Care-in-Retrograde: Designing for Reproductive Health in the Aftermath of Roe

The overturn of Roe v. Wade radically changed abortion access within the United States leaving women to navigate new financial, legal, and logistical challenges in managing their reproductive health needs. Reporting on findings from co-design workshops with participants from Indiana (a state with an abortion ban) and New York (where abortion is accessible), we investigate how women envision care in response to ongoing legal and medical uncertainty. Drawing together techno-feminist scholarship on care and reproductive health, in this paper we highlight several "entangled" design stories of anxiety and fear in navigating diminished healthcare services, as well as resistance and hope. Our findings prompt critical reflections for HCI on the role of health technology amid a world in which reproductive health, and medicine at large, is often a site of political contestation and conflict. Care-in-Retrograde re-orients a techno-utopian and future-oriented view of health technology to consider design work amid healthcare trajectories of disruption and reversal.