Online abortion rights fight comes at a cost

Woman goes public to face stigma, then goes into hiding

SEATTLE — Amelia now is in hiding.

She left her apartment here after her address was published online and the death threats began. Her crime? She had an abortion. And after the House of Representatives voted on Sept. 18 to defund Planned Parenthood, she updated her Facebook status with a proud declaration.

“Hi guys!” it began. “Like a year ago I had an abortion at the Planned Parenthood on Madison Avenue, and I remember this experience with a nearly inexpressible level of gratitude.”

She wrote about how “the narrative of those working to defund Planned Parenthood relies on the assumption that abortion is still something to be whispered about.” She signed off, “#ShoutYourAbortion.” And a movement was born.

Breast cancer had Betty Ford. So did rehab, and suddenly it was socially acceptable to get treatment for alcoholism. Katie Couric had a colonoscopy on national television 15 years ago, and screenings for colon cancer jumped 20 percent. But since the Supreme Court legalized abortion in 1973, the controversial medical procedure has been without a recognizable champion.

Standing up

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The stigma surrounding abortion has kept most women quiet about their need for and use of the procedure. Few celebrities have jumped into the fray to publicly advocate for abortion rights by telling their own stories. Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Calif., is the rare politician who has told the world that she once had the procedure; she did so in 2011, during an earlier fight to cut funding to the health care provider Planned Parenthood.

Republican Rep. Chris Smith of New Jersey had just detailed on the floor of Congress how a second-trimester abortion looks on an ultrasound. Speier got up and declared that “the gentleman from New Jersey has just put my stomach in knots.”

“I’m one of ‘those women’ he spoke about just now,” she said. “But for you to stand on this floor and suggest, as you have, that somehow this is a procedure that is either welcomed or done cavalierly without any thought is preposterous.”

That 2011 battle led to a Planned Parenthood campaign with the hashtag #StandWithPP, which has been resurrected this year as the health care provider came under attack when a video campaign surfaced this summer accusing the health care provider of selling aborted fetal tissue for research. The organization roundly denies that claim. The group launched another effort this week — #PinkOut — which coincided with Cecile Richards, the group’s president, going before Congress in a testy five-hour hearing.

But none of these efforts have garnered the attention — both good and bad — that followed Bonow’s Facebook revelations and the #ShoutYourAbortion campaign she created with another Seattle resident, columnist Lindy West.

Bonow calls herself a “liberal, pro-choice, loud, political woman” who is surrounded by a community of like-minded people, West among them. As the assaults on Planned Parenthood continued this year, she said, she and her friends realized that the abortion provider was still being threatened with losing its funding four years after the original campaign, and many women who’d had abortions hadn’t even talked about it to one another.

“We’re all women who think that stigmatizing abortion is wrong,” she said in a telephone interview from the city to which she decamped from Seattle after the threats began last week. (She requested it not be named.) “We don’t ascribe to it, and yet, in some way we have colluded with our silence.”

Left in tears

On the day the House voted, Bonow went to bed in tears. The next morning she woke up, called up her Facebook page and began to write the post to her 1,500 friends. West, who has more than 60,000 Twitter followers, tweeted the link to Bonow’s declaration.

Responses began to flood in, and Bonow followed her initial post with another: “This is what it looks like when people decide to challenge an oppressive narrative by raising their own voices and choosing to accept a new level of personal vulnerability as a sacrifice,” she wrote.

Not long after #ShoutYourAbortion began, the threats started flowing.

Bonow and her boyfriend spent several nights in a Seattle hotel. They headed out of town, returned and left again because she felt so unsafe.

On Tuesday, she got a call from David Hale, vice president of development at Planned Parenthood of the Great Northwest and the Hawaiian Islands, expressing concern for her safety.

He put her in touch with Planned Parenthood’s security guru, who connected her with the Seattle Police Department and the FBI. The hope is that they can help her assess the level of threat and that she can soon come home.