More and more women (and men) are telling their stories. Until recently, those stories were not very accessible but now these stories having the potential to change the stigma of abortion in our culture.
Our grantee, Emily Letts, whose video of her abortion has gone viral, is working with NotAlone.us, a site for video storytelling.
Because public sharing of your abortion story can bring positive reactions as well as negative, Renee Bracey Sherman of the Sea Change Program has set up a survey to find out the impact on those who choose to share. If you have experience in telling your story, please help with this survey. More about the survey:
As you may know, I have been sharing my abortion story publicly for several years. This experience has brought great joy, a feeling of empowerment, and connection to other people who have had abortions across the country – especially other storytellers. While this has been wonderful, it also brings harassment, both online and off, threats of violence, and thus has highlighted the missing pieces of support for abortion storytellers in our movement.
To ensure that storytellers are truly supported, I am conducting a survey and interviews with public abortion storytellers to look at what support systems have been working for them, and what we as a movement could do better to ensure their needs are met.
To that end, I am asking you to complete this survey, if you’re a public abortion storyteller, and forward it to any and all people who previously and currently share their abortion story in public forums including: journalism, media, video, workshops and panels, nonprofit advocacy campaigns, lobby visits, and interviews. I want to hear about all the best (and worst) practices so we can crowdsource a list of recommendations on how to best support our public abortion storytellers emotionally, mentally, and physically.
The survey can be found on The Sea Change Program’s website at: seachangeprogram.org/abortion-storyteller-experience-survey/
And, you might want to read the guides on Exhale’s site.