On September 19, in reaction to Congress’ vote to defund Planned Parenthood, Seattle-based activist Amelia Bonow decided to start publicly talking about her recent abortion. “Like a year ago I had an abortion at the Planned Parenthood on Madison Ave, and I remember this experience with a nearly inexpressible level of gratitude,” she wrote on Facebook. “…having an abortion made me happy in a totally unqualified way. Why wouldn’t I be happy that I was not forced to become a mother?”
She finished her post with the hashtag “#ShoutYourAbortion,” a reference to an abortion-themed zine that she had been working on with fellow activist Kimberly Morrison, and encouraged other women to do the same. Shortly thereafter, her friend Lindy West—writer, activist, and former Jezebel staffer—took the hashtag to Twitter, sending it out to her 60,000+ followers.
In the week that’s followed, women have been flooding #ShoutYourAbortion with their own abortion stories and the breadth of experiences is profound. There are women who ended pregnancies after finding out that their fetuses had life-ruining physical defects, women who had abortions because they were with abusive partners or because their birth control failed, and women who had abortions simply because they didn’t want kids. None of these women are ashamed and none of them should be. Abortion is the right choice, so long as it’s your choice.
We talked to Bonow over email about abortion, speaking out, internet trolls (she’s seen a lot of them in the past few days), getting doxed and how to support women who are forced to stay quiet.
Jezebel: How do we help women, particularly women who don’t have the luxury of speaking publicly about their abortions (because they don’t have the support of their communities or any number of other reasons), realize that their abortions are nothing to be ashamed of and that we’re there for them?
Amelia Bonow: Every woman has a right to her own unique psychological, emotional, physical or spiritual reaction to having an abortion. I would never dream of telling another women how she should feel about that experience. While other women feeling ashamed of their abortions makes me incredibly sad, I’m not trying to talk other people out of their reactions. Shame is not my thing and it’s certainly a cultural expectation that #ShoutYourAbortion (SYA) wants to counter with our own perspective. But no part of SYA is directive. It’s not #ShoutYourAbortionRightNowOrYouAreABadFeminist!
However, for me, having an abortion simply wasn’t some major, heavy experience. The heaviest part was feeling overwhelmed by gratitude because the Planned Parenthood in my neighborhood took such incredible care of me. I felt relief. I felt aware that I am one of the luckiest women in the world. I felt deeply sad that so many women in the states lack access to safe and affordable reproductive healthcare. For these women, motherhood is compulsory, while I had the opportunity to opt out. I also felt a huge wash of love for my friends, many of whom are the people who have helped push SYA into the world.
Ending my own social media silence about my abortion happened on a whim. I just realized that my own silence was totally incongruous with my personality and values. Don’t get me wrong—I sent an email to like 20 friends and family members after I got knocked up just letting them know the score and telling them I was fine, so that I didn’t have to talk about it 20 different times and absorb 20 different peoples’ emotional reactions. But I had never just gone off about my abortion via social media the way I regularly go off about white supremacy, casual drug use, being terrified that the world is ending, period stains—you know, things that most people are afraid to talk about. Why was I afraid of talking about abortion this way? I guess I realized that I was NOT afraid to talk about it publicly; I just hadn’t done it yet. The stigma surrounding abortion is based in misogynistic garbage thinking and hillbilly science and someone else’s version of morality, so why should someone who knows so much better and has certain levels of privilege—my whiteness, my community, and my pregnancy being the product of consensual sex, to name a few—collude with my own silence?
It is not breaking news that the anti-choice movement and conservatives in general rely on silence and shame to control and disempower women. SYA has just kicked the patriarchy in the dick. They are so angry with us and they can’t figure out how to shut us up. There are too goddamned many of us and you cannot reverse a viral shift in cultural consciousness. SYA is in no way a completely unique tactical movement, but the way it has gotten off the ground has electrified women around the world. I know it has electrified me, and I am a jaded, caustic millennial; I haven’t felt a change like this in a long time. The Kim Davises of the world can’t quash this kind of movement.