The year after a denied abortion
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 commissioned Stacy Kranitz to follow one woman for a year after she was denied an abortion for a life-threatening pregnancy. 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 reveal many of the gaps in Tennessee’s social safety net. “They forced me, basically, to have a child,” she said of the state after the abortion ban. But then, “They didn’t help me take care of that child.”
Stacy Kranitz
Stacy Kranitz is a photographer based in the Appalachian Mountains of eastern Tennessee. She is a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow. Additional awards include a Southern Documentary Fund Research and Development grant and a Puffin Foundation grant. She works as an assignment photographer for publications including Time, ProPublica, the New York Times, Vanity Fair, the Atlantic and Mother Jones. Her first monograph, As it Was Give(n) to Me, was published by Twin Palms in 2022. It was shortlisted for a Paris Photo – Aperture First Photobook Award.
ProPublica is an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism with moral force. We dig deep into important issues, shining a light on abuses of power and betrayals of public trust — and we stick with those issues as long as it takes to hold power to account.
Exhibition presented free of charge in the 1912 Building of La Pulperie.
Exhibition presented within the framework of the Zoom Photo Festival Saguenay.
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