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#ShoutYourAbortion Trend Helps Tackle Stigma of Terminations

  • Pro-choice campaigners started the Twitter hashtag to destigmatize the procedure. campaigners protest in London.

    Pro-choice campaigners started the Twitter hashtag to destigmatize the procedure. campaigners protest in London. | Photo: AFP

Published 22 September 2015
Opinion

Campaigners started the Twitter hashtag to destigmatize the procedure.

Tens of thousands of women have shared their experiences of abortion on Twitter, to open-up the conversation and tackle the stigma attached to the procedure.

When the U.S. House of Representatives revoked federal funding for Planned Parenthood, the U.S. organization that gives contraceptive counsel, campaigners Lindy West, Amelia Bonow and Kimberly Morrison started the Twitter hashtag “#ShoutYourAbortion” on Twitter.

The hashtag took off worldwide, trending on Tuesday in the U.S., Australia and Europe, with 60,000 women, and counting, posting about their terminations.

Others used the phrase to an explain an opinion on abortion, with both pro-choice and pro-life activists engaged.

While some praised the initiative for removing the shame in terminating a pregnancy, others criticized the tag for supposedly glorifying it.

Some states in the U.S., such as Texas, are seeing to reduce abortion rights, with few legal clinics remaining, although half of all pregnancies in the U.S. are planned, according to Guttmacher. 

The World Health Organization states that where abortion is permitted on broad legal grounds, it is generally safe, and where it is highly restricted, it is typically unsafe. In developing countries, relatively liberal abortion laws are associated with fewer negative health consequences from unsafe abortions than are highly restrictive laws.

In Latin America only Cuba,Uruguay and Puerto Rico allow abortions without restriction, though Uruguay still has a complicated procedure in place in order to get an abortion.

Chile, which has one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the world, prohibiting terminations under all circumstances including rape and the mother’s life being at risk, is now debating a change in the law.

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Abortion is nothing to be proud of, I wish there were widespread videos of the procedure so that people can see what it actually is. In that case I think a lot of people would stop looking at it the same way they look at the removal of a cyst or tumor
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