The headline on the "Newsweek Web Exclusive" was "Outing Abortion, From Town Halls to Twitter." The subhead does an unusually deft job of summarizing Sarah Kliff's argument: "A Florida woman tweeting her abortion is trying to take the shame out of the procedure. It's a high-tech twist on an evolving mission, one that's had limited success."
Kliff's jumping off point is what we discussed Monday: a woman who was tweeting while her unborn child was being chemically annihilated by RU486. Having ingested the powerful abortifacient, Angie Jackson then posted a You Tube of herself as her unborn child died. Why?
Angie Jackson, from her You Tube entry
"I'm live tweeting my abortion on Twitter," she said, "not for some publicity stunt or for attention or to justify this to myself, I am at peace with my decision. I'm doing this to demystify abortion. I'm doing this so that other women know, 'Hey, it's not nearly as terrifying as I had myself worked up thinking it was. It's just not that bad.' …I hope everybody on You Tube has a great and godless day. Peace." (www.nrlc.org/News_and_Views/March10/nv030110.html.)
Kliff's point is that this one-upmanship (my description) is nothing new. The Twitter part might be "novel," but not the "mission."
"In the nearly four decades since Roe v. Wade, in magazines and blogs, in tweets and T shirts, thousands of women have publicly told some form of their abortion story," she writes. "Media vary but the motivation is generally the same: make abortion less shameful and secret."
But, darn it, no such luck. Abortion is still "stigmatized," and, worse yet, "pro-choice organizations lost control of the narrative." They actually gave it away (to women who regret their abortions) by "ignoring the conversation about abortion, even if it was a difficult one to approach."
But, just so we're clear here, it's not that the idea of broadcasting to the world that you disposed of your own unborn child is a bad one. The "problem" is there weren't enough of these stories, or, more specifically, they were "disconnected."
Thus Kliff can assure the reader that "Changing the stereotypes that come with abortion, and the stigma they engender, is not necessarily impossible." What's needed is "a larger, more complex discussion."
Okay, let's think about this in a complex way. Why do so many women who have abortions either verbally express their profound regret or acknowledge that second hand by refusing to discuss what happened--or by "distanc[ing] themselves from others who have had the same experience"?
If we believe this web exclusive, it's because generally abortion "does not define a woman's identity nor engender community formation." Pardon? "[W]hen you make an abortion decision, it's probably not going to define you, so there's less motivation to advocate for that right," according to Kate Cosby, who, were are told, is "a researcher at University of California--San Francisco who focuses on the stigma and emotions involved in abortion."
But the explanation is far different and--if I dare say so--much simpler than that. As anyone who has ever worked at a woman helping center/crisis pregnancy center will tell you, most women consider/complete an abortion out of sense of sheer desperation. Too often they have been abandoned by the men in their lives or are on the receiving end of incredible pressure to abort. When the "woman" is, in fact, a girl, she really needs a helping hand and expressions of support. Without that, it is easy to see why they believe abortion is their "only option."
But having taken their child's life under those circumstances, why would they be cheerleaders for "choice"?
Pro-abortionists and their colleagues in the media subscribe to the theory if you drown the public in abortion stories, people will either become desensitized to the ugly brutality of abortion or become resigned to it as somehow "normal." You would think the undeniable pro-life shift in public opinion--not to mention the very negative response to PPFA's tasteless "I had an abortion" Tee-shirt campaign--might have taught them something. But in fact they draw the opposite conclusion.
The abortion set, never a slave to taste, discretion, or the cruelty of abortion, will never run out of new and imaginative ways to try to persuade the public that aborting/not aborting is no different than choosing Coke over Pepsi. But there is no more chance of that than Barack Obama telling the truth about abortion and health care "reform."
Contact: Dave Andrusko
Source: NRLC
Publish Date: March 5, 2010
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