When women speak, we erase the political narrative and remind people that we are mothers, students, lawyers and teens.
Women Need to Let Others Know the Real Truth About Abortion
I had an abortion when I was 20 years old and I told only God, my best friend and the boy who got me pregnant. Mine was a typically religious black family, but not fundamentalist. They wouldn’t have made me feel like a pariah, but I did not need their shaming to make me feel ashamed. I knew what society thought of “girls like me."
“To say this word abortion is to say I am shamed thing, a womb turned urn," I tell audiences around the country in my poem “Why We Hold Our Tongues.” In this society, women's sexuality is a loaded gun always pointed at us.
The lives of actual women are so often invisible in this debate as to make one wonder who is actually having abortions. We are reduced to statistics, politicizing a profoundly personal issue.
But when women speak out about our experiences, as I finally chose to do, we erase the political narrative. We remind people of the truth. We are mothers, students, lawyers, teens, humans making decisions about autonomy, family and self-determination.
This truth telling, this “coming out” is an essential tool in dismantling the stigma and shame of abortion. It is harder to be against a person you know and love. When I have shared my story with those against abortion access, they were able to see a new perspective, one rooted in real experience and not rhetoric. That sharing has moved people to consider the importance of accessible safe abortion care.
If we know our stories can be sharp and effective tools for keeping abortion safe and legal why aren't we speaking up? We have been made silent by the dehumanization and danger of coming out.
In this world, abortion providers are killed at Sunday service, Internet trolls find the addresses of abortion advocates and send us hate mail. In this world, those who support you pull you into the shadows and whisper their support in low tones. Far too often, it is those with the least power who are asked to give the most. This must change.
Women who want to come out and tell our abortion stories need safety to do it. We need our supporters, who I believe are the majority, to show that they have our backs. Otherwise, legislative security cannot be sustained. The nearly 1 in 3 women who have had or will have an abortion in their lifetimes, must be the voices guiding this dialogue and it is our stories that have been missing. A debate without us, is not a debate about real life. And isn't “life” what all this fuss is about?