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| When human life is treated like dirt! |
Psa 94:3 "LORD, how long shall the wicked,
how long shall the wicked triumph?"
Psa 119:53 "Horror hath taken hold upon me
because of the wicked that forsake thy law"
Full article: http://www.malaysia-chronicle.com/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=298432:shocking-woman-films-her-own-abortion&Itemid=4#ixzz3479d215r
It takes 37 seconds and four cutaways for Emily Letts to explain she’s having an abortion. First the fresh-faced American is in a car, sans make-up, vulnerable, before the scene switches and we see her dressed up, and smiling at the camera. Then she’s in a dark room. The footage is grainy, like it’s being filmed on a smartphone. Finally, Letts is sitting in what looks like her living room. The shot is a close-up, the atmosphere almost confessional. “Hi”, she says to the camera, breathlessly, before explaining that she’s a counsellor working in a US abortion clinic and she’s pregnant. Suddenly Letts is walking into a procedure room in a surgical gown and hat, ready to have a termination.
The three minute long non-graphic video was uploaded to YouTube in March, and went viral after winning an award for breaking abortion stigma. For some, it is a taboo-breaking, stigma-busting triumph for the pro-choice movement. US website Feministing called it an “important, useful intervention” and praised Letts for helping to demystify abortion. Predictably, pro-life bloggers are up in arms, with some calling Letts - who let’s remember is only 25 - a “witch from hell”. For me, it’s an awkward and uncomfortable watch - there is barely a second of the video that did not make me squirm.
EMILY'S ABORTION VIDEO
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Whatever you make of it, almost everyone has an opinion. The furore has prompted Letts to write an article in this month’s Cosmopolitan – which has kick-started the whole debate again. She explains that as she was in the first trimester of pregnancy she could have taken the abortion pill but instead decided to have a surgical termination with local anaesthetic to “show it wasn’t scary”.
As for her reason for taping the procedure? We have now learned that Letts wanted to show “there is such a thing as a positive abortion story”, plus she couldn’t find a video online of the procedure that focused on “the woman’s experience”. “We talk about abortion so much and yet no one really knows what it actually looks like”, she explained.
But Letts’s video is not what an abortion looks like. This is termination as performance. It’s stylised, editorialised - there’s even a folk song playing in the background while she undergoes the procedure. After it’s over, Letts tells medical staff “you guys are my heroes” before looking straight up at the camera, right at her viewers.
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I am passionately pro-choice (so much so that a friend once jokingly referred to me as ‘the terminator’) and believe women can only be free when they are in control of their own fertility. I support Letts’s choice, and the choices of millions of women like her around the globe. But that doesn't mean I need to applaud her video stunt. A positive abortion story isn't about filming the procedure or doing a piece to camera a month later saying you have no regrets - it’s about the rest of the life you make for yourself afterwards.
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Sure, Letts must have (figurative) balls of steel to put her abortion online and open herself up to the wrath of the pro-life movement. She has certainly sparked a debate. But do we really need to go to these lengths to talk about abortion in 2014? Plus I don’t want to see footage to demystify the process of termination, just like I do not need to watch someone else having a root canal on YouTube before going to the dentist. For those interested in breaking taboos Education for Choice, part of the young people’s sexual health charity Brook, is doing great work on abortion stigma without (to my knowledge) filming anyone in stirrups.
