Students at SUNY Purchase Plant Herbal Abortion Garden To Fight ‘Reproductive’ Slavery

Students at southeastern New York’s SUNY Purchase campus are tending to a “Reproductive Justice Garden,” helping to weed, water, and fertilize herbs that cause abortions. Social media posts from the club called Collective Organizing for Pleasure and Equity, which sponsors the garden, say that harvesting and using the herbs are acts of resistance for “females and those assigned female at birth” to follow in the footsteps of American slaves who were forced to reproduce.According to documents retrieved in a Freedom of Information Act request from The College Fix, for the last two years student fees have been contributing to the cost of maintaining the garden that Planned Parenthood says to “avoid” and the National Institute of Health reports can be deadly.“Doctors usually recommend that pregnant people avoid these herbs because there’s a chance they can cause a miscarriage,” a Planned Parenthood blog warned in April, adding that the scientific evidence is not clear whether the plants “work to cause an abortion or are safe to use to end a pregnancy.” Planned Parenthood did not respond to a request for elaboration from a doctor.The National Institutes of Health went further, finding in an examination of 86 cases of amateur abortions using herbs between 1986 and 1999 caused a half-dozen deaths. It “appears that the ingestion of plants to induce abortion involves the risk of severe morbidity and mortality,” reads a published report. The National Capital Poison Control Centers notes that side effects from abortion-inducing herbals include liver damage, breathing difficulties, and potentially death.“Any student or faculty-run project involving a substance capable of causing … miscarriage, hemorrhage, organ toxicity … should be subject to the same kind of oversight a chemistry lab or research project involving hazardous materials would,” a visiting fellow at The Heritage Foundation, Melanie Israel, told The College Fix.The garden was planted in 1999 prior to the 2022 Supreme Court ruling, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned 1973’s Roe v. Wade and allowed some states to severely restrict the practice. New York has some of the least restrictive abortion laws nationwide.A pro-life student group has protested at the site. Several of its members did not respond to calls and emails from The New York Sun.The reproductive garden and waiting room at the school campus’s Richard and Dolly Maass Gallery can be seen on the group’s website, How to Perform an Abortion and Instagram channel. The site describes the installation as a “learning and art project that demystifies the historical, biological, and ethical stories surrounding abortion.” The group was founded by an artist and professor emeritus of Queens College at New York, Maureen Connor, an urban planner and choreographer, Jane Manwelyan, and gardener and artist Landon Newton. The College Fix reported that Columbia’s Barnard College also maintained an abortion garden in 2025, led by another of the How to Perform an Abortion leaders and architecture professor, Kadambari Baxi.

Students at SUNY Purchase Plant Herbal Abortion Garden To Fight ‘Reproductive’ Slavery

Students at SUNY Purchase Plant Herbal Abortion Garden To Fight ‘Reproductive’ Slavery

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