The IUD Project is a crowd-sourced collection of stories and photographs collected in 2016-2017. I collaborated with people rushing to get long-term birth control to protect their bodily autonomy throughout the uncertainty of the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, and thus a loss of affordable birth control. In response to fear that the administration would outlaw birth control, there was an 800% increase in IUD implants in 2016, an option that could outlast a two-term Donald Trump presidency. IUD Project participants submitted pictures, writing, audio recordings, and other digital media responding to their experiences of seeking reproductive healthcare. The project grew through a Facebook group of 500+ people that I facilitated, in which members could ask questions and share information to provide a supportive outlet.

In addition to the archival and community aspects of this project, I created a series of silver gelatin photograms. By combining a sample IUD used for training health care workers, photographic chemicals, and light on photo-sensitive paper, the black and white images look like the inside of the body. The IUD is the focal point as the abstract lines of liquid flows around it. The sharpness of the implant is foreign to the softness of the body. Featured in the Village Voice, R.C. Baker writes about the photograms featured in the 2019 Everywoman Biennial, summing up the project, “Charlotte Woolf’s silver-print triptych Untitled (IUD Choices) captures the bright, hard-edged birth control devices floating in a gray realm of inner space, aliens in that cosmos of desire, pleasure, and pain that is the body.” While birth control can fix the problem of unwanted pregnancy, it often snowballs into unexpected side effects and pain. The political act of guarding one’s bodily autonomy does not go unpunished.