In March 2014, this video was announced as one of the two winners of the Abortion Care Network’s Abortion Stigma Busting video competition. The other winner was the infamous Emily’s Abortion Video. Although this video has not gone viral like Emily’s video, it is certainly as tragic. The video’s goal is to make abortion seem as normal and frequent as possible. It takes four different women with different backgrounds and shares little pieces of their lives in the form of a timeline. The timelines include random and strange things, such as “got a restraining order,” which are followed by “had an abortion.”
The oldest woman in the video seems very pro-women’s rights and is probably a feminist. Her timeline includes her mother giving her a “women’s health” pamphlet. Her mother’s actions may well have started her journey towards abortion. If her mother had given her a pamphlet about the beauty of adoption, perhaps she would have kept that “unwanted pregnancy.”
The video’s message is that abortion is normal and no big deal. But the video shows only grown women with their lives all worked out. We don’t see the teenage girl crying because she is petrified of her pregnancy. They don’t show the struggling college girl in the abortion facility, asking herself how much more pain she has to endure. We don’t see the young woman right out of the abortion facility, shocked at the reality of what she has just done. We see smiling women who show their content faces, only years after their abortion experience. However, we don’t see these women at home, terrified of the dreams they’ve had of their abortions. We don’t see them sad, thinking about what would have happened if they had kept their babies and where they would be.
It’s really easy to show a nice bright façade when it comes to abortion. It’s not so easy to come to terms with the pain and horror.
