New story at Slate:
Angie Jackson, the Florida mother now known as the abortion tweeter, isn’t the first woman to try to demystify abortion by talking about her story publicly. Since Romper Room personality Sherri Chessen got a very public abortion in 1962 after taking thalidomide, women have tried to erase the lingering shame of abortion by publicizing their own. Author Jennifer Baumgardner recently started the “I had an abortion” T-shirt project. A forthcoming Web site, ShareWithThree.org, urges women to “come out” to three friends about their abortions.
Jackson’s innovation was to use Twitter and YouTube to detail her experience with the drug RU-486 and thus expose her personal life to assault and dissection. One hundred twenty-nine thousand viewers watched Jackson’s first YouTube video about her abortion and left nearly 10,000 comments. Anti-abortion blogger Jill Stanek devoted a 10-part blog series to analyzing Jackson’s tweets and picking apart the side effects she suffered. Some commenters have questioned whether Jackson’s claim that a pregnancy would be very risky for her is valid. Others have been viciously critical, calling Jackson a murderer or making death threats against her family, including one commenter who said he hoped Jackson’s 4-year-old son would be ripped limb from limb.
Jackson, whose special-needs son was born after a grueling 98-hour delivery, says her motivation is to counter the stories of regret the anti-abortion movement has cultivated in recent years. As the controversy continues, one of the most interesting—and motivating—parts of her narrative has been largely overlooked: her intimate connection with a religious movement—one she now calls a cult—that glorified fertility and childbirth and demonized medical intervention even when mothers’ labors were going very wrong.
