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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
A new group of feminist activists are promoting brutal honesty about abortion -- including wearing T-shirts that say you've had one.
Sep 20, 2004 | "It was the safest place, but I felt vulnerable," admits 34-year-old author and "professional feminist" Jennifer Baumgardner, between bites of panini at an East Village cafe, in New York. She is referring to the sole occasion -- April's March for Women's Lives in Washington -- on which she wore one of her controversial T-shirts, which read, simply, "I had an abortion." Eight months pregnant, Baumgardner mentions the piles of hate mail she has received since producing the tees, and half-jokingly whispers about a fear of getting shot.
Baumgardner, who created the shirts in 2003 when she began work on a film also called "I Had an Abortion," insists that she didn't design them for shock value, but to spark discussion about abortion and help "personalize" the still-taboo subject.
Still, why would anyone advertise something so personal? "To destigmatize what's still known as the A-word," says Jane Bovard, 61, president of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers, who with her staff at the Red River Women's Clinic, in Fargo, N.D, have "once or twice" sported the shirts en masse to after-work happy hour. "No one has said anything at all," Bovard notes. (Not everyone is so tolerant of the shirts; when singer Ani DiFranco donned one in Inc., the magazine received several angry letters and lost some subscribers.)
To Baumgardner, who has sold 600 shirts out of her apartment and through Planned Parenthood, the tees represent "a new arm of the pro-choice movement" in which women "own up" to their abortions, talking about them candidly without shame or remorse. Not that talking about abortion rights is anything new. "Women telling their stories has long been a [pro-choice] tactic, but the difference is that right now there's a lot of activity, enthusiasm and political energy behind it, so it's especially vibrant."
While the message isn't that different from the consciousness-raising of the '70s, the medium has changed. In the past few years, a growing group of women have connected with each other -- in hopes of changing cultural attitudes -- by creating Web sites (I'mNotSorry.net, the Abortion Conversation Project, I Had an Abortion), fanzines (Mine, Our Truths) and movies (Penny Lane's "The Abortion Diaries," and Baumgardner's film) that frankly describe their abortions, and their range of emotions afterward.
In "I Had an Abortion," Baumgardner's hourlong documentary, 20 women (including Gloria Steinem and Byllye Avery of the Black Women's Health Imperative) frankly detail their decisions. According to Baumgardner, "both [Steinem and Avery] felt relief" after their abortions. Steinem got pregnant right after college. She knew if she kept the child, she would have to marry the father, and, Baumgardner says, "Her life would be subsumed by his. The doctor who [performed] the procedure made her promise to do something great with her life. She tried for a couple of years to feel guilt on the anniversary of the abortion, but she never did."
Avery was a widow and a mother of two when she had her abortion in 1973. She, too, never felt guilty about the decision. Instead, she saw it as "the absolute right thing," Baumgardner says, "a commitment to the children [she] already had."
