Abortion Blogging Angie does softball interview
For those of you still wondering why Angie tweeted her abortion, she gives us a glimpse:
JACKSON: …. I’m a blogger, and I’m actually writing a book, ‘Birth and Death: Life of a Newborn Cult’ about my experiences, and I talk about a lot of controversial or hot button issues every day.
Translation: It was a publicity stunt to plug my book that I’m writing.
JACKSON: Well, when I had my son, who is four now, I had a tremendously difficult pregnancy and 98-hour back labor, and my doctors advised me to avoid becoming pregnant again, which is why I had an IUD inserted in my cervix.
What doctor allows a patient to be in labor for 98 hours? Hello? Is this 1810? Either Angie’s doctor is a quack or Angie’s stretching the truth a tad here.
And there’s a world of difference between “my doctors advised me to avoid becoming pregnant again” and “pregnancy is life-threatening for me”. My best friend had life-threatening pregnancies. Her doctors pushed for tubal ligation.
And IUDs are inserted into the uterus, not left in the cervix. Again, either Angie’s doctor is a quack or Angie can’t get her facts straight.
JACKSON: I had prepared that if I became pregnant anyway, I would have an abortion because the risks were too high for me to continue a pregnancy.
Translation: I knew if I got pregnant I’d just kill the baby. No biggie, right?
PHILLIPS: As you well know, we’ve been looking at all the various comments, both negative and positive to what you did, and these are really harsh. But people wrote in and said- they called you all kinds of names, from being a whore to someone who just couldn’t keep her legs closed. They called you a baby killer. I mean, it’s even hard for me to say these things because some of those- the e-mails and the responses were so brutal. How did that make you feel? Did that bother you? Did it make you think twice about what you did?
JACKSON: Actually, if anything, it showed me more how important it is to talk about taboo things or to talk about personal things.
Translation: I hit the attention-whore jackpot.
JACKSON: …. One- about half of American women will have an unintended pregnancy before the age of 45, and one in three American women will have an abortion sometime during their childbearing years. And yet, this is something we almost never talk about, or at least we talk about the political aspects, but not the individual women.
Translation: I’ve been living in a cave for the past ten years. Or I’ve just been too wrapped up in myself to notice that the internet is crammed to the electronic rafters with first person abortion accounts, including women blogging their abortion. Naw, let’s be honest. I knew the “blog my abortion” thing had been done to death — ha! — so I had to up the ante a bit if I was going to generate publicity for my book.
JACKSON: ….Some of the heat that I’ve gotten has certainly showed me what the cost of that silence is, is that when a woman does want to discuss it, she’s- the reaction is quite strong.
The reaction wasn’t the cost of silence, Angie. It was the cost of shooting your mouth off. “Oh, my baby is dying inside me even as I speak. And I think that’s just about the coolest thing ever. Eat shit, prolifers!” And plenty of them took the bait. And this is surprising?
PHILLIPS: Final question: what made you decide to do the RU- 486? Is that something you discussed with your boyfriend? How quick did you make that decision? Why that route?
JACKSON: Sure. I investigated – I looked at a couple of websites, one of which is imnotsorry.net, which includes a lot of personal abortion stories, and I read how different women had felt.
Translation: What I said before about the silence on this issue? That was total bullshit. I knew the net was full of first person abortion stories. I had to think of a way to trump all those stories and get the spotlight on the center of the universe, namely ME!
JACKSON: I thought that the RU-486 abortion-by-pill at home would be a more natural and comfortable experience.
1. Punk’d!
2. Frankly, I think you chose chemical abortion as part of the publicity plan. Tweeting a surgical abortion would have meant that you’d be on your Blackberry while you were in the stirrups. Much easier to tweet at home.
