More than stigma: Interrogating counter narratives of abortion

Abstract

A large body of feminist scholarship identifies and examines modes of representing abortion, focusing on themes such as stigma and the production of an autonomous foetal subject. In recent years, there has been a proliferation of cultural representations of abortion that do not conform with, and even explicitly reference and rebuke, stigmatising and foetocentric depictions of abortion. Focusing on the Australian context and two sets of online sites—the websites of Australian abortion clinics and widely circulated pro-choice, feminist commentary on abortion—this article provides a critical reading of new, ‘unapologetic’ modes of representing abortion. We argue that they increase the cultural legitimacy of abortion and are therefore incredibly important, but have limitations because of their reification of the neoliberal autonomous subject. Nevertheless, we urge feminist scholars to pay more attention to discourses that presume abortion is unproblematic and beneficial to women. Scholarship on abortion has performative effects, and we hope that identifying and nurturing counter narratives of abortion is one means by which abortion can be normalised.

Keywords

Abortion feminism pro-choice activism representations of abortion stigma

In recent years feminist and pro-choice activists and researchers have called for more ‘positive’ representations of abortion as a means to combat abortion stigma and improve women’s access to and experiences of abortion (Cockrill, 2014: 63–64). Such calls often derive from critique of rhetoric that dominates current pro-choice activism. Weitz, for example, argues that the pro-choice ‘mantra’ that abortion should be ‘safe, legal and rare’ is ‘harmful and ineffective as a strategy to securing rights’ (2010: 168). Kelly similarly cautions against the focus on abortion as exceptional and tragic amongst reproductive rights advocates in Latin America, which, she cautions, ‘may (re)produce narrative constructions, lines of argument and legal rules that undercut their larger emancipatory goals’ (2014: 313). She joins scholars in other contexts to advocate for more celebration of abortion in feminist organising and a broader ‘normalising’ of abortion (Ludlow, 2012; Sanger, 2017; Thomsen, 2013). A comprehensive politics of reproductive justice cannot, of course, rest on positive representations of abortion alone, and exactly in relation to abortion what counts as a ‘positive’ representation is an open question (Ross and Solinger, 2017; Smith, 2005). Nevertheless, the framing of abortion as a commonplace, essential and life-giving decision (rather than one that, as we constantly hear, destroys life) is a necessary intervention into feminist pro-choice activism and scholarship.

In this article we endorse calls for positive and normalising representations of abortion and draw attention to the wide range of such representations that already exist, not only in feminist and pro-choice activist materials but in the mainstream of popular culture and, of particular interest to us, in the online domain. The arrival of feminist cyberspace (Travers, 2003), its overlap with mainstream online sites, and the online availability of pro-choice information about abortion are diversifying the cultural contexts of abortion. Our focus on positive representations coincides with a historical trend in abortion scholarship to focus on the cultural meanings of abortion through the theme of abortion stigma. In 2009 Kumar, Hessini and Mitchell influentially defined abortion stigma ‘as a negative attribute ascribed to women who seek to terminate a pregnancy that marks them, internally or externally, as inferior to ideals of womanhood’ (p. 4). The present historical moment also includes a growing trend to represent abortion—within abortion activism and elsewhere—in a way that counters stigma by celebrating the benefits of abortion for women. Scholarship on abortion has paid insufficient attention to these positive representations of abortion. We address this gap, focusing our empirical investigation on two separate sets of online sites: the websites of Australian abortion clinics and widely circulated feminist, pro-choice commentary on abortion.

We begin by summarising dominant themes in scholarship on the representation of abortion before explaining our methodology and then conducting a thematic qualitative analysis of two sets of online sites. We then argue for the epistemological and political importance of considering cultural depictions of abortion as a commonplace and positive experience for women and, finally, move to evaluate our two online sites in terms of their importance and limitations for fulfilling feminist goals regarding reproduction. Our intervention is threefold: to chart new modes of representing abortion that have not yet been addressed in feminist, pro-choice research; to reorient the epistemology of feminist abortion scholarship in order to enhance the reiterative force of normalising and positive representations of abortion; and to critically examine modes of representing abortion that are proliferating in the current historical moment. We thus offer ways of imagining abortion beyond themes, such as stigma and focus on the autonomous foetus, that currently dominates scholarly work on the cultural politics of abortion.

Representing abortion

Our investigation sits within the sizeable body of multidisciplinary research on the representation of abortion in contemporary popular discourses in the Anglophone West. Laurie Schrage observed 16 years ago that while feminists and pro-choice forces had won the legal battle in the USA, anti-abortion forces dominated popular representations of abortion (2002: 61). Her claim is implicitly supported by the majority of the research into abortion representation in Anglophone film, television, advertising and print media. Rosalind Petchesky’s ground-breaking article (1987) on visual representations of the foetus since the 1960s identified a phenomenon upon which several others have since elaborated, highlighting, among other issues, the construction of the foetus as a white and fully autonomous agent across a range of sites (McLaren, 2013; Palmer, 2009; Taylor, 1992). Scholars have also described the ‘awfulisation’ of abortion, a pattern of discourses that depicts abortion as an exceptional, morally-dubious procedure that damages women emotionally, a regime that stems from and further reifies the normative positioning of pregnant women as already mothers to autonomous children (Hadley, 1997; Millar, 2017). Others have commented on a taboo on representing abortion in popular culture and news media and, simultaneously, a proliferation of stereotyped representations that stress selfishness, irresponsibility, danger, emotional trauma, morality, class differences, political controversy and/or sensationalism (for television see Press and Cole, 1999; for film see Doyle, 2009; Thomas, 2009; Yenerall, 2011; for news media see Evans and O’Brien, 2015; Purcell et al., 2014). The inaccuracy of representations of abortion when compared with the ‘real life’ experience has also been noted (Sisson and Kimport, 2014).

The discursive context for abortion is never homogenous, however, and research has also identified pro-choice positions in representations of abortion in women’s magazines (Baird, 2002; Le Masurier, 2007: 199) and on television, even if featured alongside stigmatising representations (Press and Cole, 1999; Condit, 1994: 123–146). Documentary films and television crime thriller series of the 21st century have been identified as sympathetic to women’s need for abortion and useful for educative purposes (Sanger, 2017: 2; Sisson and Kimport, 2016). Short reviews have identified positive representations of abortion in the US film Grandma, released in 2015 (Cole, 2016), the ‘abortion rom-com’ Obvious Child of 2014 (Sciortino, 2014), and, in 2016, the US TV series Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Jane the Virgin and Scandal (Logan, 2016). The recent trend towards positive and normalising abortion stories in TV and film is joined by a proliferation of pro-choice first-person storytelling about abortion in social media and other online sites (Sanger, 2017: 220, 226–228).¹

These developments suggest that the cultural narrative of abortion may be shifting, yet this shift has not been adequately addressed in abortion scholarship. Further, while there is some research into anti-abortion online sites (Bowman-Grieve, 2009) we did not find any scholarly analysis of pro-choice sites. This article addresses these gaps, utilising an under-examined source of depicting abortion—feminist and pro-choice online sites—to provide a critical overview of a larger trend towards celebratory and normalising representations of abortion.

Methodology

Our choice to focus on two sets of online sites is informed by the dominance of the internet in the 21st century as the source of news and commentary about public affairs and for information about everything, including health care (Sayakhot and Carolan-Olah, 2016). In particular, as Travers observes, the internet allows ‘feminists and progressive participants to contest the exclusive nature of and rewrite the public … occupy[ing] public space in a way that is unprecedented offline’ (2003: 232). Abortion providers, abortion activists and women who have abortions are using online forms of communication to give women-centred information about abortion and to centre the subject position of the woman who wants and/or has had an abortion. This online ‘feminist counterpublic’ (Travers, 2003) is a major source of information about abortion. The discursive production of abortion experiences depends on historically specific national, regional and even local conditions. From here we focus on the Australian context. Australia is a multicultural (post)colonial western country of about 25 million people who are overwhelmingly ‘pro-choice’ (Betts, 2009). Abortion is provided liberally, although far from adequately, predominantly by privately owned clinics (Baird, 2017).

Our first site of analysis is the collection of websites of Australia’s 36 abortion clinics, all but two of which are private. We found these sites through the website of Children by Choice (n.d.), the only Australian online abortion advocacy site, which lists all clinics in each jurisdiction. Our attention to abortion clinic websites stems from the assumption that women are highly engaged with abortion discourses when they are pregnant and wanting an abortion (or when they are supporting a friend or family member). The websites of abortion clinics are significant because they offer ostensibly practical and descriptive information about what the experience of abortion entails. We treat the 36 websites as a single body of pro-choice information while also noting differences among them.

Our second site of analysis comprises two sets of online media that are easily accessible and widely read and exemplify the presence of feminist abortion politics, often stridently expressed, in the Australian online media mainstream, here overlapping with the feminist internet. The first is Mamamia (n.d.), which claims to be Australia’s ‘largest independent women’s website’, reaching an audience of 4 million Australians each month. Mamamia frequently publishes unequivocally pro-choice articles on national and international legislative, activist, and political events (e.g. Collins, 2016). Our second set of online media is the writings of ‘Australia’s go-to feminist’ (Simic, 2016) Clementine Ford. Ford writes her own blog Feminist Killjoy to the Stars and runs a twitter account (which has 105,000 followers). She also writes for online mainstream Australian news outlets and has recently published a bestseller Fight Like A Girl (2016). Both Mamamia and Clementine Ford’s commentary include first-person narratives of women who have had abortions. The counter-narrative identified in these writings clearly cites, reinforces and explicitly references the transnational abortion politics epitomised in the US-based #ShoutYourAbortion campaign, which went viral in many countries, including Australia, in 2015 (Ford, 2015; Poole, 2015).

The two sets of sites have different purposes and address different audiences. Not all women who read the online feminist commentary will have visited clinic websites; not all women who visit the websites will engage with feminist commentary. Together, though, the clinic websites and the online discussions represent a large part of the contemporary Australian pro-choice discursive infrastructure, covering pro-choice or feminist discourse, which is politically important, as well as the (predominantly private) providers who make abortion literally accessible to (most) women. These sites are arguably the most easily available ‘positive’ representations of abortion in the Australian online environment.

We examine these two sites using a qualitative content analysis from a feminist theoretical lens (Braun and Clarke, 2006), mapping how our two discursive sites represent the experience of abortion and the subject position of the ‘aborting woman’. These themes are critical because abortion activism and legislative discussions about abortion involve depictions of women who have abortions and their experiences (Millar, 2017). They are also part of what shapes the subjectivity and agency of women who have abortions.

Clinic websites

We investigated the 36 clinic websites listed on the Children by Choice (CbC) website in November 2015 (Children by Choice, n.d.).² The websites of CbC and the two most significant public providers in Australia, the Pregnancy Advisory Centre (PAC) in South Australia and the Pregnancy Advice Service at the Royal Women’s Hospital (RWH) in Victoria, are comprehensive resources for the general public, beyond their own clients, and for other service providers.³ The websites of the private clinics vary in terms of the range and amount of information they provide. They are legible as promotional vehicles in a competitive healthcare market but they do not function as advertisements in the usual way and their content is remarkably standard and the information provided is consistent with the public sites.

Clinic websites uniformly place the pregnant woman who is considering or seeking an abortion at the centre of the imagined world of the clinic, addressing her directly in statements such as ‘We will support your choice’ (Options) and ‘[t]he right procedure for you depends on your preference’ (Dr Marie). Some sites explicitly reiterate the key feminist principle (Albury, 1999: 50) that ‘someone else should not make the decision for you. You know best about your own life’ (RWH). There is repeated emphasis on the lack of judgement of women’s choices by clinic staff.

Visual images on the sites depict women predominantly (but not exclusively) as apparently white and conforming to standard norms of middle-class femininity. Cheerful images of women together are common, suggesting support and shared experience. Recognition of economic (or other) differences is generally muted. The RWH site features a fact sheet about ‘finances and housing’ to assist thinking about the cost of a child. Several of the private clinic sites have ‘FAQ’ pages (e.g. Greenslopes; GCA; FCC; Options; The Women’s Clinic) which feature ‘money questions’, clarifying insurance rebates for example, although only a small number of clinics disclose their prices on their website.

The discussion of abortion decision-making varies. Reference to ‘decision’ or ‘decision-making’ is in the opening sentence of some clinic homepages (e.g. Hampton Park; Nanyara; PAC), and relegated to pages titled ‘Counselling’ in others. Some sites depict the process as ‘never an easy decision’ (FCC; see also Options), yet most allow for differences in this aspect of the woman’s experience: ‘This choice may be straightforward for some, for others the decision may be quite difficult, perhaps the most difficult they will ever make’ (Specialist Medical Centres). No reason for having an abortion is privileged or discounted and, however the decision-making process is represented, all abortion providers privilege choice, or ‘options’, as the key value: ‘Our Philosophy of Patient Care is to provide women with choice’ (Women’s Clinic).

The process of obtaining both medical and surgical abortion is the main way that abortion is described and constitutes the most significant part of the private providers’ websites. The Surgical Abortion page for the Hampton Park clinic is typical. It begins with a section on ‘Arriving at our clinic’ then goes to ‘The Procedure’ (which includes reference to anaesthetic, ultrasound, swabs, dilation of the cervix and the suction curette), and finishes with ‘Post-Op and recovery’. One Medical Abortion page (Cairns Doctors) begins ‘For early pregnancy (up to 9 weeks) the first tablet is taken at the clinic with your doctor’. Most sites stress the high quality of care provided, which is where the language of market competition is clearly apparent. One site’s homepage (Specialist Medical Centres) states ‘We are the benchmark’. The market is also made clear in another’s (Salisbury) claim that ‘We provide very competitive pricing for all our reproductive procedures’.

Nearly all the websites address the post-abortion emotional state. The Royal Women’s Hospital says ‘Usually, psychological and emotional well-being improves after an abortion—and it’s rare to experience long-term negative consequences’ (RWH). One private clinic asserts that ‘evidence shows that there are rarely lasting negative consequences for women who choose to have an abortion’ (Greenslopes). Relief is the most commonly mentioned response. The Fertility Control Clinic states ‘About 90% of women feel relieved following an elective abortion, and engage positively with their lives’ (FCC). Only the more comprehensive sites (Bluewater; PAC; RWH) have detailed pages that guide women through the ‘negative’ emotions associated with abortion (Millar, 2017).

An overtly articulated discourse of rights is rare in the clinic websites. The standout exception is the Queensland private provider’s site, which has a banner on every page that pronounces ‘We believe it is the right of every woman to have, or NOT have, children at the time and under the circumstances of her choosing’ (Options).⁴ The PAC site states that abortion is ‘a woman’s right to decide’. Explicit reference to abortion politics is generally muted on most sites, often evident only via cautions about and refutation of anti-abortion strategies. Several sites warn about ‘deceptive “counselling” services’ (GCA; Greenslopes; RWH), a reference to anti-abortion ‘false providers’ (Allanson, 2007) that advertise counselling services without declaring their opposition to abortion. One site alerts readers: ‘Some people, especially those who are opposed to abortion, believe that most women sink into a pit of depression, guilt and grief after an abortion. This is false’ (Bluewater). Another site invokes abortion stigma in order to challenge it by normalising abortion as a medical procedure: ‘Our philosophy is to remove that stigma, by making the procedure as acceptable and respected as any other gynaecological operation’ (Specialist Medical Centres).

Women’s narratives on the net

The first-person narratives of abortion that we investigate are more personal and overtly political than the clinic websites. We searched the Mamamia site from 2012 to 2015 and found five articles focused on women’s experiences of abortion. We concentrated on the two articles with the most reader comments, which we take to be indicative of broader ‘citizen engagement online’ (Weber, 2014: 942): ‘I had an abortion’ (Anonymous, 2012) and ‘A very, very different kind of abortion story’ (Wilson, 2014b). The earlier, anonymous post received 389 comments; the later post, written by Penny Wilson (a pseudonym), received 464 comments when it was originally posted in November 2014 and was shared 3500 times. Wilson’s story was re-posted in July 2015 alongside a link to a recent study (Rocca et al., 2015), which found that, in the words of an editor for Mamamia, despite being ‘constantly told they will be traumatised by their decision … 95% of women do not regret their decision to terminate their pregnancies’ (Wilson, 2015).

‘I had an abortion’ (Anonymous, 2012) is written in the confessional mode. Anonymous confesses to being ‘careless’ with contraception and emphasises the reasons why she had her two abortions: ‘I was young, far from ready to be a mother and the guys I was with were idiots’. The author expresses her desire to ‘share our [abortion] stories. To normalise them and the experience of abortion’, but immediately qualifies this by citing the undesirability of abortion: ‘I don’t mean that … [abortion] should be seen as something simple or fun or desirable. That’s never going to happen.’

In contrast ‘A very, very different kind of abortion story’ (Wilson, 2014b) asserts the desirability of abortion for the unwillingly pregnant woman: ‘choosing to proceed with those pregnancies … would have wrecked [my life]’ (Wilson, 2014b). Published two years later, Wilson’s narrative is a much clearer counter-discourse, but nevertheless shares features with Anonymous’ story. Both authors criticise the taboo preventing women from sharing their abortion stories with friends with whom they share ‘everything … [e]xcept this’ (Anonymous, 2012). They aim to ‘break the silence’ surrounding abortion so other women do ‘not feel ashamed or alone’ (Anonymous, 2012). Both narratives challenge the ‘unwritten rule about admitting you’ve had an abortion’, which is to say that you regret the decision (Anonymous, 2012) or are ‘really sad about them’ (Wilson, 2014b). They contrast this unwritten rule with their truth: ‘I don’t [regret my decision]. Not for a moment’ (Anonymous, 2012); ‘I’ve had harder days at work and more painful experiences at the beauty salon’ (Wilson, 2014b). Both narratives express ‘gratitude and relief’ (Wilson, 2014b) for the paths their abortions opened up for them: ‘I shudder to think what would have happened to my life if I’d had either of those babies’ (Anonymous, 2012); ‘Abortion can be a positive thing … I can’t even imagine who I would be without them’ (Wilson, 2014b). Wilson (2014a) collated into a subsequent post the hundreds of, overwhelmingly positive, comments her story generated from women who have had abortions. They included ‘I chose abortion. No guilt. No regret’; ‘Why didn’t I keep the pregnancy? Because I don’t want to be a mother’; and ‘ABORTION CAN BE FABULOUS’.

When compared to the Mamamia stories, Clementine Ford’s writing is more combative and responsive to stigmatising representations. Ford describes herself as an ‘angry feminist’ (Ford, n.d.); her first piece in the mainstream press detailed her two abortions (Ford, 2009), and she writes regularly about ‘her two no guilt, no shame abortions’ ‘for political reasons’ (Ford, 2014b; see also 2012, 2013, 2014a, 2015, 2016: 92–120). In a concise statement of a narrative repeated through her work, Ford (2009) declared in her first media piece on abortion:

I’ve had not one but two abortions. I know I’m supposed to grovel and scrape my belly along the ground for all eternity begging the world’s forgiveness. I’m supposed to kowtow and claim they were each the hardest decision I ever made, that I think about them every day, that I fall into violent pits of depression because I feel such intense agony over the fact I’m such a heartless, baby-killer. Bollocks to that. I feel no shame regarding either of them. I was acting in my own best interest, a fact I refuse to apologise for.

Ford cites a highly dramatised version of the expected, apologetic narrative of abortion to offer a directly contrasting account, referencing the language of compulsory maternity to reclaim self-interestedness as a legitimate rationale for abortion. As she has written more recently, ‘We [women] are not glorified incubators whose sole purpose is to churn out children for men to govern … And no one—no one—should be afforded the privilege of dictating the use of our bodies without our consent’ (Ford, 2014a).

The performativity of abortion scholarship

It is important for scholars to map the recent trend towards normalising and celebratory depictions of abortion. Such focus opens up under-examined material to academic critique and also, importantly, reorients the epistemology of abortion away from a preoccupation with themes such as stigma and ‘awfulisation’. Modes of representing abortion demarcate the knowable with consequences for the experiences of women and abortion providers, abortion politics, and laws. As a mode of representing abortion, abortion scholarship also helps establish particular norms for thinking about abortion and the women who have abortions. Academic focus on positive representations of abortion may, therefore, help amplify their normative effects.

Gavey and Schmidt (2011) note the performative effects of feminist research in their account of cultural scripts about rape. They argue that the dominant narrative that rape is inevitably and profoundly traumatising is inconsistent with ‘scientific empirical research’ (2011: 450) and can bring forth ‘ways of othering, stigmatizing, violating, and potentially obstructing avenues of support’ (2011: 452); rejecting the idea of any one truth about rape, they urge ‘attention to the power of discourse to shape the objects to which it refers’ (2011: 452), and call for ‘more nuanced depictions of what rape is and means’ in order to legitimate a wider range of experiences (2011: 453). The implication of their article is that the trauma discourse could create, or at least unhelpfully universalise, what it claims only to sympathetically describe.

Abortion scholars may similarly accord dominant strands of talking about abortion more uniformity than would otherwise be apparent and may reinforce the very negative abortion discourses they seek to dislodge. In reviewing sociological literature on women’s abortion experiences Purcell argues that the focus on women’s reasons for abortion, which flows from the public health imperative to prevent abortion, ‘places limitations on the kinds of questions that can be asked’ (2015: 591). In scholarship on stigma, a ‘particularly common hook’ in recent literature (Purcell, 2015: 590), research is also tapered to focus on negative outcomes and contexts. Despite frequently noting that women experience more positive than negative emotions after abortion, researchers explicitly target women who have had negative experiences (Kimport, 2012: 110), design their questions to ‘elicit narratives of difficult experiences’ (Cockrill and Nack, 2013: 976) or give more weight to negative than positive emotions (Rocca et al., 2015: 4), or they dwell on factors that can predict negative outcomes, without equal attention to predictive factors for positive outcomes (Foster et al., 2012: 88). Kumar (2013), whose research helped ignite stigma research, has warned that abortion stigma risks suffering from ‘conceptual inflation’; scholars may be ‘heaping too much into the stigma basket’, so masking other ‘deeply rooted inequalities’—those that are not the cause of or produced by stigma—and ‘fail[ing] to see sites of resistance and resilience’ (2013: 330). Just like socio-cultural and juridical norms for abortion, scholarship on abortion may reify what it claims only to observe and obscure other norms, experiences and sources of injustice.

The overwhelming consensus in quantitative psychological research (NCCMH, 2011) is that relief is the predominant feeling after an abortion. Qualitative studies of women’s experiences, although fewer in number, have similarly found that relief is the overwhelming experience and ‘negative sequelae’ are infrequent (Harden and Ogden, 1999; Ryan et al., 1994). One Australian study found that some women, expecting negative judgement, were surprised to receive a positive response from people to whom they disclosed their abortions (Kirkman et al., 2011: 126). Together, these studies strongly point to a social context other than stigma and marginalisation. Women who feel relief, and who may not predominantly feel socially isolated or stigmatised after their abortions, may be drawing on positive popular representations of abortion that remain under-researched and under-theorised. Yet academic enquiry must not merely describe such representations, as we have done to this point; it is also important to uncover their normative underpinnings in order to fully appreciate how they contribute to the ongoing struggle for reproductive justice and may also unwittingly reinforce assumptions that are ultimately antithetical to its goals.

Unapologetic abortion narratives

In their respective online settings, abortion providers, abortion activists and women who have abortions have formed a feminist counterpublic that challenges pro-natal discourses that stigmatise and pathologise abortion, forging alternative meanings for abortion where the autonomous foetal subject, repeatedly critiqued in feminist literature (e.g. Petchesky, 1987), is almost completely absent.

Australian abortion clinic websites promote a uniformly clear set of values and practices: a woman’s competency and ownership of decisions relating to her pregnancy; her entitlement to good quality non-judgemental care; and the generally positive effects of an abortion, which are sometimes communicated with reference to the anti-abortion counter-claim. The stress on the lack of moral judgement institutes the woman’s position as a medical consumer. Arguably the much repeated value of choice is the precept that underpins the clinics’ moral code. They thus draw on, and reproduce, a discourse about abortion constructed at the intersection of the discourses of women’s health (Gray, 2012), patients’ rights, medical consumerism and informed consent (Thachuk, 2007), and liberal feminism (Whelehan, 1995: 25–43). The subject who is produced is the generic subject of liberal feminism: the white, middle-class and, via the visual images, conventionally feminine citizen. The key value in this discourse is the right of the individual to choose.

Autonomous choice is also at the centre of first-person accounts on Mamamia and by Clementine Ford. The abortion narrative that is discernible across these feminist online sites clearly references and rebukes the apologetic, stigmatising narrative of abortion. The apologetic narrative places women who have abortions on the defensive, requiring them to justify their abortions to others—offering reasons for their contraceptive failure and for why motherhood would have been an impossible or irresponsible option—and profess grief and sadness for their decisions. The narrative positions motherhood as the only unproblematic outcome of pregnancy, thereby re-stigmatising abortion and the women who have them. Anonymous’ story contains traces of the apologetic narrative. She admits to carelessness with contraception, cites her youth and lack of secure romantic partnership as reasons for why she was not ‘ready’ to become a mother, and notes that abortion can never be ‘simple’ or ‘desirable’. Such gestures confirm motherhood as the anchoring point in women’s lives, while also reifying images of what ‘good’ or ‘responsible’ motherhood entails—in this instance, being of a suitable age and in a good relationship with someone who is not ‘an idiot’ (Millar, 2017). In contrast, the unapologetic narrative foregrounds the figure of the ‘unwillingly pregnant woman’, for whom abortion provides a release from an involuntary and unwelcome condition, thus producing an overwhelming positive experience. As a clear counter-discourse, however, the seeds of the apologetic abortion narrative remain entrenched within its framing of abortion, limiting its emancipatory potential. By asserting self-determination, the narrative could, for example, offer precisely the justification and defence of abortion it purportedly eschews.

The affirmation of abortion as a positive experience in both the clinic websites and the online first-person testimonies combats misinformation and stigma. But the focus on positive individual experiences can support rather than challenge an individualised and ultimately reductive abortion politics. One could ask whether, even if women did experience abortion negatively, this should be cause for its re-criminalisation or continued under-servicing. The idea that abortion should be available because of women’s positive experiences similarly bases the law and service provision on individual responses to the procedure. Recourse to individual experiences, particularly emotional experiences, abstracts the individual who has the experience from their broader social, structural, cultural, and economic contexts (Millar, 2017). The continued incitement to individual women to ‘break the silence’ by sharing their abortion stories also returns us to the individual—to her particular experience of abortion and to her responsibility for perpetuating or ending abortion stigma through either her silence or vociferousness.⁵ Ford’s unapologetic assertion of ‘acting in my own self-interest’ (2009) is at once a rejection of patriarchal discourses that demand women’s self-sacrifice and an unnerving resort to the language of neoliberal individualism and its assertion of the undivided self-authoring subject (McRobbie, 2009).

Economic or other constraints on choice are evaded in the clinic websites, where a notable absence of an articulated discourse of equitable access points to the limits of liberal discourse on abortion in relation to women who are not economically and geographically privileged. It also points to the takeup of only some elements of the women’s health and patients’ rights movement—autonomy without critique of its conditions (Thachuk, 2007); choice without critique of its limits and co-option by consumer capitalism (Albury, 1999: 19–24). The minor exceptions to this generalisation are the Gynaecology Centres Australia website, which specifies that its clinics are located with access for rural women in mind, and the RWH site, which acknowledges economic disadvantage. (Arguably the website of the PAC, the other public provider, does not need to mention finances because, in South Australia, abortions are nearly all provided for free in the public health system.)

In focusing on the individual, autonomous and ‘unapologetic’ subject, the counter-narratives we have traced could easily be seen to reify the ‘responsibilised’ subject of neoliberalism, a political rationality Wendy Brown ascribes as amounting to ‘depoliticization on an unprecedented level’ (2006: 704); they certainly reflect a (neo)liberal feminism that ‘addresses women who have the luxury of making choices which they often mistakenly assume are available to everyone’ (Whelehan, 1995: 42–43). The overall de-contextualisation of abortion in the clinic websites and the online feminist testimonies leave critical questions unaddressed. Why and how, for instance, are women made ‘responsible’ for their unplanned or unwanted pregnancies as well as potential consequences of such pregnancies (Millar, 2017)? In this context, which women have the resources to enact this responsibility (Whelehan, 1995)? Why is abortion the only commonly performed necessary health care procedure that is not provided routinely by the public health care system for free in Australia (Baird, 2017)? Why is sexual and reproductive healthcare and sexuality education provided so haphazardly in Australia, to the disproportionate disadvantage of poor and marginalised women (Arabena, 2006; Yeung et al., 2017)?

Conclusion

Our focus on the websites of Australian abortion clinics and widely circulated feminist, pro-choice commentary on abortion maps a growing trend in normalising representations of abortion and reorients abortion scholarship away from an emphasis on negative representations of abortion. This is important because the tendency within academic scholarship to focus on negative and stigmatising representations of abortion produces an overly uniform reading of legal, political, medical and media discourses and has the potential to obscure counter-discourses of abortion. The online sites analysed here represent lively and practical resistance to the stigmatising discourses that have been the focus of so much feminist scholarship. Affirmation of the subject position of the ‘unwillingly pregnant women’ offers discursive possibilities for abortion that automatically validates the decision and presents the experience and its aftermath in positive terms; for her, abortion is the only unproblematic outcome of pregnancy. This subject position claims—or reclaims—women’s position as the rightful subjects of abortion decisions and constructs abortion as a normal, positive and straightforward procedure that enables women to lead the lives they imagine for themselves.

A focus on choice or even decision-making abstracted from context, however, means the positive representations on offer here re-centre the white middle-class liberal subject and are frequently devoid of the social, cultural and economic critique that drove the politics of the earlier Women’s Liberation Movement or allied Women’s Health Movement (Broom, 1991) and animates the more recent Reproductive Justice Movement led by women of colour in the USA (Ross and Solinger, 2017; Smith, 2005). Although affirmation of personal autonomy needs to form part of a larger reproductive politics, academic focus on the positive and normalising representations of abortion that have been called for by some scholars must subject such representations to critical analysis if it is to broaden the horizons of the scholarly and political imaginary. Researchers need to search out and amplify representations that are positive and that centre the multi-dimensional experiences of subjects beyond the white middle-class woman with the resources to choose.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the commercial, public or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

Barbara Baird works in Women’s Studies at Flinders University, an institution built on the unceded land of the Kaurna First Nations people. She has been researching the history and politics of abortion in Australia for over 25 years. She is currently writing a history of the provision of abortion services in Australia since 1990. With historians from Macquarie University, she is working on an Australian Research Council Discovery Project that is investigating the history of sexual citizenship in Australia since 1969. She is the co-convenor of the South Australian Abortion Action Coalition (saac).

Erica Millar works as a lecturer at the University of Adelaide, an institution built on the unceded land of the Kuarna First Nations people. In 2019 she will be taking up a position as Lecturer of Criminology at La Trobe University. She researches in the sociology, cultural politics, history and biopolitics of reproduction and her first book Happy Abortions: Our Bodies in the Era of Choice was published by Zed Books in 2017. Erica is a member of the South Australian Abortion Action Coalition (saac), which is working to secure better abortion access for women in South Australia.

References

Albury

(1999) The Politics of Reproduction, St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin.

Allanson

(2007) Pregnancy/abortion counselling: False providers, mandatory counselling. Women Against Violence 19: 5–9.

Anonymous (2012) I had an Abortion. Mamamia, February 7. Available at: http://www.mamamia.com.au/news/i-had-an-abortion/ (accessed 18 July 2018).

Arabena

(2006) Preachers, policies and power: The reproductive health of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Australia. Health Promotion Journal of Australia 17(2): 85–90.

Baird B (2002) ‘I had a party to celebrate my abortion’ and other incredible stories. In: Abortion – Politics, Access and Challenges: Conference Proceedings, Abortions Providers Federation of Australasia, Biennial Conference 3–4 November 2001, Adelaide, Australia. Compiled by the Pregnancy Advisory Centre and IPD System Services Pty Ltd, SA, pp. 9–17.

Baird

(2017) Decriminalization and women’s access to abortion in Australia. Health and Human Rights 19(1): 197–208.

Betts

(2009) Attitudes to abortion: Australia and Queensland in the twenty-first century. People and Place 17(3): 25–39.

Bowman-Grieve L (2009) Anti-abortion extremism online. First Monday 14(11). DOI: https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v14i11.2679.

Braun

Clarke

(2006) Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology 3(2): 77–101.

10.

Broom

(1991) Damned if We Do: Contradictions in Women’s Health Care, Sydney: Allen & Unwin.

11.

Brown

(2006) American nightmare neoliberalism, neoconservatism, and de-democratization. Political Theory 34(6): 690–714.

12.

Children by Choice (n.d.) Home. Available at http://www.childrenbychoice.org.au/ (accessed 18 July 2018).

13.

Cockrill

(2014) Commentary: Imagine a world without abortion stigma. Women & Health 54(7): 662–665.

14.

Cockrill

Nack

(2013) ‘I’m not that type of person’: Managing the stigma of having an abortion. Deviant Behavior 34(12): 973–990.

15.

Cole

(2016) Grandma. The Gerontologist 56(1): 155–157.

16.

Collins S (2016) It’s 2016. Abortion should be safe, legal and available to all women. Available at http://www.mamamia.com.au/abortion-access-debate/ (accessed 18 July 2018).

17.

Condit

(1994) Decoding Abortion Rhetoric: Communicating Social Change, Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

18.

Doyle

(2009) Blind spots and failed performance: Abortion, feminism, and Queer theory. Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences 18(1): 25–52.

19.

Evans

O’Brien

(2015) The Cairns abortion trial: Language, deviance, and the ‘spoiled identity’. Journal of Sociology 51(3): 755–768.

20.

Ford C (n.d.) Feminist killjoy to the stars. Available at: http://clementineford.tumblr.com/ (accessed 18 July 2018).

21.

Ford C (2009) Clementine Ford reveals her two no guilt, no shame abortions. News Corp Australia Network, 15 October. Available at: http://www.news.com.au/news/my-no-guilt-no-shame-abortions/news-story/f38b7169c4c24ff8dcd075b2f776d9f3 (accessed 18 July 2018).

22.

Ford C (2012) Give me back my womb. Hoopla, 20 January. Available at: http://thehoopla.com.au/meaning-pro-life/ (accessed 6 November 2015).

23.

Ford C (2013) Abortion humour. Daily Life, 10 March. Available at: http://www.dailylife.com.au/news-and-views/dl-opinion/abortion-humour-20130304-2fhqi (accessed 18 July 2018).

24.

Ford C (2014a) Hands off our hard-fought abortion rights. The Drum (ABC), 9 May. Available at: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-05-09/ford-hands-off-our-hard-fought-abortion-rights/5440994 (accessed 18 July 2018).

25.

Ford C (2014b) Neither abortion nor adoption is an easy way out. Daily Life, 20 February. Available at: http://www.dailylife.com.au/news-and-views/dl-opinion/neither-abortion-nor-adoption-is-an-easy-way-out-20140220-333sl.html (accessed 18 July 2018).

26.

Ford C (2015) #ShoutYourAbortion: If you’ve had an abortion, you have nothing to apologise for. Daily Life 22 September. Available at: http://www.dailylife.com.au/news-and-views/dl-opinion/shoutyourabortion-if-youve-had-an-abortion-you-have-nothing-to-apologise-for-20150921-gjrmc6.html (accessed 18 July 2018).

27.

Ford

(2016) Fight Like a Girl, Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin.

28.

Foster

Gould

Kimport

(2012) How women anticipate coping after an abortion. Contraception 86(1): 84–90.

29.

Gavey

Schmidt

(2011) ‘Trauma of rape’ discourse: A double-edged template for everyday understandings of the impact of rape? Violence Against Women 17(4): 433–456.

30.

Gray

(2012) Reaching for Health: The Australian Women’s Health Movement and Public Policy, Canberra: ANU Press.

31.

Hadley

(1997) The ‘awfulisation’ of abortion. Choices 26(1): 7–8.

32.

Harden

Ogden

(1999) Young women’s experiences of arranging and having abortions. Sociology of Health & Illness 21(4): 426–444.

33.

Kelly

(2014) Reckoning with narratives of innocent suffering in transnational abortion litigation. In: Cook

Erdman

Dickens

(eds) Abortion Law in Transnational Perspective: Cases and Controversies, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 303–326.

34.

Kimport

(2012) (Mis) Understanding abortion regret. Symbolic Interaction 35(2): 105–122.

35.

Kirkman

Rowe

Hardiman

, et al. (2011) Abortion is a difficult solution to a problem. Women’s Studies International Forum 34(2): 121–129.

36.

Kumar

(2013) Everything is not abortion stigma. Women’s Health Issues 23(6): e329–e331.

37.

Kumar

Hessini

Mitchell

(2009) Conceptualizing abortion stigma. Culture, Health & Sexuality 11(6): 625–639.

38.

Le Masurier

(2007) My other, my self: Cleo magazine and feminism in 1970s Australia. Australian Feminist Studies 22(53): 191–211.

39.

Logan E (2016) Here’s why the abortion storylines on Jane the Virgin and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend matter. Glamour, 16 November. Available at: http://www.glamour.com/story/abortions-on-tv-scandal-crazy-ex-girlfriend-jane-the-virgin (accessed 18 July 2018).

40.

Ludlow

(2012) Love and goodness: Toward a new abortion politics. Feminist Studies 38(2): 474–483.

41.

Mamamia (n.d.) What is Mamamia? Mamamia. Available at http://www.mamamia.com.au/about-mamamia/ (accessed 18 July 2018).

42.

McLaren

(2013) The emotional imperative of the visual: Images of the fetus in contemporary Australian pro-life politics. In: Doerr

Mattoni

Teune

(eds) Advances in the Visual Analysis of Social Movements, Bingley, UK: Emerald Group Publishing, pp. 81–103.

43.

McRobbie

(2009) The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change, London: SAGE.

44.

Millar

(2017) Happy Abortions: Our Bodies in the Era of Choice, London: Zed Books.

45.

NCCMH – National Collaborating Centre for Mental Health (2011) Induced Abortion and Mental Health: A Systematic Review of the Mental Health Outcomes of Induced Abortion, Including Their Prevalence and Associated Factors: Executive Summary, London: Academy of Medical Royal Colleges.

46.

Palmer (2009) Seeing and knowing: Ultrasound images in the contemporary abortion debate. Feminist Theory 10(2): 173–189.

47.

Petchesky

(1987) Fetal images: The power of visual culture in the politics of reproduction. Feminist Studies 13(2): 263–292.

48.

Poole M (2015) Why thousands of women are shouting about their abortions on social media. Mamamia, 22 September. Available at: http://www.mamamia.com.au/news/hashtag-shout-your-abortion/ (accessed 18 July 2018).

49.

Press

Cole

(1999) Speaking of Abortion: Television and Authority in the Lives of Women, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

50.

Purcell

(2015) The sociology of women’s abortion experiences: Recent research and future directions. Sociology Compass 9(7): 585–596.

51.

Purcell

Hilton

McDaid

(2014) The stigmatisation of abortion: A qualitative analysis of print media in Great Britain in 2010. Culture, Health & Sexuality 16(9): 1141–1155.

52.

Rocca

Kimport

Roberts

, et al. (2015) Decision rightness and emotional responses to abortion in the United States: A longitudinal study. PloS one 10(7): e0128832.

53.

Ross L and Solinger R (eds) (2017) Reproductive Justice: An Introduction. Berkeley: University of California Press.

54.

Ryan

Ripper

Buttfield

(1994) We Women Decide, Bedford Park, SA: Women’s Studies Unit, Flinders University.

55.

Sanger

(2017) About Abortion Terminating Pregnancy in Twenty-First-Century America, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

56.

Sayakhot P and Carolan-Olah M (2016) Internet use by pregnant women seeking pregnancy-related information: A systematic review. BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth 16(65). Available at: https://bmcpregnancychildbirth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12884-016-0856-5?report=reader (accessed 18 July 2018).

57.

Schrage

(2002) From reproductive rights to reproductive Barbie: Post-porn modernism and abortion. Feminist Studies 28(1): 61–93.

58.

Sciortino K (2014) ‘Abortion rom-com’ Obvious Child is important – because it’s so ordinary. The Guardian, 13 June. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/jun/12/obvious-child-rom-com-jenny-slate-ordinary (accessed 18 July 2018).

59.

Simic Z (2016) First person feminism. Australian Review of Books, 12 December. Available at: http://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/fight-like-a-girl-clementine-ford-review/ (accessed 18 July 2018).

60.

Sisson

Kimport

(2014) Telling stories about abortion: Abortion-related plots in American film and television, 1916–2013. Contraception 89(5): 413–418.

61.

Sisson

Kimport

(2016) After After Tiller: the impact of a documentary film on understandings of third-trimester abortion. Culture, Health & Sexuality 18(6): 695–709.

62.

Smith

(2005) Beyond pro-choice versus pro-life: Women of color and reproductive justice. NWSA Journal 17(1): 119–140.

63.

Taylor

(1992) The public fetus and the family car: From abortion politics to a Volvo advertisement. Public Culture 4(2): 67–80.

64.

Thachuk

(2007) Midwifery, informed choice, and reproductive autonomy: A relational approach. Feminism & Psychology 17(1): 39–56.

65.

Thomas

(2009) Buying up baby: Modern feminine subjectivity, assertions of ‘choice,’ and the repudiation of reproductive justice in postfeminist unwanted pregnancy films. Feminist Media Studies 9(4): 409–425.

66.

Thomsen

(2013) From refusing stigmatization toward celebration: New directions for reproductive justice activism. Feminist Studies 39(1): 149–158.

67.

Travers

(2003) Parallel subaltern feminist counterpublics in cyberspace. Sociological Perspectives 46(2): 223–237.

68.

Weber

(2014) Discussions in the comments section: Factors influencing participation and interactivity in online newspapers’ reader comments. New Media & Society 16(6): 941–957.

69.

Weitz

(2010) Rethinking the mantra that abortion should be ‘safe, legal, and rare’. Journal of Women’s History 22(3): 161–172.

70.

Whelehan

(1995) Modern Feminist Thought: From the Second Wave to Post-Feminism, New York: New York University Press.

71.

Wilson P (2014a) Opinion: 14 reactions to my ‘I had an abortion’ post. Mamamia, 9 November. Available at: http://www.mamamia.com.au/social/what-its-like-to-have-an-abortion/ (accessed 18 July 2018).

72.

Wilson P (2014b) A very, very different kind of abortion story. Mamamia, 2 November. Available at: http://www.mamamia.com.au/wellbeing/what-having-an-abortion-is-like/ (accessed 18 July 2018).

73.

Wilson P (2015) A very, very different kind of abortion story. Mamamia, 15 July. Available at: http://www.mamamia.com.au/wellbeing/abortion-regret/ (accessed 18 July 2018).

74.

Yenerall K (2011) Reproductive rights and modern film: Five women, six movies and the politics of abortion. APSA 2011 Annual Meeting Paper. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1901919 (accessed 18 July 2018).

75.

Yeung A et al. (2017) Sex education: Findings from the Second Australian Study of Health and Relationships. Sexual Health, 6 March. Available at: http://www.publish.csiro.au/sh/pdf/SH16215 (accessed 18 July 2018).