From RH Reality:

The New Public Face of Abortion: Connecting the Dots Between Abortion Stories

by Steph Herold

Over the last few months, there’s been an electric energy around the sharing of abortion stories. We’ve seen  two  stories in the New York Times, a Jewish abortion story on  Kveller, a continuation of an abortion story on  Thought Catalog, an early abortion story on  Boing Boing, and a  piece by a woman reflecting on the consequences of telling her abortion story in the Texas Observer. One woman even documented her abortion in photos. And that’s just recently.

What’s going on here? Why are so many people “coming out” now? There are no simple answers to this question. Are women responding to the onslaught of anti-choice legislation? Has the uptick in media reporting on abortion policies eased some of the stigma around speaking about abortion? Are the calls to come out about abortion from pro-choice activists, politicians, and advocacy organizations actually working?

Without asking every person whos shared her story, we wont know the answers to these questions. By looking at what theyve decided to publish, we can consider more basic issues: what are women saying when they come out? What kinds of experiences are represented? Who is coming out about their abortion experience, and who is silent?

To map the patterns and gaps in these published narratives, I created a tumblr to collect these stories:  ihadanabortion.org. Here’s what I’ve found so far.

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