Millions of abortion stories have gone untold, and it's been a serious tactical error. rtraister writes on how decades of silence left us unprepared for the post-Roe fight
A woman at home with her toddler checks for bleeding during her medication abortion in April 2020. Photo: The Abortion Project In 2004, I covered a pro-choice gathering of over a million people in Washington, D.C., called the March for Women’s Lives. I was 28, and most of the speakers and celebrities onstage were much older, many of them veterans of the second-wave feminist movement.
I haven’t had an abortion, but when I was pregnant with my second child, the erosion of access across the country led me to seek out stories from my own family. It’s not that these stories were kept from me; my mother, for example, had always been open about having had an abortion. But even as a 39-year-old who had been writing about gender, power, and abortion for more than a decade at that point, I’d never pursued the why or how.
My friend Zoe has just started speaking publicly about a third-trimester abortion she had four years ago in part because prior to her own experience, she’d had no knowledge of the roadblocks that existed under Roe, even in blue states. “As someone who always used to call myself pro-choice, and who now calls myself pro-abortion, I had somehow never heard the story of someone who needed a later abortion,” she says.
“It was absurd,” says Goodwin, who pointed out that the space ceded to these false narratives has led to “claims that there are such things as heartbeats” at six weeks gestation, “which there aren’t,” making their way to the Supreme Court. Meanwhile the stories of providers who have had to retrofit clinics, do unnecessary transvaginal ultrasounds, and recite misinformation to satisfy state restrictions have gone unheard.
“The reason I didn’t talk about it was because I didn’t see anyone around me saying, ‘I had an abortion,’ ” says Bracey Sherman, who went on to found We Testify, a group dedicated to telling a wide range of abortion stories, centering the experiences of people of color and others on the margins of mainstream narratives. “Every time I saw abortion argued about on television, it was always some Catholic bishop. None of them were talking about race.
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