Last week, Steph Herold, the pro-choice activist behind IAmDr.Tiller launched a Twitter campaign to get women to come out about their abortions, using #ihadanabortion. Emily Douglas at The Nation invited us both to exchange our thoughts and ideas about the role of public abortion storytelling for changing the debate.
Read our exchange: “I Had An Abortion” in 140 Characters or Less: An Exchange with Steph Herold and Aspen Baker.
Thank you Aspen and Steph for this important and potentially
productive dialogue! One burning issue for me is in regard to the poem and to what I think (?)is Steph’s request that ‘patients’ support their providers. Women who have abortions do, most definitely, ‘support’ their abortion providers, whether they can openly come out or not. Women who have abortions know much better than their providers their specific circumstances leading them for help and they aren’t apt to ever forget those circumstances-or the people who helped them. (This is especially true of women who continue to need privacy!) And while I certainly recognize the isolation providers face, and can very much understand their own need for voice and support, I do not think the women who come to them for help are the ones responsible for providing this publically. Private support can take many forms, and it can eventually lead to more (full!)public support as the woman moves on in her life, if she has felt supported throughout her experience. There is a need for *both* public and private voice. If the public voice comes at the expense of private individual voices, making them feel guilty or ashamed for not ‘coming out,’ I think much harm has been done to the movement, and more significantly, to the individuals it purportedly serves.