Oh No She Didn’t: Woman Live Tweets Abortion

Another day, another social media moral panic. Blogger Angie Jackson has been called a whore and compared to nazis and paedophiles after live tweeting her abortion last week.

Ms Jackson, already a mother to a four-year-old boy with special needs, became pregnant after her IUD failed her. After receiving a positive pregnancy test, she went to a health clinic where she was given the drug RU 486 to take, along with some Vicodin for the pain.

As someone who admits she tweets “everything” she claims she was naive about what would happen when she decided to document her abortion experience.

As she wrote on her blog,

“I think there was a lot more naivety than heroism in my initial decision to tweet this. It wasn’t even that conscious of a choice – I tweet everything. I write about everything. The rewards of honesty, in terms of a personal sense of “wholeness”, can’t be adequately described. No one can hurt me because, everything they know is something I chose to reveal about myself.”

There was no graphic content to her tweets. Just a live account of spotting, cramp, bleeding and tiredness, then a YouTube video taken the next day where she talked through the experience and her reasons for wanting to demystify the aborion process.

Still, it was enough to offend America’s pro-life movement, who called her decision “a tragedy”. She has even received death threats.

Jackson has come out fighting, saying that abortion talk is censored. “When people say, “You shouldn’t tweet about an abortion” I can’t help but feel what they really mean is, “You shouldn’t talk about abortion.”

“I’m just doing something women do everyday. Abortions aren’t rare, and when they’re legal, they’re safe.”

The whole situation echoes that of Penelope Trunk, who famously Tweeted her miscarriage. What many critics of the women seem to be saying is that sure, talk about miscarriage and abortion, but not Twitter, which is public. Both women also had a matter-of-fact tone to their tweets, which seems to upset people as these topics are meant to be written about Very Seriously and Earnestly with lots of hand-wringing.

As Tracy Clark-Flory wrote at Salon, why can’t women access more information about abortion before they choose to have one, as they can with other medical procedures?

before I went in for what felt like terrifying oral surgery to remove a backasswards tooth from my sinus cavity — freaky, right? — I went on YouTube and watched footage of similar procedures and video blogs of people’s recovery process. It replaced all of my far-fetched nightmarish visions with concrete, factual information. Without that, I might have gone running for the hills — or at least passed out in the waiting room.

She says that Jackson has done women a favour. I am inclined to agree, although there is something a bit media-courting about Jackson that makes me weary of triumphing her as a feminist saviour.  The story highlights again the incredible power of Twitter to bring us real-time accounts of lives and people that we may not always agree with, but who bare their souls for worldwide scrutiny.