For those of you still wondering why Angie tweeted her abortion, she gives us a glimpse:
JACKSON: .... I'm a blogger, and I'm actually writing a book, 'Birth and Death: Life of a Newborn Cult' about my experiences, and I talk about a lot of controversial or hot button issues every day.
Translation: It was a publicity stunt to plug my book that I'm writing.
JACKSON: Well, when I had my son, who is four now, I had a tremendously difficult pregnancy and 98-hour back labor, and my doctors advised me to avoid becoming pregnant again, which is why I had an IUD inserted in my cervix.
What doctor allows a patient to be in labor for 98 hours? Hello? Is this 1810? Either Angie's doctor is a quack or Angie's stretching the truth a tad here.
And there's a world of difference between "my doctors advised me to avoid becoming pregnant again" and "pregnancy is life-threatening for me". My best friend had life-threatening pregnancies. Her doctors pushed for tubal ligation.
And IUDs are inserted into the uterus, not left in the cervix. Again, either Angie's doctor is a quack or Angie can't get her facts straight.
JACKSON: I had prepared that if I became pregnant anyway, I would have an abortion because the risks were too high for me to continue a pregnancy.
Translation: I knew if I got pregnant I'd just kill the baby. No biggie, right?
PHILLIPS: As you well know, we've been looking at all the various comments, both negative and positive to what you did, and these are really harsh. But people wrote in and said- they called you all kinds of names, from being a whore to someone who just couldn't keep her legs closed. They called you a baby killer. I mean, it's even hard for me to say these things because some of those- the e-mails and the responses were so brutal. How did that make you feel? Did that bother you? Did it make you think twice about what you did?
JACKSON: Actually, if anything, it showed me more how important it is to talk about taboo things or to talk about personal things.
Translation: I hit the attention-whore jackpot.
JACKSON: .... One- about half of American women will have an unintended pregnancy before the age of 45, and one in three American women will have an abortion sometime during their childbearing years. And yet, this is something we almost never talk about, or at least we talk about the political aspects, but not the individual women.
Translation: I've been living in a cave for the past ten years. Or I've just been too wrapped up in myself to notice that the internet is crammed to the electronic rafters with first person abortion accounts, including women blogging their abortion. Naw, let's be honest. I knew the "blog my abortion" thing had been done to death -- ha! -- so I had to up the ante a bit if I was going to generate publicity for my book.
JACKSON: ....Some of the heat that I've gotten has certainly showed me what the cost of that silence is, is that when a woman does want to discuss it, she's- the reaction is quite strong.
The reaction wasn't the cost of silence, Angie. It was the cost of shooting your mouth off. "Oh, my baby is dying inside me even as I speak. And I think that's just about the coolest thing ever. Eat shit, prolifers!" And plenty of them took the bait. And this is surprising?
PHILLIPS: Final question: what made you decide to do the RU- 486? Is that something you discussed with your boyfriend? How quick did you make that decision? Why that route?
JACKSON: Sure. I investigated - I looked at a couple of websites, one of which is imnotsorry.net, which includes a lot of personal abortion stories, and I read how different women had felt.
Translation: What I said before about the silence on this issue? That was total bullshit. I knew the net was full of first person abortion stories. I had to think of a way to trump all those stories and get the spotlight on the center of the universe, namely ME!
JACKSON: I thought that the RU-486 abortion-by-pill at home would be a more natural and comfortable experience.
1. Punk'd!
2. Frankly, I think you chose chemical abortion as part of the publicity plan. Tweeting a surgical abortion would have meant that you'd be on your Blackberry while you were in the stirrups. Much easier to tweet at home.
Actually, parts of the IUD DO remain the cervix. Some of them are T-shaped, and others have strings so that they can be removed easily, and to make sure they aren't "adrift" in the uterus. I know -- I used to have an IUD, and I had to check, every so often, that the string was still there, and was supposed to call the doctor immediately if I couldn't find it.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, you might find this interesting:
http://abortioneers.blogspot.com/2010/03/sad-times.html
It is also interesting that Angie befriended another woman that was livetweeting her abortion as well...Her user name was @nextthurs. It has been 8 days since she stopped tweeting and it sounds like there may have been complications & that is why she stopped...One of her very last tweets was about bleeding like a stuffed pig all day...She has other children as well...
ReplyDelete@nextthurs didn't just stop tweeting - she stopped blogging and she stopped using formspring as well. We haven't heard from her in a week. She seems to have dropped off the face of the planet - or at least the internet.
ReplyDeleteL, I'm turning that into a link, and I"ll blog about it later.
ReplyDeleteOne point I want to make -- carrying an unplanned pregnancy to term is hardly a horror. Of the six kids in my family, half of us were unplanned. I was conceived when my father was out of work and my parents were struggling to put food on the table for two other kids. They've never seemed to regret letting me live, and give every evidence of loving my other two "oops" siblings just as much as the planned kids.
It's been well documented for decades that ambivalence -- even to the point of rejecting the pregnancy -- is perfectly normal and almost always self-limiting. "Treating" it with abortion strikes me as malpractice, of using an irreversible medical procedure to "treat" a condition that would clear up on its own. It used to resolve with "quickening", but modern medical technology gives us ultrasound, which allows the mother to bond with the unborn child earlier and thus resolve her ambivalence earlier. Why is this proven method of alleviating the distress of an unplanned pregnancy not only not used by champions of "choice", but every attempt by others to provide the treatment fought tooth and nail?
And L, the IUD itself is an intraUTERINE device. If it's just sitting there in the cervix (not the string hanging out the cervix), it wasn't inserted properly.
ReplyDeleteThere are all sorts of IUDs, in all sorts of amazing shapes -- the t-shaped ones have more than a string in the cervix, they actually have...well, I don't know how to say, substantial working parts.
ReplyDeleteI preferred to cally mine a "baby bug zapper," although I suppose technically it was a sperm zapper. :)
Christina, the link gives some insight into why those women went into that horrific clinic which we wondered about before. I'm just thinking that if they don't even have enough money for the abortion how are they going to have enough money for the baby?
ReplyDeleteLil, a lot of the time women are trapped in learned helplessness. They feel like there's nothing they can do to get out of their bad situation. The abortion maintains the wretched status quo, which while not great is at least what they know how to cope with.
ReplyDeleteHelp rejecting abortion means help overcoming the feelings of being trapped and helpless. I know from my own experience how trapped a woman can feel, not wanting to go through with an abortion but just not seeing any other way. Turns out what we needed was just to move to a better neighborhood. We needed a friend who LITERALLY dragged us out of the apartment and made us get in the car and look for another place. I was convinced that it was an exercise in futility. But we found a place the first day out! And that move improved all of our circumstances. We went from starving ourselves and selling our wedding rings to buy food, to be able to have guests over for dinner. All because somebody cared enough to jolt us out of our despair.
I want to see women provided with that kind of support. It didn't take that much for us. Some women need more help. (If you read Ashli's story, "It began with a desperate email", you can get the idea.
I'm gonna say that the twit, er, um, "twitterer" (tweeter?) just used the term incorrectly out of ignorance. Probably got mixed up with the doctor's explanation (or lack thereof), or just knew that something was inserted in (more technically "through") her cervix. Perhaps just a slip of the tongue. However, she doesn't seem like the brightest bulb in the light fixture, so she may never have worried her pretty little head about precisely what parts she has where and what happens to them during an IUD placement.
ReplyDeleteHi Christina
ReplyDeleteIt wasn't me that wrote the link for Sad Days it was L. - but I can see why its confusing.