‘people who have abortions are our future’: abortion storytelling and the feminist imaginary

Prologue

Abortion storytelling, rooted in feminist histories of consciousness-raising, has become an important part of reproductive justice activism. The aim is to ‘normalise’ abortion, to keep saying abortion out loud as a challenge to the stigma that underpins it. The promise is a future of greater reproductive freedoms. In this thought piece, I critique whether storytelling can indeed work towards this aim and promise. Drawing on Erica Millar’s (2017) work on the emotional script that has underwritten abortion choice through anti-abortion sentiment, I ask whether abortion storytelling can open space for the emergence of a different script and future—whether it speaks to Lola Olufemi’s (2021) call to imagine otherwise if we are to become/be such a future.

Below, I explore these ideas through a self-reflective, provisional-thinking meditation on the limits and possibilities of abortion storytelling by drawing on examples from the US, UK and Ireland and my own abortion experience (via short, italicised fragments). Through autotheoretical engagements and a call for polyvocal storytelling, I invite the reader to (re)think through their own stories and ask whether together we might be able to imagine a reproductive otherwise.

‘People who have abortions are our future’

Abortion storytelling has become a key tactic in reproductive justice activism. Numerous abortion storytelling projects—both offline and online—have sprung up in recent years across the globe to contest restrictive abortion regimes. The online projects are the most visible—such as Shout Your Abortion (US) and In Her Shoes (Ireland, Northern Ireland, Poland)—and usually take the form of a viral hashtag or website where people can upload their abortion stories. ¹ Stories have been collected to protest Northern Ireland’s abortion ban and the 2022 overturning of the Roe v Wade ruling in the US, for example. ² But these platforms can also be more than a specific/isolated protest. They can be the imaginings of a different way of interacting with abortion, a gateway towards a re-theorising of gender and the body. US abortion storytelling platform We Testify’s website states that ‘[we] unapologetically believe that people who have abortions are our future’. ³ In this statement, We Testify frames abortion as more than just a medical procedure: abortion is framed as the possibility of a radically different way of living. Similarly, Shout Your Abortion proposes to be about ‘much more than abortion; it’s about unlearning the idea that we are not supposed to talk about the things that happen to us’ (Bonow, 2018a, p. xii).

In Experiments in Imagining Otherwise (2021), Lola Olufemi explores the radical potential of imagining a future that disrupts linearity and looks beyond:

The feminist imagination carves out a site of

agency that forms the impetus for action. It

has many purposes, but in this regard, it

enables resistant acts to take place by

dismantling hegemonic notions of what is

permissible under current conditions.

The imagination is central to the cultural

production of revolutionary movements; its

primary role is to signal what could be.

(ibid., p. 35, original emphasis)

If abortion storytelling is used to support processes of unlearning and to fashion a radical future, does it, then, engage with the desire and practice of imagining otherwise? Can it be a process of reviewing, rethinking, creating and becoming—a mechanism to dismantle and theorise what could be?

‘Normalising’ abortion

Not so long ago, after speaking about abortion at a conference,

a woman turned to me in the queue for the toilet.

‘I just wanted to shout at you: I’ve had two abortions!’, she said.

When I tell people I research abortion, or that I’ve had an abortion, the person I’m speaking with will often tell me that they’ve had one or two or multiple abortions, or that someone close to them has had one. People I’ve only just met will tell me their story: a story they’ve barely told before. Old friends or colleagues will open up about their own experience. These are conversations I’ve had in England, where abortion is relatively legally accessible, and yet the subject remains cloaked in secrecy and shame. The exchanges often feel like disclosures or confessions.

When these ‘disclosures’ happen, I used to be struck primarily by the silence. Why didn’t I know this before about someone so close to me? Why did they not know this about me? Why had we never spoken about it? But I’ve become increasingly intrigued by the impulse: the invitation of my speaking the word ‘abortion’, the urge to meet that invitation with a story of abortion, the urge to say it out loud.

‘It’s like a need’, one friend told me.

‘When a space is opened to

speak about abortion

safely,

you realise you’ve always needed to talk about it’.

Judith Butler has drawn attention to the workings of sayable discourses in the production of a subject:

… censorship seeks to produce subjects according to explicit and implicit norms, and … the production of the subject has everything to do with the regulation of speech. The subject’s production takes place not only through the regulation of that subject’s speech, but through the regulation of the social domain of speakable discourse. The question is not what it is I will be able to say, but what will constitute the domain of the sayable within which I begin to speak at all. (Butler, 1997, p. 133)

If you talk about your own experience of abortion, you engage in a process of speakability: a process of repeating and producing discourses in which a body and its experiences become knowable and sayable. Just as sex is both produced and destabilised through the reiteration of norms (Butler, 1993, p. 10), so too is abortion (which is entangled with discourses of sex and gender). As such, reiteration can destabilise the explicit and implicit norms which predominantly hold abortion in the grips of shame and stigma (see Kumar, Hessini and Mitchell, 2009; Cockrill and Nack, 2013). Abortion storytelling is a process of reiteration. Might it, then, inhabit the ability to destabilise stigmatising norms?

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The dismantling of abortion shame, stigma and silence is usually the main aim of organised abortion storytelling projects (Kissling, 2018, p. 18). Storytelling is used to reset the narratives on abortion, to challenge the ‘awfulisation’ of abortion (Hadley, 1997)—a discourse that frames abortion as an exceptional, traumatic and regrettable event (Mishler, 2021, p. 88)—and position it instead as something normal, everyday and ordinary. In this way, the act of vocalising abortion is seen as an act of resistance, solidarity and defiance.

But does the ‘simple’ act of saying an abortion story automatically resist the stigma it seeks to challenge? Or is the story only sayable within the terms of that stigma, within the terms of what stigma has ascribed ‘an acceptable abortion’? What are the terms in which abortion becomes ‘normal’?

I’m too young,

and too financially insecure, I told myself,

to be a mother

yet.

A happy abortion? shifting discourses

Erica Millar (2017, p. 3) has critiqued how abortion experiences (in English-speaking countries of the Global North) are scripted through emotions that regulate abortion through anti-abortion sentiment, thereby inscribing the ‘choice’ of abortion with loaded rhetoric. Abortion is a ‘choice’ discursively produced through grief, shame, stigma and normative femininity, and powered by norms surrounding gender, race and social class (ibid., pp. 4–5). Dominant gender narratives work to naturalise the woman-as-mother destiny, rendering pregnant women ⁴ already mothers and other women as mothers, mothers-to-be or longing for a child. Underlying the reasons people often give for having an abortion (they don’t have a stable job, are single or living precariously, for example) is the script that abortion is chosen due to the inability of the abortion-seeker to offer their potential child the economic resources deemed necessary to ensure their happiness, thus framing the choice as made in the best interests of their potential children (ibid., p. 265).

I chose abortion, because I was too young,

and too financially insecure,

and too precarious,

to be a mother

yet.

A choice tangled in notions of compulsory motherhood.

I am not ready to be a mother yet [read: I will be a mother one day]

[read: I will be a better mother one day].

In places where abortion is legally available, the presentation of abortion as a choice to be made by free, self-determining subjects disguises the rigid emotional script of abortion that regulates such a choice (ibid., p. 5). This naturalisation strengthens the stigma upon which the ‘awfulisation’ of abortion is built: presenting abortion as unnatural, unethical, disruptive and sad.

I chose abortion, because I was too young,

and too financially insecure,

and too precarious,

to be a mother

yet.

A choice, but a sad one;

A choice tangled in notions of compulsory motherhood.

I am not ready to be a mother yet [read: I will be a mother one day]

[read: I will be a better mother one day]

A choice,

But a sad one.

On reading Millar’s (2017) book, I saw the construction of my own abortion narrative. I felt tricked by my own experience: constituted as the Compulsory Mother by the pre-written script of my experience. The language that I’d used to make sense of my abortion now seemed cold and distant: not my own. I could have framed my abortion choice differently (I didn’t want to be pregnant so decided not to be), but at the time I didn’t have the words.

I searched online for abortion stories with similarly constructed narratives. The #ShoutYourAbortion hashtag brought up plenty, including: ‘I could not have given that child the life it deserved. I would not have been the mother I want to be. #ShoutYourAbortion’ and ‘18 & broke + pregnant = bad. Abortion + 3yrs later + married + stable job = a great life for my baby. #ShoutYourAbortion’. ⁵

Indeed, scholars have analysed stories collected on ‘pro-choice’ abortion storytelling sites for patterns in narratives, and particular framings of abortion come up again and again. Sarah Larissa Combellick (2021) has analysed how storytellers on the US platform My Abortion My Life use morality to explain their decision to have an abortion; Mallary Allen (2015), in her analysis of US website I’mNotSorry.net, suggests that storytellers often frame their decisions in the context of dominant ‘middle-class values’, such as the expectation to finish education or establish a career prior to parenthood; Andrea Becker (2019), through a study of stories from Tennessee, looks at how people employ their identity as a mother to dispel abortion stigma. ⁶

The ability to code abortion stories into certain narratives reveals the existence of dominant abortion discourses within ‘pro-choice’ spaces. Such formulaic stories can be common in social change movements, providing a narrative arc in which people identify and mould their own story (Allen, 2015). Certain rhetorical tropes become ‘narrative building blocks’ that are repeated and reproduced, especially as a cause gains public attention and narrative patterns become widespread (ibid., p. 45). Those with experiences who don’t neatly fit the narrative often emphasise the elements of their stories that align the most, which works to strengthen and normalise the narrative framework (ibid.).

So whilst the act of telling abortion stories might disrupt the silence that often surrounds abortion, the act, in itself, might not be enough to disrupt the stigma, as the story arcs in which experiences are told might simultaneously be strengthening the compulsory motherhood narratives (among others) that regulate abortion as shameful and bad.

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Where are the happy abortions?

By proposing this question, I do not mean to suggest that the future should be one of happy abortions, rather that the future should be one where that possibility exists as ‘normal’. Whilst Millar (2017) critiques the normative discourses that underpin the emotional script of (unhappy) abortion, she is not arguing for an abortion politics waged through recourse to a woman’s (happy) emotions. This would undermine the structural issues that need addressing in relation to abortion provision and would serve to collapse the emotional experience into a naturalised female subject (whether happy or sad). It is important to acknowledge the heterogeneity of abortion seekers’ lives, and so it is not the case of supplanting the idea of a sad or difficult abortion experience with a happy one—in fact, it is important that abortion-positive discourses embrace a multiplicity of experiences, including those characterised by sadness and grief, rather than erasing these emotions for fear of legitimising anti-abortion sentiment (see Jeanie Ludlow’s [2021] discussion on the erasure of the foetus in pro-choice discourses)—it’s about making the latter a possibility (Millar, 2017, pp. 277–278).

Within the telling and repetition of abortion stories, the dominant discourses—the underlying stigma and shame—can be reproduced, but they can also be destabilised. Sara Ahmed (2017, p. 30) observes how recent feminist strategies of online story sharing are a revival of second-wave feminist consciousness-raising tactics, which are about ‘reaching a feminist account … with and through others’. Ahmed (ibid.) refers to these systems of depositing experiences as ‘a feminist catalogue’, and notes how the ‘drip, drip’ of stories slowly becomes a flood. Within the release of this flood, the process of repetition allows space for the ‘[r]econstituting possibility’ (Butler, 1993, p. 10) that destabilises the naturalisation of sex within the constitution of abortion. For Millar (2017), this destabilisation depends on the dismantling of motherhood as the placeholder of women’s happiness and a disruption of the emotions through which abortion is made intelligible. This destabilisation can pave the way towards an imagined otherwise where abortion can be made sense of in a multiplicity of ways: as sad, and/or difficult, and/or without regret and/or … happy.

The construction of this possibility is arguably already happening. Not all abortion stories follow the dominant script. The online platforms include stories that challenge the prevailing discourses. There are unapologetic stories. There are stories of happiness. Storytelling platforms themselves often promote a language for abortion that looks beyond the dominant scripts. Shout Your Abortion, for example, was set up following a viral social media post by Amelia Bonow (2018b, p. 3), which ended: ‘having an abortion made me happy in a totally unqualified way. Why wouldn’t I be happy that I was not forced to become a mother?’. This language is far from the mainstream, but the possibility of its expression suggests the workings of the ‘reconstituting possibility’ needed for space to open for a future otherwise.

An autotheoretical impulse: everyday theorising

I realised I could say/feel it another way:

I was unexpectedly pregnant

and didn’t want to be.

Ahmed (2017, p. 30) also tells us that ‘feminism involves a process of finding another way to live in a body’. She is suggesting that feminism involves learning to take up more space, but her words also make me think about how the destabilisation of abortion discourses—discourses so enmeshed in bodily experience—requires us to re-think, re-process or even re-inhabit our own bodies. Abortion storytelling can provide space for this re-inhabiting. By listening to others’ stories or telling and re-telling our own, we can re-process our own experiences and find new vocabularies for them. In this sense, abortion storytelling can inhabit an ‘autotheoretical impulse’, an instinctive urge to think through concepts and politics via one’s own bodily experience (see Fournier, 2021). Through an engagement with others’ and our own abortion stories, we can theorise and re-theorise abortion and the gendered narratives that underpin it.

This re-theorising is powerful in the story of US model Chrissy Teigan. In 2020, Teigan publicly revealed that she had lost a baby at 20 weeks due to a pregnancy complication. At the time, she described the experience as a miscarriage. But two years later, in the wake of the US Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade and thus allow states to block abortion access, Teigan came to realise that she had actually had a life-saving abortion. Speaking at a conference in September 2022, Teigan said: ‘I told the world we had a miscarriage, the world agreed we had a miscarriage, all the headlines said it was a miscarriage … and I [later] felt silly that it had taken me over a year to actually understand that we had had an abortion’ (BBC, 2022). She went on: ‘I fell silent, feeling weird that I hadn’t made sense of it that way’. Through conversations around Roe v Wade, Teigan was able to re-process her experience, reconceptualising it as an abortion. Abortion campaigners congratulated her for sharing her story and ‘changing the conversation around later abortion’. ⁷

The autotheoretical impulse inhabited in much abortion storytelling is theory-making at the everyday level; a theory-making that doesn’t rely on an academic hierarchy of what counts as knowledge. Abortion storytelling holds the possibility of an organic knowledge production that centres those with experience.

Polyvocal possibilities

Whilst a focus on the self in abortion storytelling is undeniably important, there are also tensions in the focus on individual experience. Storytelling from the viewpoint of the I can be silencing of others’ experiences, unable to fully theorise on behalf of a collective. Take abortion storytelling platform The X-ile Project, which was active during the campaigns to legalise abortion in Ireland and Northern Ireland. The project consisted of an online gallery of people who had been forced to travel to access abortion services outside of Ireland, in an argument for local access. Katie Mishler (2021, p. 92) has argued that by focusing on medical tourism, this platform excluded those unable to travel due to financial or legal reasons—those who are disproportionately undocumented refugees, migrants and from minority ethnic communities. These people were silenced within the parameters of The X-ile Project: the individuals voicing their stories on the platform were giving a version of abortion experience, but not one that could speak for all. Whilst the telling of personal stories might open space for others to vocalise their own, which could potentially lead to a picture of collective experience, a personal story, on its own, can’t generalise experience.

Another tension in personal storytelling involves the relationship between the individual and a neoliberal worldview. Millar (2017, p. 276) has cautioned that a ‘politics of abortion fought through first-person narratives … runs the risk of further transforming abortion politics into a politics of individual experience’. This can work to build a type of feminism based on the principles of ‘individualism, choice and agency’, which promotes a politics based not on changing structural inequalities but on an ‘attitudinal pose of assertiveness and defiance’ (Rosalind Gill, 2016, cited in Millar, 2017, p. 276). When it comes to the representation of abortion, we need to think not just about the fact that the personal is political but also about the politics of the personal. What are the norms that expressions of personal experience rely on and reinforce (ibid., p. 277)? What are the forms of power that operate to make the expressions of the personal possible? A focus on the self can sometimes work to disguise how an individual is constituted within wider structures and social inequalities, can place too much emphasis on the individual as a principal agent of change, and can silence those who don’t feel comfortable to adopt an ‘attitudinal pose of assertiveness’—those who don’t feel comfortable #ShoutingTheirAbortions.

The reproductive justice movement recognises a need for multiple stories. This movement—which was founded and is led by women of colour and Black and Indigenous feminists in the US—critiques the structural inequalities entangled in the predominantly white-feminist-led ‘pro-choice’ movements, which have historically excluded some populations (the poor, the undocumented) from their definition of legally defined choice. The reproductive justice movement emphasises the need to recognise the intersectionality and multiplicity of experience. This is summarised by pioneer of the reproductive justice movement Loretta J. Ross and historian Rickie Solinger:

No one story (lens) can describe everyone’s experience. No lens (story) is incorrect, and it takes many lenses to provide a full range of possibilities. No single lens can work for all. To embrace the vision of reproductive justice, one must embrace polyvocality—many voices telling their stories that together may be woven into a unified movement for human rights. (Ross and Solinger, 2017, p. 59)

To theorise or re-theorise abortion intersectionally, we need space and mechanisms for polyvocal storytelling. This is about opening the pool of storytellers, so that the overall tapestry is woven by threads of difference. It’s about creating an environment where this difference can be centred, rather than collapsed into dominant, narrow narratives. It’s about interrogating the roots and inequalities enmeshed in this difference. It’s about finding a polyvocality that can centre a multiplicity of voices and experiences. And it’s about acknowledging that stories are a powerful part of a system of change, but that the burden of abortion politics isn’t the responsibility of the individual.

Otherwise

Olufemi’s meditation on the feminist imagination continues:

That is, the future is not in front of us, it is

everywhere simultaneously: multidirectional,

variant, spontaneous. We only have to turn

around.

(Olufemi, 2021, p. 35, original emphasis)

In the assertion that ‘people who have abortions are our future’ is the idea that people with experience need to be in decision-making positions of power. I also read in this statement the idea that a (feminist) future is a world that recognises a multiplicity of experiences of pregnancy, where abortion is detached from a notion of compulsory motherhood: an otherwise. Whilst abortion storytelling can’t alone imagine/be an otherwise, it can, through a polyvocality of multiplicity, help engage with an otherwise: abortion storytelling can be a space of possibility in which we might turn around and see/be a future.