What Happens When We Share Our Abortion Stories: Hate, Vitriol, But Also Love
May 16, 2014Wednesday morning, like most, I rolled over in bed, hugged Harley the cat, and looked at my phone to check the morning’s news stories.
“Congrats on killing your baby. Nice job,” the first Facebook post said. It had seven “likes.”
Throughout the morning, Facebook posts, messages, emails, and tweetsrolled in calling me a “murdering piece of garbage,” “twisted waste of a human,” and a “disgusting slut,” among many other things.
Because of a Mamas Day article I wrote on the Huffington Post about how an abortion changed the way I experience Mother’s Day, people I’ve never met requested that I kill myself, get raped, die in childbirth (as a Black woman, that is something for which I am at higher risk), and be sterilized (something that many women of color have experienced). They asked if I have dementia (something I watched my grandmother suffer from) and hoped that I would be sold into the “sex trade” and “forced to give birth over and over again and then die from giving birth.”