Abortion Stories Research Articles

“We Are Having Abortions”: How Abortion Stories Illustrate Policy and Warn of What Is to Come

A pivotal moment in the post–Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization response was how abortion storytellers rose up in defiance of the laws. Of course, people continued to have abortions, but the way in which they did so openly, refusing to be silent and testifying before Congress about their experiences—potentially criminalized or still legal—was valiant. People who have abortions are experiencing an unprecedented level of visibility at a moment in which we've lost all legal protections. But that visibility and storytelling is one of the critical ways in which we will be able to tell the story of now and support each other as we build a vision for what's next: a world in which everyone is able to freely decide if, when, and how to grow their families and receive an abortion at any time, for any reason, anywhere. We are building it for ourselves, we are imagining it on-screen, and we are telling the stories of what we need to make that world possible today.

Introduction: Histories of abortion beyond Roe

AbstractThis introduction to the forum of articles on ‘Histories of abortion beyond Roe’ addresses the difficulty of telling abortion (hi)stories without reference to the procedure's legal status. A brief survey of the history of reproductive medical interventions and recent scholarship on US abortion history illustrates how the contemporary concept of ‘abortion’ emerged only once abortion could be narrativised in medical and legal terms as an intentional act. Thus, the stories told about abortion had and continue to have the power to shape abortion's meaning, its history and even its legal status, as summaries of the forum's three articles illustrate.

“You can’t tell this story without abortion”: television creators on narrative intention and development of abortion stories on their shows

Abstract Scholars and advocates often cite media as a mechanism to change culture, especially related to contested issues in American politics such as abortion. While there is mixed evidence in support of this claim, it is not clear how media content creators conceptualize their abortion plotlines. We identified television shows available to U.S. audiences that included abortion plotlines and purposively recruited the creators who worked on them. Forty-six American creators completed in-depth interviews. Respondents’ primary reasons for including abortion plotlines were: (1) to normalize abortion; (2) to deploy abortion as source of character development; and (3) to respond to politics. Some respondents reported barriers to getting abortion content from page to screen, including stigmatizing attitudes towards abortion from colleagues and network executives. Respondents did not necessarily aspire to reflect the reality of abortion access in the US, instead seeking to destigmatize abortion by portraying televisual representations of compassionate, shame-free abortions.

Jews Who Have Had Abortions

ABSTRACT Jewish women have been speaking publicly about their abortions for decades, even before it was legal to have an abortion. Many Jews have also written about their abortions and published them. These are the stories featured in this collection. Abortion stories reveal the way people think morally about their abortions, the complexities around accessing care, and the work that still needs to be done in reducing stigma for people who have had abortions. The fifteen narratives here do not reflect all of the abortion experiences among Jews in the United States, but they do contain a range of abortion experiences. Sharing these stories and teaching with these stories will expand understanding and normalize abortion. Having an abortion is a moral act. These narratives from Jews who have had abortions reveal that these abortions are motivated by their religious identities, in one way or another.

(Re)criminalizing Abortion: Returning to the Political with Stories.

Abortion stories have always played a powerful role in advancing women's rights. In the abortion sphere particularly, the personal is political. Following the Court's reversal of Roe v. Wade, abortion politics, and abortion storytelling, take on an even deeper political role in challenging the bloodless judicial language of Dobbs with the lived experience of women.

From Silence to #Shout: French-Language Abortion Narratives in Transnational Dialogue

Abstract: Taking as premise that stories provide the frames through which we grasp and articulate lived experiences, this article brings abortion narratives into transnational and transgenerational dialogue in order to challenge the dominant story told about termination. Comprised of accounts of both clandestine and legal abortions occurring on three continents (Algeria, Hexagonal France, and Belgium, with critical parallels noted in US narratives), including four literary texts, several collections of testimonies, and one documentary film, the corpus highlights core commonalties that cut across experiences of termination, demonstrating the global impact that women's health stories harbor. Part One examines Bey's Au commencement était la mer , Malinconi's Hôpital silence , Ernaux's L'événement , and, to a lesser extent, Guathier's Paroles d'avortées , discussing the dehumanization of institutional violence and lack of information as key commonalities. Turning to contemporary abortion narratives in a variety of genres, Part Two shows how silence, stigma, and dehumanization continue to characterize abortion stories today, but also notes a shared volition to craft new narratives of intelligibility. Finally, Part Three discusses the power harbored in dialogue amongst abortion narratives of all types, notably in terms of the medical humanities and the expansion of language available to express lived experiences, but more importantly as foundation for a relational understanding of abortion as part of reproductive care—a notion nascent in contemporary narratives, but which comes to the fore when stories are circulated as feminist folklore.

Shouldering Death: Moral Tensions, Ambiguity, and the Unintended Ramifications of State-sanctioned Second-trimester Selective Abortion in Denmark.

This article is based on an ethnographic study of pregnant couples' embodied, emotional, and moral experiences of second-trimester selective abortion in Denmark. Drawing on 16 selective abortion stories, I unpack the intense, often highly accelerated, days that follow from the moment a fetal aberration is detected to the moment of fetal disposal or burial. I show that although prenatal screening and diagnostics have come to occupy a routinized part of pregnancy in Denmark, when women and their partners opt for termination, they are faced with a series of bodily events and actions they are entirely unprepared for while at the same time feeling essentially alone in grappling with the moral confusion that ensues. I argue that despite widespread medico-legal sanctioning and social endorsement of selective abortion, the specificities of how such terminations are done in Denmark in ambiguous, and conflicted, ways situate women and their partners in a series of moral tensions around how to relate to the abortion, the dead fetus, their grief, and their entitlement to such mourning. By chronicling the core struggles that the process of termination catalyzes, I point to the social and moral ramifications of the embodied practices and medico-legal choreographing of selective abortion in Denmark. [selective abortion, moral tensions, embodied practices, responsibility, death].

“You Can't Tell This Story Without Abortion”: TV Creators on the Intention and Development of Abortion Stories on Their Shows

“You Can't Tell This Story Without Abortion”: TV Creators on the Intention and Development of Abortion Stories on Their Shows

Unforgetting: national memory and women’s personal narratives about abortion in Australian public spaces since 1970

‘Silence’ is commonly invoked to characterise the place of women’s personal narratives of abortion in public spaces. Yet women have been publicly speaking their abortion stories at least since the beginning of the Women’s Liberation Movement. This article argues that ‘forgetting’ is the better term to describe the public place of women’s stories of abortion. After recovering a 50-year history of public story-telling, it argues that the imperatives of whiteness and white maternal citizenship in Australia underpin institutionalised forgetting of stories of abortion. It concludes that the claim of silence only reproduces the forgetting, and the innocence of white national memory.

Temporal Migrations in Annie Ernaux’s L’Événement: Recounting (a) Lived Experience(s) in Abortion Narrative

In Annie Ernaux’s novel, L’Événement (2001), the author writes about her clandestine abortion while she was a college student. Ernaux constructs her narrative through her journal, which serves as proof while also allowing her to relive the experience from forty years before vividly. The narrative describes and recounts Ernaux’s experiences of seeking a person to provide the abortion, the process, and the moments afterward to her reader. Ernaux’s novel offers a temporal retelling through memory from her contemporary time to the past when she had an abortion. It blends the past and present lived experiences, reminding the reader of what was and juxtaposing it with what is. The text illustrates the conditions women experienced in telling their story while juxtaposing it with how women describe their abortion story currently during a time of legal certainty. Ernaux exposes the taboo of telling one’s abortion story. The narrative structure of Ernaux’s text also illustrates the lived experience for women of a particular class without access to abortion by challenging the taboo of discussing an abortion story publicly. This article analyses how Ernaux’s novel explicitly challenges the taboo in both past and present through a feminist narrative that describes a woman’s lived experiences.

"We have to make sure you meet certain criteria": exploring patient experiences of the criminalisation of abortion in Australia.

Nine different sets of laws govern abortion in Australia, and the criteria for an abortion to be considered lawful varies considerably by jurisdiction. We explored how the criminal status of abortion affected patients' experiences in accessing care in a country where abortion services are widely available. We conducted qualitative, in-depth interviews with 22 people who had an abortion in Australia since 2009 across a variety of legal contexts. We audio-recorded all interviews and transcribed them in their entirety. We carried out content and thematic analyses of the interviews using deductive and inductive techniques. At the time of their procedures, more than half of our participants (n = 13) obtained their abortion in a state or territory that had criminal sanctions associated with procuring an abortion and required abortion seekers to meet strict legal requirements to access care. In general, participants reported confusion about the legal status of abortion. Participants who had an abortion in criminalised settings described significant negative emotional impacts that were directly linked to the law. They were often required to fit their abortion story into a state-mandated narrative. Further, the criminalisation of abortion meant that some participants felt they could not be honest with clinicians for fear of being denied care. The participants were overwhelmingly in support of decriminalisation of abortion and increased consistency of the legal status of the procedure across Australia. The criminalisation of abortion in some Australian states negatively impacts patients' emotional wellbeing, undermines the patient-clinician relationship, and perpetuates abortion stigma. In the absence of legislative reform, training for clinicians - including abortion providers and general practitioners - to explain the implications of the legal status to their patients appears warranted. Patient-centred resources, such as a website with state-specific information, could fill an important knowledge gap for the public.

“I can’t believe your mixed ass wasn’t on the pill!”: race and abortion on American scripted television, 2008-2019

ABSTRACT Racial identities provide important context for understanding reproductive experiences, including abortion. However, this context is often not fully reflected in popular cultural narratives about abortion, including on American television. Because onscreen depictions have the potential to influence public understandings of abortion, it is crucial to examine the messages these plotlines convey about the relationship between race, racism, and abortion access. We analyze a decade of onscreen abortion depictions, finding that the vast majority contain no racially-specific content. When plotlines do portray a character of color obtaining an abortion, these depictions can be both progressive in making race visible and regressive in relying on problematic racial tropes. These patterns differed by race: Black characters often obtain abortions while wrestling with and reinforcing racial stereotypes; Latina characters’ abortion stories are predominantly concerned with Catholic judgment. Plotlines featuring Asian or multiracial characters are largely absent. In contrast, white characters’ stories comprise the vast majority of abortions on television, and none of these plotlines substantially address issues of race. These disparate patterns obfuscate structural barriers to abortion access and may contribute to the skewed beliefs that the American public holds about abortion.

Exploring 'artivist' innovations in Ireland's pro-choice campaign

This article looks at the artistic practices of feminist pro-choice artivists in Ireland, in the successful mobilisation for repeal of the Eighth amendment. It focuses in particular on the home|work.collective, who in their performances in public places of The Renunciation - a performed reading of abortion stories - helped to make people's lived experiences visible at multiple scales: new technology enabled them to 'stretch' the reach of these performances into digital space, and to leverage the opportunities offered by social media for horizontal organising. The Renunciation's transnational resonance also enabled it to travel to spaces beyond its original performance sites. Through combining political public art and performance with technology, new possibilities emerged for solidarity, visibility and public participation in advancing reproductive rights. Creating and connecting new spaces of solidarity - 'hybrid spaces' - new possibilities for alliance-making were opened up.

Looking Back, Looking Forward: Examining the Processing of Abortion Experiences Using Public Abortion Narratives

Limited research has utilized public abortion narratives to understand how individuals process through their abortion experiences. To address this gap in the literature, this study used thematic analysis to consider the public abortion stories of 39 participants from the Tennessee Stories Project, focusing on how individuals process through these experiences and the context of the abortion experience in a person’s life course. Participants were primarily those who were abortion patients; however, abortion providers and supporters including partners or spouses, family members, and friends of those who received abortion care were also represented. Data analysis indicated that abortion seekers engage in introspection, involving political and religious/spiritual considerations; report specific feelings about their abortion experience, including having no regrets and feeling gratitude; process emotions related to the abortion experience by normalizing emotional responses and using mementos; and position their abortion in the context of their life, both in terms of their family and career opportunities and personal development. These findings provide valuable insight into how individuals process through the abortion experience, before, during, and after the abortion procedure, and suggest possible directions for service providers, advocates, and policy makers in order to better support abortion patients, providers, and family members.

Abortion stigma, class and embodiment in neoliberal England

Research on abortion stigma has given insight into how women experience abortion, tell stories about abortion, and make decisions about abortion. Stigma encompasses a range of feelings, experiences and discourses that can make having an abortion a negative experience or one that women might wish to conceal. This paper explores how abortion stigma is both classed and embodied, using the life stories of 15 middle-class women who have had abortions in England in ‘neoliberal times’. It argues that the women’s class position gave them access to various discursive resources with which to articulate their abortion stories, shaping their experiences and narration of stigma. It also draws attention to the ways in which both class and stigma are ‘made through marking’ on the body, and thus to the under-theorised embodied aspects of abortion stigma. In doing so, it argues that abortion stigma acts as a regulatory ‘technology of the self’ that is enabled by middle-class practices of self-control.

Experiences of harassment and empowerment after sharing personal abortion stories publicly

ObjectiveIn recent years, in an attempt to counter stigma and increase empathy, public education campaigns have encouraged people to share their personal abortion stories. This exploratory study sought to document negative and positive experiences of those who have shared their abortion stories publicly. Study designWe conducted an anonymous online survey of people who have shared their abortion story publicly (N = 88), recruited via partners affiliated with two abortion story-sharing campaigns. The survey asked about the context in which respondents shared their abortion story, any negative and positive experiences online and in “real life” as a result of story sharing, and any problems or benefits resulting from these experiences. We analyzed survey data using descriptive statistics, bivariate analyses and categorizing responses to open-ended questions. ResultsSixty percent of respondents reported experiencing harassment and other negative incidents after sharing their story publicly. These experiences contributed to emotional stress, problems with loved ones and difficulties at work and/or school. These harms were reported even by many respondents who used only a first name or alias when sharing their story. Despite this, positive experiences as a result of story sharing were reported by four out of five respondents and motivated many to continue sharing their story. ConclusionsThis exploratory study indicates that many people who share their abortion story publicly find it to be an empowering, rewarding experience. Yet they also experience harassment and threats at high rates. Future research should explore both positive and negative experiences in more depth. ImplicationsSharing one's personal abortion story as part of a public education campaign can be a positive, empowering experience. Nevertheless, policymakers, journalists and reproductive health advocates should recognize the potential harms experienced by people who share their abortion story publicly and consider measures to support these individuals.

To Be a (M)other: A Feminist Performative Autoethnography of Abortion

This is an abortion story. A feminist story. A body story. An autoethnographic story. This is a story of learning how to story abortion in a culture unforgiving to abortion stories. A story of embodying a body deemed unworthy of embodiment. A story of enfleshment enmeshed amid silence and violence. Influenced by feminist embodied auto-epistemologies, this essay seeks to disrupt the functionality of the U.S. American abortion debate through a performative, somatic reclamation of my experience from the semantic constrictions of highly medicalized, politicized, and individualized hegemonic discourses. Engaging a feminist performative autoethnographic praxis informed by écriture feminine, I center my corporeal body as a site of epistemological value to speak back against the limiting narratives of/about abortion while illustrating the critical creative potentials of performative autoethnographic storytelling. This essay weaves theory, lyric prose, epistolary, and poetry to performatively reconstruct, reframe, and reclaim my abortion experience through an embodied autoethnographic framework, in hopes of illuminating possibilities for others to “[experiment] with how we might tell stories differently rather than simply telling different stories” (p. 16).

A Good Abortion Is a Tragic Abortion: Fit Motherhood and Disability Stigma

In the context of abortion stigma, most abortion stories remain untold. The stories we do tell of abortion are often told to morally recuperate the status of the woman who has an abortion through a recourse to tragedy. Tragedy frames experiences where every choice produces some suffering, so decisions are geared toward maintaining individual integrity rather than adherence to absolute moral truths. This article argues that one dominant tragic abortion narrative, that of the disabled fetus, works to recuperate the moral status of “fit” mothers while actively constructing disabled lives as unlivable and undesirable. The option to stigmatize disability in recuperating the moral status of the woman who has an abortion relies on eugenic logics that also construct a variety of women (racialized, poor, disabled, and young) as illegitimate reproductive subjects. The article analyzes narratives of Sherri Finkbine's 1962 abortion in relation to contemporary narratives of late‐term abortions involving nonviable fetuses to expose how investment in medical judgments of good births enables particular women to make use of tragic narratives to maintain their status as moral mothers without disturbing broader abortion stigma or eugenic logics.

Coverage of Abortion in Select U.S. Newspapers.

News coverage can shape public understanding of policy issues in important ways. In the last decade, many new state-level abortion restrictions have been passed, often based on claims about the safety of abortion care, yet little is known about recent news coverage of abortion. This study analyzes a sample of news on abortion in the United States and explores the implications for reproductive health policymakers, practitioners, and advocates. We analyzed a sample of news and opinion articles containing the term "abortion" published in three major U.S. newspaper sources in 2013 and 2016. The total sample was 783 unique pieces. We coded for story topics, references to fetal personhood, women's stories, and basic abortion facts. Three trained coders conducted the coding, with intercoder reliability rates ranging from 0.777 to 1.0. Most of the time abortion appears in the news, it is merely mentioned, rather than discussed substantively. Abortion is covered as a political issue more than a health issue. The personal experiences of people who get abortions are present in only 4% of the sample, and language personifying the fetus appears more often than women's abortion stories. State abortion restrictions are newsworthy, yet basic facts on the commonality and safety of abortion are virtually absent. This study suggests that the news does not support public understanding of abortion as a common, safe part of reproductive health care. Such framing may undermine public support for policies that protect access to this common health care service.

Risking Their Lives: New Zealand Abortion Stories 1900–1939

Risking Their Lives: New Zealand Abortion Stories 1900–1939