space and trust for long overdue growth spurts from those who traditionally hold power. We will continue to develop educational projects and foster relationships that allow for deep collaboration and healing between strategies and networks working toward radical change. We will do that while dedicating our educational resources and programs to expanding personal and collective knowledge of our bodies, of our health, and of our reproductive lives in ways that empower, inform and liberate us from the whims of the political system and the languor of those with power.
Daena Horner, (she/they) is an educator, activist, abortion doula, and herbalist. They are co-founder and director of Holistic Abortions, a grassroots project committed to increasing body literacy and liberation through creating accessible curriculums, peer-to-peer support networks, community-led research and educational materials that center the people getting abortions.
Abby Minor lives in the ridges and valleys of central Pennsylvania, where she works on poems, essays, drawings, and projects exploring reproductive politics. Granddaughter of Appalachian tinkerers and Yiddish-speaking New Yorkers, she teaches poetry in her region’s low-income nursing homes and directs an arts education organization called Ridgelines Language Arts.