The abortion advocate from whom the hashtag #shoutyourabortion emanated, who also has since founded a group of the same name, is now in the midst of an “abortion storytelling tour” throughout the Bible Belt in an effort to claim that “abortion is normal” and to urge mothers who ended their children’s lives to tell their abortion story.
“Join Amelia Bonow (#ShoutYourAbortion) and Poppy Liu (Collective Sex) for an evening of abortion storytelling, art, and conversation,” the event webpage states. “Poppy and Amelia will talk about their approaches to creative abortion storytelling as activism and power.”
The outline further details that Bonow will speak on “the emergence and evolution of #ShoutYourAbortion, which evolved from a viral hashtag into a full-fledged movement,” and Liu will discuss “how being a queer first-generation yellow-american woman of color influenced her abortion story.” Liu will recite poetry and show her film “Names of Women,” in which she recalls her own abortion in 2015 at the Margaret Sanger Planned Parenthood in New York.
Both women will then “facilitate a talkback about why changing the way we talk about abortion has the power to change lives and legislation.”
While the tour is primarily focused on influencing the Bible Belt, being called the “Bible Belt Abortion Storytelling Tour,” it also has stops in the Northeast. Bonow and Lui have already taken their activism to Charis Books in Atlanta, Georgia, Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey, and the LGBT Center in the nation’s capital, and are expected to appear at The Pinhook in Durham, North Carolina this evening.
In the days ahead, the abortion advocates will make tour stops at Firestorm Cafe & Books in Asheville, North Carolina, Mudlark Public Theatre in New Orleans, Louisiana and the Civic Media Center in Gainesville, Florida.
According to the site Gambit, which interviewed Bonow, “Shout Your Abortion’s work … is based around the idea that abortion is very common … and pins distributed at its events say ‘Abortion Is Normal.'”
“Because of the deep polarization and politicization surrounding abortion as an issue, women often do not feel able to talk about their abortion experiences and process them in the way they would with almost any other life experience,” the site said. “The culture of silence prevents women from sharing abortion experiences both good and bad, and keeps discussions about the reality of abortion planted in the rhetorical and theoretical, rather than the personal.”
However, one commenter under the report noted, from a different viewpoint, that proclaiming the truth about abortion could open some women’s eyes.
“[T] he truth will set people free. Believing big people can attain benefits by spilling the blood of little unwanted people is demonic,” wrote Jeriah Knox. “Abortion is murder, fuelled and driven by man’s lust.”
“It is time to deal with the truth that unrestrained wicked men, as the bigger stronger bodies, will keep abortion around just as long as they keep pornography around and for the same reasons,” he opined. “Abortion rights make women cheap, accessible, and exchangeable, with no commitments, no responsibilities, and no bother to be considerate of her physiology.”
As previously reported, according to its annual report, Planned Parenthood performed 321,384 abortions during the 2016-2017 fiscal year. The organization’s founder, Margaret Sanger, was a staunch advocate of eugenics, and made a correlation between birth control and the purification of the races, referring to those with disabilities as being “morons,” “idiots” and “imbeciles.”
“Birth control itself, often denounced as a violation of natural law, is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit, of preventing the birth of defectives or of those who will become defectives,” she wrote in “Woman and the New Race.” “If we are to make racial progress, this development of womanhood must precede motherhood in every individual woman.”
“The emergency problem of segregation and sterilization must be faced immediately,” Sanger also contended in her publication “The Pivot of Civilization.” “Every feeble-minded girl or woman of the hereditary type, especially of the moron class, should be segregated during the reproductive period. Otherwise, she is almost certain to bear imbecile children, who in turn are just as certain to breed other defectives.”
She similarly decried what she characterized as women serving as “incubators” in a “male dominated civilization.”
“Woman’s role has been that of an incubator and little more. She has given birth to an incubated race,” Sanger claimed in “Woman and the New Race.” “In the mass, she has brought forth quantity, not quality. The requirement of a male dominated civilization has been numbers. She has met that requirement.”
“This is the dawn. Womanhood shakes off its bondage. It asserts its right to be free. In its freedom, its thoughts turn to the race. Like begets like. We gather perfect fruit from perfect trees,” she said. “The relentless efforts of reactionary authority to suppress the message of birth control and of voluntary motherhood are futile. The powers of reaction cannot now prevent the feminine spirit from breaking its bonds. ”
Proverbs 6:17 says that God despises “hands that shed innocent blood.”