‘I felt I couldn’t tell anyone’: The stigma of abortion keeps women silent. It’s time for us to shout

In January 2020, a few months before we found ourselves in the first national lockdown, I had an abortion.

I’m not unusual. Research conducted by MSI Reproductive Choices tells us that one in three women in the UK will have at least one abortion by the time they are 45 years old. Like a lot of us, I’ve read this statistic a lot over the last few months on social media, as abortion laws across the world have come increasingly into the spotlight.

There’s been the overturning of Roe v Wade in the United States, the recent marches in Poland after a woman who was five months pregnant died of sepsis following the tightening of their restrictive laws, and here in the UK, a mother of three sentenced to more than two years in prison for obtaining drugs to have an abortion after the legal cut-off.

But there are other statistics that came out of theMSI Reproductive Choices research which I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. Only 33 per cent of UK women would tell their family if they were considering an abortion, only one in three would tell their friends, and just 62 per cent would tell their sexual partner. And 6 per cent of women would choose not to tell anybody at all, except a medical professional. Yet 92 per cent of women in the UK identify as pro-choice. To me, this disparity is frightening.

I wish I had known these statistics before I left the clinic on that cold January afternoon, because despite being in the company of a beautiful friend, who sang to me on the long drive home, I had never felt more alone.

Increasingly, over the following weeks, which saw me in hospital with serious complications, I felt I couldn’t speak to anyone about my experience. Only a couple of people in my whole life knew about my abortion, and I found it hard to describe how I felt even to those people.

They had supported me in the run-up to the procedure, and both of them had made the journey to Liverpool with me – one physically with me in the car, and one continually present on the other end of the phone.

The reason I felt tongue-tied was complex: I worried that because we were proudly in the 92 per cent of pro-choice women, they would think badly of me for feeling depressed and experiencing grief. Outside of the people who knew, I was frightened of upsetting or offending someone – even women friends I knew and loved well.

I found this silence and stigma debilitating. I was used to sharing everything with my friends – they’ve saved me on a regular basis. Without them, I would be worse off in just about every way. They’ve helped me through divorce, grief, broken hearts, child illnesses, career crises, and on and on.

Yet never have I felt less able to access that support network, than during my abortion experience. I was afraid of who to tell: of how they would react and what they would think of me.

When my isolation got too much – and I finally started to open up to more people about what had been going on for me – I found the responses both profound and surprising: “I’ve had one too”; “It took me decades to get over the guilt”; “I’ve never told anyone before.”

These were women I considered to be close friends. We talked openly about everything from sex to death and back again; we had watched each other’s children grow up and supported each other through so much over the years. And yet I had absolutely no idea how many of them had been in my position.

Abortion, it seems, is the one thing women don’t know how or if they can talk to each other about – and the consequences of this can be devastating.

In the months following my abortion, I began to use my experience in my work as a poet and focus on the silence and shame I had experienced. In the end I went the other way. I spoke about abortion all the time. I considered every time I spoke about it to be an act of defiance. Of compassion. Of connection.

I wrote a collection of poetry and got onto a PhD programme to research ways of communicating experiences that carry with them inherited silence and shame.

At every poetry reading I’ve done since, I’ve had women come up to me to share their abortion experiences. For some of them, it’s the only time they’ve spoken about it. Some of them have been silent and living with the shame and stigma for decades. Whole lifetimes.

All of this may sound like a throwback to a patriarchal 1950s society, but the suppression of women’s voices and stories is as real today as it was then. In fact, as part of my PhD research I’ve spent time going through archives looking at the history of abortion reform.

I’ve found letters and hand-drawn posters written by women from the 1950s onwards calling for the right to decide what happens to their own bodies. I find it chilling every time I look at them. I can’t believe we’ve been fighting this battle for so long – but it’s a battle we must continue to fight for all the best reasons. Decriminalising abortion would allow the shame surrounding the experience to slowly be reduced.

Why is this so important? Well, the problem with shame is that it is a slow-rotting chemical that eats into a person and the fabric of the world around them. If you are ashamed of something, you’re not likely to seek support. And lack of support can be devastating.

What strikes me most is the sorrowful, shame-filled implications of the silence in those MSI Reproductive Choices statistics. With so few women feeling able to talk about their experiences, any understanding of the complex, nuanced and entirely human emotions concerning the abortion experience get trampled by the hotly contested sides of the political opinion box.

This division continues to mean that women have little comfortable space to move in. If you have an abortion and then feel regret or guilt or grief, you worry about upsetting the pro-abortion sides of the box, and if you have an abortion and feel a sense of celebratory relief you are charged with guilt by the anti-abortion sides. (Of course the reality is that a lot of people feel a shifting combination of all those things.)

What’s clear to me is that as we get increasingly lost in the rhetoric and politics of the abortion box, we are in ever greater danger of eroding what little ability women have to talk to and support each other through the abortion experience. And most of us know just how crucial the support of other women is to our physical and mental health and wellbeing.

Whether you were marching in the recent BPAS protest supporting the decriminalisation of abortion, whether you were watching, furious that such a thing was being supported, or whether you were somewhere in between, perhaps we could all do with remembering that on that day, the same as on every day, almost 600 women in the UK were having an abortion and going on to deal with the aftermath.

If you are reading this thinking you don’t know a woman who’s had an abortion, think again. The chances are much more likely that you just don’t know one who’s told you about it.

Amelia Loulli is completing a PhD in poetry at Newcastle University. Her first poetry collection, ‘Slip’, will be published in 2024 with Jonathan Cape