4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
When you hear the not so usual phrase "abortion blog," well, no one has a terribly enthusiastic reaction. After all, when it comes to unplanned pregnancy, the mandate is, tell no one, keep your head down, get it over with and march on like a brave soldier. Fact is, young women lacking familial support often find themselves guarding a terrible secret when it comes to making certain decisions regarding their right to chose. Enter the abortion blogger, whose slogan reads, "I'm 23. I'm knocked up. And I don't want to keep it. You can fu*k yourself, Judd Apatow." If that doesn't tell you enough, the name of her site does: "What to expect when you're aborting."
Again, the idea of a public abortion diary does not exactly inspire lovey dovey feelings. When I first heard about this blog, I threw my hands up in the air and thought of Heidi Montag and the age of anything for P.R.: Is nothing sacred? So I did some investigating. Turns out, the intention is well meaning: When this particular young woman sought out advice regarding her unplanned pregnancy and the possibility of abortion, all she was met with with was jaded Planned Pregnancy workers and a bevy of hardcore religious sites that claimed she was pure evil and going down no matter what route she chose to take.
Not exactly supportive and certainly not informational.
Instead, she decided to create a blog that recorded her own experiences and offered a message of hope and empowerment to similar females faced with the same experience. Lest we jump to conclusions here, she is not advocating or in any way, shape or form encouraging young women to get abortions. She is simply trying to offer a message of "Hey, this is an issue we should address, right?" and "You're not alone."
I'm pro-choice, but I'm not a huge abortion advocate in that I support more in depth sex education and preventative actions such as more access to birth control because I understand that such an invasive surgery can be traumatizing, no doubt. However, I fully, and I mean, fully, believe in a woman's right to exercise control over her body and abortion certainly falls into that category, (in fact, I argued for pro-choice in a precocious 6th grade debate team argument, so I've been following this issue for a long, long time).
But in this day and age, part of the media as we know it implies confessional documentation of one's experience, in this case, in hopes of it benefiting the greater good. Well, that's something I can get behind. Do you think we're lacking in terms of resources for women going through the excruciating decision and subsequent experience that is the process of having an abortion?
