Summer Centered: Isabella Otterbein '26 Combines Art and Activism to Drive Awareness of Crisis Pregnancy Centers
Photo by Patrick Montero.
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One of three Hurford Center creative interns, Otterbein is spending the summer as a programs intern for Abortion Access Front and creating a zine designed to educate the College community.
Based on their name alone, crisis pregnancy centers might seem a perfectly suitable destination for women seeking reproductive care. However, their purpose is often much more disingenuous, and they exist solely to prevent women from seeking an abortion, says Isabella Otterbein ’26.
As one of three creative interns supported by the John B. Hurford '60 Center for the Arts and Humanities, Otterbein has dedicated her summer to educating people about these centers, often operated by anti-abortion activists without medical licenses. Such organizations, which outnumber actual medical clinics by about four to one nationwide, she says, regularly employ tactics designed to draw in unsuspecting patients.
“If you were to Google ‘pregnancy resources near me,’ you would most likely be handed a fake pregnancy center,” says Otterbein, a political science major and double minor in gender and sexuality studies and visual studies. “Women will go because they advertise free limited ultrasounds, which they can legally do without having a medical license, and free pregnancy tests, which are just the pregnancy tests you can get at CVS.”
Her internship, Otterbein says, comes at a timely moment in U.S. history following the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade in 2022 and its more recent dismissal of a case that would have limited access to the medication abortion drug mifepristone. Otterbein designed her own experience, opting to split her summer between advocacy work with Abortion Access Front (AAF), a nonprofit established by Lizz Winstead, a co-creator of The Daily Show, and a creative project that will be on view in VCAM this fall.
“I was looking to find a way to connect my interest in politics and law with art, which has always been a struggle for me. AAF is one of the organizations that does that successfully,” says Otterbein. “I was immediately intrigued by how the organization has combined art and comedy to raise awareness and advocate for reproductive rights.”
As one of AAF’s programs interns, Otterbein has been focused on orchestrating AAF’s “Expose Fake Clinics” action hours, which gather activists from across the country online to identify and highlight crisis pregnancy centers by leaving reviews on websites like Yelp and Facebook.
Otterbein is also drawing on her background as an artist with a focus on collage to create a zine — a handmade, small-batch publication — focused on crisis pregnancy centers and reproductive services in the area surrounding Haverford. Based on her research, Otterbein says that within a 20-mile radius of Haverford’s campus, there are 20 crisis pregnancy centers and only six legitimate reproductive health clinics.
“I really love zines as a method of sharing information,” says Otterbein. “They're accessible, and their history as a part of underground movements fascinates me.”
In the fall, Otterbein plans to enlarge elements of her zine and hang them on VCAM’s walls. She also hopes to organize an action hour similar to AAF’s paired with a screening of its 2023 documentary, No One Asked You.
