‘people who have abortions are our future’: abortion storytelling and the feminist imaginary

prologue Abortion storytelling, rooted in feminist histories of consciousness-raising, has become an important part of reproductive justice activism. The aim is to ‘normalise’ abortion, to keep saying abortion out loud as a challenge to the stigma that underpins it. The promise is a future of greater reproductive freedoms. In this thought piece, I critique whether storytelling can indeed work towards this aim and promise. Drawing on Erica Millar’s (2017) work on the emotional script that has underwritten abortion choice through anti-abortion sentiment, I ask whether abortion storytelling can open space for the emergence of a different script and future—whether it speaks to Lola Olufemi’s (2021) call to imagine otherwise if we are to become/be such a future. Below, I explore these ideas through a self-reflective, provisional-thinking meditation on the limits and possibilities of abortion storytelling by drawing on examples from the US, UK and Ireland and my own abortion experience (via short, italicised fragments). Through autotheoretical engagements and a call for polyvocal storytelling, I invite the reader to (re)think through their own stories and ask whether together we might be able to imagine a reproductive otherwise.

to protest Northern Ireland's abortion ban and the 2022 overturning of the Roe v Wade ruling in the US, for example.2But these platforms can also be more than a specific/isolated protest.They can be the imaginings of a different way of interacting with abortion, a gateway towards a re-theorising of gender and the body.US abortion storytelling platform We Testify's website states that ' [we] unapologetically believe that people who have abortions are our future '. 3 In this statement, We Testify frames abortion as more than just a medical procedure: abortion is framed as the possibility of a radically different way of living.Similarly, Shout Your Abortion proposes to be about 'much more than abortion; it's about unlearning the idea that we are not supposed to talk about the things that happen to us' (Bonow, 2018a, p. xii).
In Experiments in Imagining Otherwise (2021), Lola Olufemi explores the radical potential of imagining a future that disrupts linearity and looks beyond: The feminist imagination carves out a site of agency that forms the impetus for action.It has many purposes, but in this regard, it enables resistant acts to take place by dismantling hegemonic notions of what is permissible under current conditions.The imagination is central to the cultural production of revolutionary movements; its primary role is to signal what could be.(ibid., p. 35, original emphasis) If abortion storytelling is used to support processes of unlearning and to fashion a radical future, does it, then, engage with the desire and practice of imagining otherwise?Can it be a process of reviewing, rethinking, creating and becoming-a mechanism to dismantle and theorise what could be?

'normalising' abortion
Not so long ago, after speaking about abortion at a conference, a woman turned to me in the queue for the toilet.'I just wanted to shout at you: I've had two abortions!',she said.
When I tell people I research abortion, or that I've had an abortion, the person I'm speaking with will often tell me that they've had one or two or multiple abortions, or that someone close to them has had one.People I've only just met will tell me their story: a story they've barely told before.Old friends or colleagues will open up about their own experience.These are conversations I've had in England, where abortion is relatively legally accessible, and yet the subject remains cloaked in secrecy and shame.The exchanges often feel like disclosures or confessions.
When these 'disclosures' happen, I used to be struck primarily by the silence.Why didn't I know this before about someone so close to me?Why did they not know this about me?Why had we never spoken about it?But I've become increasingly intrigued by the impulse: the invitation of my speaking the word 'abortion', the urge to meet that invitation with a story of abortion, the urge to say it out loud.'It's like a need', one friend told me.'When a space is opened to speak about abortion safely, you realise you've always needed to talk about it'.
Judith Butler has drawn attention to the workings of sayable discourses in the production of a subject: … censorship seeks to produce subjects according to explicit and implicit norms, and … the production of the subject has everything to do with the regulation of speech.The subject's production takes place not only through the regulation of that subject's speech, but through the regulation of the social domain of speakable discourse.The question is not what it is I will be able to say, but what will constitute the domain of the sayable within which I begin to speak at all.(Butler, 1997, p. 133) If you talk about your own experience of abortion, you engage in a process of speakability: a process of repeating and producing discourses in which a body and its experiences become knowable and sayable.Just as sex is both produced and destabilised through the reiteration of norms (Butler, 1993, p. 10), so too is abortion (which is entangled with discourses of sex and gender).As such, reiteration can destabilise the explicit and implicit norms which predominantly hold abortion in the grips of shame and stigma (see Kumar, Hessini and Mitchell, 2009;Cockrill and Nack, 2013).Abortion storytelling is a process of reiteration.Might it, then, inhabit the ability to destabilise stigmatising norms?

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The dismantling of abortion shame, stigma and silence is usually the main aim of organised abortion storytelling projects (Kissling, 2018, p. 18).Storytelling is used to reset the narratives on abortion, to challenge the 'awfulisation' of abortion (Hadley, 1997)-a discourse that frames abortion as an exceptional, traumatic and regrettable event (Mishler, 2021, p. 88)-and position it instead as something normal, everyday and ordinary.In this way, the act of vocalising abortion is seen as an act of resistance, solidarity and defiance.
But does the 'simple' act of saying an abortion story automatically resist the stigma it seeks to challenge?Or is the story only sayable within the terms of that stigma, within the terms of what stigma has ascribed 'an acceptable abortion'?What are the terms in which abortion becomes 'normal'? 4Abortion affects trans and non-binary people as well as cis women.I refer to 'women' when looking at specific elements in the constitution of abortion that have become intelligible within cultural meanings ascribed to femininity/motherhood/womanhood.This gendering works to exclude trans and non-binary people from the abortion conversation, so analysis that points to and attempts to disrupt this gendering is important if we are to seek an inclusive conceptualisation of abortion (see Millar, 2017, p. 27).
I'm too young, and too financially insecure, I told myself, to be a mother yet.
a happy abortion?shifting discourses Erica Millar (2017, p. 3) has critiqued how abortion experiences (in English-speaking countries of the Global North) are scripted through emotions that regulate abortion through anti-abortion sentiment, thereby inscribing the 'choice' of abortion with loaded rhetoric.Abortion is a 'choice' discursively produced through grief, shame, stigma and normative femininity, and powered by norms surrounding gender, race and social class (ibid., pp.4-5).Dominant gender narratives work to naturalise the woman-as-mother destiny, rendering pregnant women 4 already mothers and other women as mothers, mothers-to-be or longing for a child.Underlying the reasons people often give for having an abortion (they don't have a stable job, are single or living precariously, for example) is the script that abortion is chosen due to the inability of the abortion-seeker to offer their potential child the economic resources deemed necessary to ensure their happiness, thus framing the choice as made in the best interests of their potential children (ibid., p. 265).

I chose abortion, because I was too young, and too financially insecure, and too precarious, to be a mother yet. A choice tangled in notions of compulsory motherhood. I am not ready to be a mother yet [read: I will be a mother one day] [read: I will be a better mother one day].
In places where abortion is legally available, the presentation of abortion as a choice to be made by free, self-determining subjects disguises the rigid emotional script of abortion that regulates such a choice (ibid., p. 5).This naturalisation strengthens the stigma upon which the 'awfulisation' of abortion is built: presenting abortion as unnatural, unethical, disruptive and sad.
I chose abortion, because I was too young, and too financially insecure, and too precarious, to be a mother

yet. A choice, but a sad one;
A choice tangled in notions of compulsory motherhood.I am not ready to be a mother yet [read: I will be a mother one day] [read: I will be a better mother one day] A choice, But a sad one.
On reading Millar's (2017) book, I saw the construction of my own abortion narrative.I felt tricked by my own experience: constituted as the Compulsory Mother by the pre-written script of my experience.The language that I'd used to make sense of my abortion now seemed cold and distant: not my own.I could have framed my abortion choice differently (I didn't want to be pregnant so decided not to be), but at the time I didn't have the words.I searched online for abortion stories with similarly constructed narratives.The #ShoutYourAbortion hashtag brought up plenty, including: 'I could not have given that child the life it deserved.I would not have been the mother I want to be.#ShoutYourAbortion' and '18 & broke + pregnant = bad.Abortion + 3yrs later + married + stable job = a great life for my baby.#ShoutYourAbortion'. 5   Indeed, scholars have analysed stories collected on 'pro-choice' abortion storytelling sites for patterns in narratives, and particular framings of abortion come up again and again.Sarah Larissa Combellick (2021) has analysed how storytellers on the US platform My Abortion My Life use morality to explain their decision to have an abortion; Mallary Allen (2015), in her analysis of US website I'mNotSorry.net,suggests that storytellers often frame their decisions in the context of dominant 'middle-class values', such as the expectation to finish education or establish a career prior to parenthood; Andrea Becker (2019), through a study of stories from Tennessee, looks at how people employ their identity as a mother to dispel abortion stigma. 6  The ability to code abortion stories into certain narratives reveals the existence of dominant abortion discourses within 'pro-choice' spaces.Such formulaic stories can be common in social change movements, providing a narrative arc in which people identify and mould their own story (Allen, 2015).Certain rhetorical tropes become 'narrative building blocks' that are repeated and reproduced, especially as a cause gains public attention and narrative patterns become widespread (ibid., p. 45).Those with experiences who don't neatly fit the narrative often emphasise the elements of their stories that align the most, which works to strengthen and normalise the narrative framework (ibid.).
So whilst the act of telling abortion stories might disrupt the silence that often surrounds abortion, the act, in itself, might not be enough to disrupt the stigma, as the story arcs in which experiences are told might simultaneously be strengthening the compulsory motherhood narratives (among others) that regulate abortion as shameful and bad.

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Where are the happy abortions?By proposing this question, I do not mean to suggest that the future should be one of happy abortions, rather that the future should be one where that possibility exists as 'normal'.Whilst Millar (2017) critiques the normative discourses that underpin the emotional script of (unhappy) abortion, she is not arguing for an abortion politics waged through recourse to a woman's (happy) emotions.This would undermine the structural issues that need addressing in relation to abortion provision and would serve to collapse the emotional experience into a naturalised female subject (whether happy or sad).It is important to acknowledge the heterogeneity of abortion seekers' lives, and so it is not the case of supplanting the idea of a sad or difficult abortion experience with a happy one-in fact, it is important that abortion-positive discourses embrace a multiplicity of experiences, including those characterised by sadness and grief, rather than erasing these emotions for fear of legitimising anti-abortion sentiment (see Jeanie Ludlow's [2021] discussion on the erasure of the foetus in pro-choice discourses)-it's about making the latter a possibility (Millar, 2017, pp. 277-278).
Within the telling and repetition of abortion stories, the dominant discourses-the underlying stigma and shame-can be reproduced, but they can also be destabilised.Sara Ahmed (2017, p. 30) observes how recent feminist strategies of online story sharing are a revival of second-wave feminist consciousnessraising tactics, which are about 'reaching a feminist account … with and through others'.Ahmed (ibid.)refers to these systems of depositing experiences as 'a feminist catalogue', and notes how the 'drip, drip' of stories slowly becomes a flood.Within the release of this flood, the process of repetition allows space for the '[r]econstituting possibility' (Butler, 1993, p. 10) that destabilises the naturalisation of sex within the constitution of abortion.For Millar (2017), this destabilisation depends on the dismantling of motherhood as the placeholder of women's happiness and a disruption of the emotions through which abortion is made intelligible.This destabilisation can pave the way towards an imagined otherwise where abortion can be made sense of in a multiplicity of ways: as sad, and/or difficult, and/or without regret and/or … happy.
The construction of this possibility is arguably already happening.Not all abortion stories follow the dominant script.The online platforms include stories that challenge the prevailing discourses.There are unapologetic stories.There are stories of happiness.Storytelling platforms themselves often promote a language for abortion that looks beyond the dominant scripts.Shout Your Abortion, for example, was set up following a viral social media post by Amelia Bonow (2018b, p. 3), which ended: 'having an abortion made me happy in a totally unqualified way.Why wouldn't I be happy that I was not forced to become a mother?'.This language is far from the mainstream, but the possibility of its expression suggests the workings of the 'reconstituting possibility' needed for space to open for a future otherwise.
an autotheoretical impulse: everyday theorising I realised I could say/feel it another way: I was unexpectedly pregnant and didn't want to be.Ahmed (2017, p. 30) also tells us that 'feminism involves a process of finding another way to live in a body'.She is suggesting that feminism involves learning to take up more space, but her words also make me think about how the destabilisation of abortion discourses-discourses so enmeshed in bodily experience-requires us to re-think, re-process or even re-inhabit our own bodies.Abortion storytelling can provide space for this re-inhabiting.By listening to others' stories or telling and re-telling our own, we can re-process our own experiences and find new vocabularies for them.In this sense, abortion storytelling can inhabit an 'autotheoretical impulse', an instinctive urge to think through concepts and politics via one's own bodily experience (see Fournier, 2021).Through an engagement with others' and our own abortion stories, we can theorise and re-theorise abortion and the gendered narratives that underpin it.This re-theorising is powerful in the story of US model Chrissy Teigan.In 2020, Teigan publicly revealed that she had lost a baby at 20 weeks due to a pregnancy complication.At the time, she described the experience as a miscarriage.But two years later, in the wake of the US Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v Wade and thus allow states to block abortion access, Teigan came to realise that she had actually had a life-saving abortion.Speaking at a conference in September 2022, Teigan said: 'I told the world we had a miscarriage, the world agreed we had a miscarriage, all the headlines said it was a miscarriage … and I [later] felt silly that it had taken me over a year to actually understand that we had had an abortion' (BBC, 2022).She went on: 'I fell silent, feeling weird that I hadn't made sense of it that way'.Through conversations around Roe v Wade, Teigan was able to re-process her experience, reconceptualising it as an abortion.Abortion campaigners congratulated her for sharing her story and 'changing the conversation around later abortion'. 7  The autotheoretical impulse inhabited in much abortion storytelling is theory-making at the everyday level; a theory-making that doesn't rely on an academic hierarchy of what counts as knowledge.Abortion storytelling holds the possibility of an organic knowledge production that centres those with experience.

polyvocal possibilities
Whilst a focus on the self in abortion storytelling is undeniably important, there are also tensions in the focus on individual experience.Storytelling from the viewpoint of the I can be silencing of others' experiences, unable to fully theorise on behalf of a collective.Take abortion storytelling platform The