Tweeting An Abortion
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[FONT=Courier New]Tweeting an Abortion [/FONT]
[FONT=Century Gothic]A blogger takes to Twitter and YouTube as she
terminates her pregnancy, and women should thank her[/FONT]
by Tracy Clark-Flory
[FONT=Times New Roman]Salon
Feb. 24, 2010[/FONT]
That headline sure got your attention, now didn't it.
Just when you thought the formula of "so-and-so tweets
[insert shocking thing]" had been thoroughly exhausted,
along comes blogger Angie Jackson to live-tweet her
abortion. When I came across news of this seeming
stunt, it conjured in my head an image of a woman
groggily wielding her smartphone while lying on an
operating table, but that isn't the case. Jackson was
in her fourth week of pregnancy when she decided late
last week to take the abortion pill RU-486 and ever
since she has chronicled her experience on Twitter
under the hashtag #livetweetingabortion.
Jackson, the mother of a 4-year-old special needs son,
found herself in this predicament after her IUD birth
control failed and she explains that her decision to
abort was based on financial strain and her high risk
of complications. But, she also makes sure to add in a
blog post that "'I don't want to be pregnant' is a
*good enough* reason to get an abortion." Naturally,
her tweets are attracting anti-choicers like bees to
honey and she is indefatigably swatting them away
rhetorically. It's an impressive sight to behold -- but
her point isn't to rile conservatives.
Instead, she explains in a YouTube video pasted below,
her aim is to remove the shame and "demystify" the
experience of terminating a pregnancy, "so that women
know, hey, it's not nearly as terrifying as I had
myself worked up thinking it was." She says, "It's not
that bad, it's not that scary. It's basically like a
miscarriage." (Remember, we've already written about a
woman who tweeted her miscarriage.) In her Twitter
feed, she talks spotting, nausea, cramps and Vicodin.
She doesn't make it sound like a walk in the park --
and of course it isn't, her body is working to expel
the embryo from her uterus -- but there is something
reassuring about how she matter-of-factly walks us, and
herself, through the whole process. It's as though
she's live-tweeting the aftermath of routine medical
procedure, like a wisdom tooth extraction.
In fact, before I went in for what felt like terrifying
oral surgery to remove a backasswards tooth from my
sinus cavity -- freaky, right? -- I went on YouTube and
watched footage of similar procedures and video blogs
of people's recovery process. It replaced all of my
far-fetched nightmarish visions with concrete, factual
information. Without that, I might have gone running
for the hills -- or at least passed out in the waiting
room. Considering that abortion is so prone to
politicized distortions and outright lies, Jackson is
doing women a real favor. This isn't another case of
overshare-itis, it's an example of how amid all the
frivolous cacophony of Facebook, Twitter and the like,
some folks are, like, actually doing good. Oh,
Internet, you enigma you.
+ YouTube Video
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