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Shout Your Abortion, also known as #ShoutYourAbortion, is a hashtag and social media campaign used on Twitter that encourages women who have experience with abortion to break the silence surrounding it. The Shout Your Abortion campaign was started on September 19, 2015, by American activists: Lindy West, Amelia Bonow, and Kimberly Morrison, in response to the US House of Representatives efforts to defund Planned Parenthood following the Planned Parenthood 2015 undercover videos controversy. After Amelia Bonow posted a Facebook status on September 19, 2015 about having received an abortion and why she did so, Lindy West shared this post along with the hashtag #ShoutYourAbortion. The hashtag has received both positive and negative attention within social media and the mainstream press.

Heavy scrutiny of Planned Parenthood was prompted by this controversy regarding the undercover videos that were released by anti-abortion activists who claimed that the organization was selling fetal tissue from abortions for profit--a claim which Planned Parenthood strongly denied. While Planned Parenthood is prohibited from using federal money for their abortion services, these videos as well as the long lasting pro-life vs. pro-choice abortion debate fueled the move towards defunding the organization.

The hashtag and campaign received a great deal of positive attention on Twitter and across the media, yet was also met with heavy criticism and opposition from anti-abortion activists. While many used the hashtag to tweet stories of relief and increased opportunity resulting from abortions, the hashtag was also used to criticize the campaign and question its purpose. Other hashtags like #ShoutYourAdoption where people tweeted stories of having lived through attempted abortions and #PPSellsBabyParts were created by pro-life supporters in response to #ShoutYourAbortion.

Abortion Stigma
There is a long history of the abortion debate in the United States as well as many past attempts to legally restrict contraception and abortion in the US; with this history has also come significant stigmatization. The cultural stigma surrounding abortion did not end nor slightly dissipate when abortion was made legal in the United States in 1973. One out of five women in the US has had a legal abortion during their reproductive years, 1.2 million women have an abortion in the US every year, and half of unintended pregnancies end in abortion. Despite these significant numbers, many women in the United States keep the procedure a secret to avoid being stigmatized, devalued, and ostracized by others in a society debating over the morality and legality of abortion. Fifty percent of US citizens equate abortion to murdering a child, even people who have close relationships with someone who received an abortion. Thus, women fear social disapproval and rarely speak of or disclose their abortion experiences. Not only do a substantial amount of Americans merely believe abortion is morally wrong, but negativity around the subject is often linked with ethnicity and religious affiliation especially with those identifying as Latino or white Catholic or white evangelical Christian. Women who have directly experienced abortion are not the only targets of its stigma and social disapproval. Those working as abortion providers, abortion clinic employees, and even abortion and pro-choice advocates are targeted by stigmatization.

There may be some immediate, short-term benefits to keeping an abortion a secret such as avoiding stigma, conflict, and social disapproval--all injurious to mental health--as well as preserving interpersonal relationships and networks of support that may be threatened by disclosing the information. However, staying silent about and concealing an abortion experience, as well as any other emotionally stressful and traumatic event, also has very detrimental long-term effects on a person such as poor physical health, distress, and other psychological problems. There have been a number of studies that have shown that disclosing stressor-related and traumatic events improves physical and mental health by reducing intrusive thoughts. The #ShoutYourAbortion social media campaign recognizes the heavy stigma surrounding abortion and the pressure on women to conceal their abortion experiences. To promote expression of emotion and reasoning deemed unacceptable by society, #ShoutYourAbortion encourages loud, shameless vocalizations of abortion stories and their beneficial after effects on women's lives through social media.

Defunding Planned Parenthood
Planned Parenthood has a history of being controversial because it is associated with sex, contraception, and abortion. From its inception as a small birth control organization called the American Birth Control League in 1916 that only lasted 9 days before it was shut down, the organization has received constant criticism and faced the possibility of government defunding for the first time since being legalized in 2011 and then again in 2015. On September 18, 2015, the U.S House of Representatives passed legislation to suspend funding of Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) for one year, pending investigation of allegations regarding PPFA’s practices with respect to fetal organ and tissue donation. The vote to temporarily stop funding arose when the organization was accused of selling (and profiting from) fetal tissue from abortions for research.

Planned Parenthood is deemed by many as primarily providing abortion services when in reality only 3 percent of such services make up the organization's offered aid. The organization is prohibited from using federal money for abortions, using it instead on the remaining 97 percent and majority of services the organization provides: PAP smears, STI screenings, mammograms, family planning, immunizations, and cancer screenings. Many supporters of Planned Parenthood have argued that defunding the organization will merely stop safe abortions instead of putting an end to abortion in general.

Purpose and Content
On September 19, 2015, the day after the passing of legislation suspending funding of Planned Parenthood, Amelia Bonow turned to social media, speaking out in defense of the organization on her Facebook page:

“Like a year ago I had an abortion at the Planned Parenthood on Madison Ave, and I remember this experience with a near inexpressible level of gratitude ... I am telling you this today because the narrative of those working to defund Planned Parenthood relies on the assumption that abortion is still something to be whispered about. Plenty of people still believe that on some level – if you are a good woman – abortion is a choice which should be accompanied by some level of sadness, shame or regret. But you know what? I have a good heart and having an abortion made me happy in a totally unqualified way. Why wouldn’t I be happy that I was not forced to become a mother?”

Two other activists, Lindy West and Kimberly Morrison became involved. West took a screen shot of Bonow’s Facebook post, added the hashtag #ShoutYourAbortion, and then sent Bonow’s Facebook post out to her over 60,000 Twitter followers. An image of Kimberly Morrison's unshaved armpit with a tattoo that reads "fuck the Patriarchy" was used as the logo for the Shout Your Abortion social media campaign. Lindy West, Amelia Bonow, and Kimberly Morrison encouraged other women to share positive abortion experiences online using the hashtag #ShoutYourAbortion in order to “denounce the stigma surrounding abortion.”  The hashtag #ShoutYourAbortion soon trended worldwide, including in the US, Australia, UK, South Africa, and Ireland. On September 22, 2015 the #ShoutYourAbortion hashtag was used over 100,000 times in a 24 hour period.

Within days of Lindy West's tweet of Bonow's Facebook post as well as her own tweeted contribution of her own abortion story and how it allowed her to build a career and care for her children, tens of thousands of other women worldwide shared their personal abortion experiences. Women tweeted their reasons for having had abortions: no desire to have children, getting back on track to finish college, busy pursuing a career, and wanting to build a steady life before becoming a mother. Some also tweeted that they had had an abortion and that was it, there was no explanation or justification necessary. Planned Parenthood's president, Cecile Richards, and executive vice present, Dawn Laguens, publicly supported the Shout Your Abortion social media campaign on Twitter, praising West's and Bonow's efforts.

Criticism and Backlash
As much support and positive feedback the hashtag has received, it has also drawn criticism and backlash within the realm of social media and through cultural stigmatization. The hashtag quickly became part of the greater Abortion debate as Anti-abortion activists and pro-life supporters also began using the #ShoutYourAbortion hashtag alongside the stories in support of abortion and the right to choose to have one. Conservative blogger Michelle Malkin urged her Twitter followers to "Shout this LOUDER: #PPSellsBabyParts.” Pro-life activist Gianna Jessen tweeted that she had lived through and been born during a saline abortion. Former Republican member of the House of Representatives, and 2012 presidential candidate Michele Bachmann posted a tweet relating the campaign Macabre. Other tweets criticized the campaign for empowering women for making mistakes and having someone else pay for them, modern feminism, and likened Shout Your Abortion to genocide. Some users on Twitter who identified as pro-choice questioned the approach. Users tweeted about how abortion was a difficult decision but that it shouldn't be tweeted about, how women should celebrate womanhood in different ways than the Shout Your Abortion campaign, and how abortion was not something to publicly brag or boast about. In response to online criticism, actress Martha Plimpton, co-founder of the pro-choice organization "A is for" created two “Mean Tweets” videos titled "Abortion Tweet Theater" along with comedian Margaret Cho and other prominent contributors to the Shout Your Abortion social media campaign. The videos show the women “laughing off the trolls” on Twitter. Critical tweets included threats, references to racism, and calling the women “baby killers.” Co-creater Amelia Bonow also received violent threats on Twitter and, after her building name was made publicized, left her home in Seattle for safety reasons. Not only have threats arisen on social media towards Amelia Bonow, Lindy West, and other women tweeting with the #ShoutYourAbortion hashtag, but anti-abortion violence is and has been a very real threat to supporters of the right to choose to have an abortion around the world. Abortion clinics across the US have suffered 300 acts of violence in the past two decades and an increased wave of anti-abortion violence took place starting in the 1990s.

Media Attention
Media responses to the Shout Your Abortion social media campaign were mixed. Mic.com, a media company focused on Millennials described Twitter users in support of Shout Your Abortion as brave and inspiring while the The Blaze, a conservative news outlet stated its support of the stigma associated with abortion and commented on the lack of morality and humanity of ending human life by means of abortion. Writing for The Guardian, Shout Your Abortion co-founder Lindy West said, "there are no 'good' abortions and 'bad' abortions, because an abortion is just a medical procedure" and “a Foetus is not a person.” Ian O’Doherty writing for The Irish Independent commented on the social media campaign saying abortion is not something to be shouted about and described abortion as “the only medical procedure which deliberately ends a life,” saying it can at best be described as “a necessary evil.” Yet he also voiced a pro-choice position, supporting the belief that access to abortion should be legal, safely done, and infrequent. Writing for The Seattle Times, Nicole Brodeur compared abortion to "political football," calling the Shout Your Abortion campaign a "Hail Mary pass" to state that women sharing very personal medical decisions to the world was a desperate attempt to fight for what the campaign deems as a woman's right. Shout Your Abortion co-founder Amelia Bonow summarized the social media campaign by commenting on opposers' inability to "shut us up" because “there are too goddamned many of us and you cannot reverse a viral shift in cultural consciousness.“ Co-founder Lindy West said that getting the discussion out in public is the whole point of the social media campaign, asserting that a woman should never feel ashamed of having an abortion or of any personal medical decisions and that such decisions can be spoken--not whispered about--and shared without shame.