Tennessee bans abortion in nearly all circumstances. But once the babies are here, the state provides little help. To chronicle what life truly looks like in a state whose political leaders say they are pro-life, ProPublica followed one woman for a year after she was denied an abortion for a life-threatening pregnancy. The resulting photo essay by photographer Stacy Kranitz and reporter Kavitha Surana shows, in intimate documentary photography punctuated by accountability asides, how the family’s personal lived experience reveals many of the gaps in the social safety net in a post-Roe state.
Raised in the depths of Tennessee’s opioid epidemic, Mayron Hollis was three months postpartum and clinging to stability when she got pregnant again. Doctors warned that she and the fetus might not survive. Abortion went against her beliefs, but the embryo had been implanted in scar tissue from her recent cesarean section and could rupture at any moment. She feared for herself and her family. But the Supreme Court had just overturned Roe v. Wade, triggering one of the nation’s strictest abortion bans in Tennessee.
At 26 weeks, Mayron began to bleed heavily and was rushed to the hospital. Her daughter Elayna was born weighing less than 2 pounds and unable to breathe on her own. Mayron lost her uterus in the surgery that saved her life.
The next year would show the consequences of choices made by Tennessee state lawmakers who have banned abortion without also investing in the safety net to support those families once the babies are born.
We couldn’t know when we decided to embark on this yearlong photography commission what was in store for Mayron or Elayna, one of the first babies born from a denied abortion after the overturning of Roe v. Wade, but we had reason for concern. We knew Mayron’s history with the child welfare and criminal justice systems, her history of addiction, her family’s precarious finances and Tennessee’s poor outcomes for maternal health, infant mortality and child poverty. We knew that even if Elayna survived the year, she still required a feeding tube and a breathing machine and needed to see a pediatrician, an eye doctor, a lung specialist and an occupational therapist. And we knew that in the months ahead, juggling 12-hour workdays in manual labor jobs while trying to find child care for a toddler and a medically complex infant would be trying for any parent — and potentially devastating for those in recovery for addiction, facing active criminal child endangerment charges and having a history of entanglement with child welfare services.
In short: We knew that Mayron was exactly the kind of person most likely to face caring for a child they weren’t prepared for in states that banned abortion.
“They forced me, basically, to have a child,” Mayron said of the state after the abortion ban. But then, “they didn’t help me take care of that child.”
