The choice of abortion remains something most people keep to themselves. Sometimes the decision is shared with relatives, often not. But when the right to abortion threatens to be taken away, many feel the urge to share their personal experience and add a hashtag to it. The private matter in your womb becomes of public interest. Hundreds of American women, many for the first time, are sharing their stories with the world on social media. Without shame, but out of desperation.
With the US Supreme Court on the brink of abolishing the national right to abortion, proponents and opponents, #prochoice and #prolife, are rushing to their own corners of the internet to make their voices heard. For each hashtag from the pro-abortion camp (such as #AbortionIsHealthCare) a counterpart is created (#AbortionIsNotHealthcare).
#MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter have shown that hashtag activism can play a major role in public debate. It is the signage of the internet to ensure that all opinions gather in the right place. The irony is that the hashtags the online debate is now playing with (#BansOffOurBodies, #RoeVsWade, #MyBodyMyChoice) are not new. Whenever the right to abortion is at stake, they are taken off the shelf.
#ShoutYourAbortion is also experiencing a revival. The hashtag emerged when the United States House of Representatives voted in 2015 to cut abortion clinics. At the time, women were encouraged to share their experience through the hashtag to normalize abortion. Now the hashtag is dusted again. Like this tweet @sunnysongbird: “I wouldn’t be frantically studying for an Administrative Law exam tomorrow if I hadn’t had my abortion in 2010. #ShoutYourAbortion”
The trend of sharing experiences continues beyond this particular hashtag. Recent research shows that nearly one in four American women has an abortion. The stories circulating on social media provide a personal insight into this statistic. The panic after a positive pregnancy test, the doubt that followed, how they look back on their decision years later. Some go into great detail, others keep it short: „Here is my abortion story. I was pregnant. I didn’t want that. The rest doesn’t matter, because women don’t have to justify their medical decisions to anyone. Point.”
In the Netherlands, too, the discussion flares up again. Where women wrote ‘Boss in their own belly’ around their navel in the 1970s, a new generation continues the message of the Dolle Mina’s through #Masters of our own belly† The hashtags surrounding abortion have become something of a haven in times of political unrest. A virtual meeting place where women make their voices heard and offer each other support when the right to abortion is discredited again. Retweetyou are not alone.
Hashtag activism often provides a brief flash of attention, for a moment the world watches. When the media storm has abated, constructive change is often not forthcoming. For American women, one hopes #ShoutYourAbortion isn’t soon relegated to the hashtag repository, ready to be dug up again if a new old white man wants to further curtail the right to abortion.