I love this picture.  This is Linda Prine’s family: her sister, her parents, her sons, and her son’s girlfriend at the Physicians for Reproductive Choice and Health awards ceremony  They are so happy, beaming, full of pride, cheering Linda for being a leader and teacher of abortion care.

This is no small thing, having your family’s support for doing this work.   A couple of years ago a clinician we had highlighted in one of our early newsletters asked me to pull the newsletter from our website.  She had recently gotten engaged and was worried that her future father-in-law would Google her and find out from our newsletter that she provides abortions.  Last year I listened to a group of amazing family medicine residents describe how meaningful their abortion training was to them.  Several of them, close to tears, shared how much it hurt that they were unable to tell their friends and family about this important aspect of their work.   Another colleague in Virginia described to me how careful she is when talking about her work with the parents of her children’s friends.  This wasn’t a safety issue for her.  She worried her kids would be judged and harassed because of her work.

The stigma associated with abortion is so powerful in our country that even stating you’ve had an abortion has become a political act.  Coming out as an abortion provider even more so–you risk being ostracized socially and professionally and, in some parts of the country, your safety and the safety of your family is at stake.

We know that 1 in 3 women in the US have had an abortion, but stigma makes these women invisible.  Talking about abortion should be normal and mainstream.  Women should be able to get support from friends and family when they are making such an important medical decision.  Abortion should be commonly written about in novels and depicted on TV and in movies as the true part of our lives that it in fact is.  That is why I love campaigns like 1 in 3.  No one should be forced to talk about their abortion; but, if we all did, maybe it would finally be clear that the 1 in 3 are everywhere, that they are us.  In the meantime, thank goodness for Exhale and Backline for providing safe, stigma-free spaces to talk about abortion.  Thank goodness for researchers like Lisa Harris and Carol Joffee for their work exploring and writing about abortion stigma; and thank goodness for families like Linda’s, who stand up and cheer the great work abortion providers do.