The Abortion Project: What medical abortion really looks like

Brut America

Blood, joy, tears, relief ...   These photographers are documenting people's real stories of dealing with medical abortions.  This is The Abortion Project.

Transcript

00:00Abortion is liberation. It's freedom. It's a choice. It's hard. It's easy.

00:05It's an enigma. It's all of these things wrapped into one.

00:19The way that our society has depicted abortion, it has never been a liberation.

00:23It has always been stigmatized. Being a project that doesn't hold back, that shows the blood,

00:30shows the pain, really pulling back the curtain of what abortion really looks like,

00:35I feel like goes a long way in validating those feelings that people have had for centuries.

00:54During my abortion, I had doulas with me and one of them snapped pictures of my abortion experience

01:01and I was able to use those photographs to process my experience, to see things that I had missed,

01:08and to share my story when I was ready to do so. I had no idea what to expect when I was going into

01:14my abortion, and so we figured that if we were able to photograph people's medical abortions,

01:20that we would be able to put the pictures out into the world and let people know what to expect.

01:30We've seen lightheartedness, joking, fun, and then we've seen prayers, we've seen tears,

01:38we've seen regret, and some of those things are fleeting, but they're still present for some

01:43people. There's so many photographs that I love from the project. One specifically is a picture

01:50of a pregnant woman in a bathtub and she has a little whale on her water spout because it's the

01:57bathtub that she bathes her children in, and I think that that's really poignant because most

02:03people that have abortions are already parents, and that's a statistic that gets overlooked a lot

02:08of times. There's also one that sticks out that she's putting a heat pad on her stomach and smoking

02:14a blunt for pain management, and I think that that's just always an amazing photograph as well

02:20to show just the different types of relief that people can get from different types of things.

02:25We never see somebody that's happy to have an abortion. We never see somebody that's nonchalant

02:32about having an abortion or another abortion. We definitely hear it as like a one-and-done,

02:40kind of radical, last option, and I think that that's something that we've seen a lot of people

02:47have a hard time accepting.

03:10When I had my abortion, we felt that medical abortion specifically was not shown in the

03:15media. Pill abortions were not very well known at the time, and thankfully they're becoming more and

03:21more well known these days, especially with COVID and everything. One of the things that I wasn't

03:26prepared for was kind of the discomfort that you go through. You do have contraction-like pain,

03:34cramping. There's sometimes nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, things like that, that the medication

03:40can cause side effects from. But for the most part, it's a lot of waiting, you know? And I

03:45think that that was something that I wasn't quite prepared for either, that sometimes the medication

03:50comes into your body and then you just have to wait for the pregnancy to be expelled.

03:54We've never faced something like this with our rights being taken away before, so that's

04:12terrifying in and of itself. But I'm in a solid community of abortion providers that are prepared

04:23for this day, and I know that abortion's not going anywhere and that medical abortion by pills

04:29especially is safe. It's sad and terrifying that that is what it's come to, but I am glad that it

04:37is a safe option, that we're not in the clothes hanger days or the knitting needle days like

04:42that we were 50 years ago. So everything has moved forward, in my opinion, in a lot of ways,

04:50even though the Supreme Court is trying to pull us backwards.

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