As long as abortion remains stigmatised, there are going to be a lot of myths around the procedure is carried out. That’s basically why Emily Letts, a 25-year-old abortion counsellor from New Jersey, had her abortion filmed. Uploading the video to YouTube (and Vimeo), she set out to ‘inspire other women to stop the guilt’ they feel about abortions.
In the video, cut together from various testimonials and then actual (non-graphic) footage of her having the abortion, she says: ‘I’m not ready to have children… I’m OK because I feel completely comfortable with the decision. I’m supported by everyone. I just want to show my story, to show women that there is such thing as a positive abortion story.’ It’s since had over 30,000 views.
As comments under the video become increasingly hateful, she wrote an essay for Cosmopolitan to explain why she decided to film it and to put out her not-so-crazy notion – that women shouldn’t feel guilty about their abortions – out there.
‘I feel like I talk to women all the time and they’re like: "Of course everyone’s gonna feel guilty,” as if it’s a given how people should feel about this, that what they’re doing is wrong,' she explains about the video, which doesn’t show anything below the waist, simply Emily’s upper body as she hums her way through the pain. 'I don’t feel like a bad person, I don’t feel sad. I feel in awe of the fact that I can make a baby, I can make a life. I knew what I can do is right because it was right for me and no one else.'
Emily’s decision to have the abortion was immediate – she hadn’t been using birth control, she wasn’t in any sort of long-term relationship and she simply ‘wasn’t ready to have a baby.’ She later realised she could use her own experience to help when talking to her patients. The decision to film it was a bit more drawn out, though. Inspired by Angie AntiTheist, a YouTuber who had filmed her medical abortion – the one where you take a pill – she trawled the internet for videos of surgical abortions (where the foetus is removed using implements by a doctor in a clinic) and found very little. ‘We talk about abortion so much and yet no one really knows what it actually looks like,’ she wrote.
So she had hers filmed. ‘I could have taken the pill, but I wanted to do the one that women were most afraid of. I wanted to show it wasn’t scary – and that there is such a thing as a positive abortion story. It’s my story,’ she wrote.
Despite the ‘tsunami of hate’ she’s received since uploading the video (and now a second time round since writing about the video), she’s had a huge crest of support, especially from other women who have been made to feel ‘great remorse’ about getting an abortion. ‘Even women who come to the clinic completely solid in their decision to have an abortion say they feel guilty for not feeling guilty,’ she says.
And if Emily feels bad about anything, it’s for not using birth control. ‘I do feel a little irresponsible and embarrassed about not using birth control. I mean, Emily, wake up! What are you doing?’ she writes, before admitting that she had the coil fitted after the termination.
Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophwilkinson
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.