#ShoutYourAbortion Old News: Try A Million Shouting It At You

This pro-choice woman set up this campaign, but she isn't too young to remember that the real truth about pro-choice folks is the exact reverse of what she believes is true.

She writes about her friend having written about

“...The assumption that abortion is still something to be whispered about.” That struck me hard. The fact that even progressive, outspoken, pro-choice feminists feel the pressure to keep our abortions under wraps – to speak about them only in corners, in murmurs, in private with our closest confidantes – means that opponents of abortion get to define it however suits them best. They can cast those of us who have had abortions as callous monstrosities, and seed fear in anyone who might need one by insisting that the procedure is always traumatic, always painful, always an impossible decision. Well, we’re not, and it’s not.

First of all, congratulations. You've arrived on Twitter, and here's what that amounts to.

More importantly, I'm amazed at the lack of awareness by these women. And to say that "my country is full of heavily armed, anti-intellectual GOP wingnuts", shows considerable ignorance as well.

I know there are bad elements on the pro-life side who are vicious--I've tried to shout those very same people down and shut them up. They are not the majority of those siding with life, however. They're just the ones the pro-choice media likes to give the only ink to, so you will think that they are. And you fell for it.

I'm not heavily-armed, I graduated from a good four-year college, and I love to read, and write, and debate and study politics. I could but I won't stoop to calling you the opposite equivalent of a wingnut, so let's grow up a bit and then we'll be taken a bit more seriously, hmmm?

But understand one big truth: being for one's abortion certainly has never suffered from forced-whispering-about.

In fact, "telling [pro-abortion] stories at full volume" is so not new, and this tweeter should know that. She was 22 when this over one-decade-old event proved that there is no pressure whatsoever to keep your pro-abortion stance under wraps:

"I consider myself fairly far along on the 'healing' and 'public-appearances' scales. We stood, all 500 of us in the Silent No More Awareness groups, in total silence as planned, for over five hours, not replying or saying one word to anything that was said or done to us, and I do mean anything.

"But nothing prepared me for literally mobs of livid people screaming the most hateful vicious snide things at me personally. We were spit on, and had an egg hurled at us from the marchers. There were two groups of Satanists. And the signs. Like the guy who held a handmade sign, 'BABY KILLER' with an arrow pointed downward at himself. If not for the riot police, we would have been mobbed. There was that much viciousness. People broke through the riot police's invisible line just to come up in my face and hurl insulting words. There were not enough police to form a complete line, so they would run up to me, shout out their abuse, and run back before the policeman or woman got to stop him/her. And I said nothing to anyone, just held my sign."

Like these women and men holding their signs:

Those signs, and our utter silence, are what drove hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million, pro-choice marchers that day in Washington, DC, to frothing-mouthed, screaming, violent hatred, all directed at just us, mostly women, who've come to regret our abortions.

So please, don't tell me you haven't been able to "tell your stories at full volume!"

We're the ones who've been "chipping away at the stigma, the lies, the climate of shame." It's the pro-abortion advocates who have been lying to women for decades, not the pro-life ones.

We who know the regret, the remorse, we don't tell you that all women will feel regret or remorse. If you'd have listened and read us real closely, you'd already know that.

We're the ones chipping away at being condemned by both sides of the argument: by so-called moralists/Christians who condemn us for what we now know to be our sins, and by you who are pro-choice, who condemn us for coming to regret having had our abortions and for showing you the scientific truth of what a late term aborted child looks like and acts like as it dies in a metal dish.

No priest, Christian or video made me realize I'd done wrong when I aborted my only daughter. No outside factor caused me to feel shame or grief.

Having my son drove home the fact of what I'd done, and deep, deep down, I always felt, in my heart, it had been wrong. I'd bet my very life that that's all it took for most if not all of us who have come to regret.

Will you dismiss our hearts for "defining it however suits them best", too? Are only pro-choice women allowed to trust their hearts, their instincts, their feelings?

Did you ever stop to think of the possibility that if pro-choice women don't talk about it, it perhaps says more about how they might secretly feel about it than that they are forced to "keep it under wraps"?

I don't cast you as a callous monstrosity. I don't say it's always traumatic or painful. I don't "define it however suits me best." It defines itself in the picture of the dying baby in the metal dish.

The reason why you can't stop this image from wrenching the vast majority of all people's hearts is that there are far too many women who have seen this picture before, in living color, in the dead bodies of their own children, whether after saline abortions. thrown into a glass jar, or after suction abortions, in beakers or buckets on the countertop. I don't "seed fear in anyone who might need one", though the truth might do that all on its own, yet I have never seen you or your friends "dispel fear" by helping those who might need one to actually see all their real choices--I've never seen your friends funding the alternative choice offered by the over 3,000 crisis pregnancy centers that the pro-life folks, many of us post-abortive ourselves, have been doing for decades.

"Why wouldn’t I be happy that I was not forced to become a mother?"

That's what the famed President said.

Forced? Were you raped? Only in that case were you forced to be a mother. Otherwise, it was my choice, and yours, to have sex, knowing full well the potential result is a pregnancy. We're not stupid little girls who don't know that sex is how you get babies.

I have no one but myself to blame. Why do you think you have someone else to blame?

And the scientific truth is, the un-rewritten/un-politically-correct medical school textbooks and world-renowned embryologists already know, that you and I already became mothers, when we first conceived.

I've never let myself be lumped in with those you say are "terrorising" you, and I'm not about to start now. Pro-choice or pro-abortion folks here in the U.S. have got the President and virtually the entire media, on your side. We're the ones who need a little support in speaking up so we can find healing from our pain, and maybe, help someone we love to not have to risk this life of pain in the first place. Yet you want to silence us. That's rich.

Sadly, abortion will probably always be legal in the United States. Even if Roe v. Wade were overturned, nothing changes. It would have to be made illegal in each of the 50 states as well before it was banned entirely, so for those of you frothing over the Planned Parenthood defunding, chill out. They get tons of money too from private donors, always have, always will, so as long as you keep drinking their Kool-Aid, you're set.

And not for nothing, but you're three years younger than my daughter would have been. Go hug your mom.

Someone ought to hashtag that.

POSTSCRIPT:

A few pro-life Tweets to that pro-choice hashtag are worth checking out here, especially Gianna Jessen, Jewels Green, FeministsNonviolence, ELLYMAYE, Sister Toldjah, and Melissa.