Roads Taken and Not Taken: Emily Letts '11

In December of 2012, I filmed my own abortion. Afterwards, Cosmopolitan did an interview with me about my experience and I became the topic of international headlines. Today I am a graduate student, a feminist, a founder of the web campaign NotAlone.US, and a reproductive rights activist.

During my time in college, I felt that Haverford and I never really understood each other. I wanted to be an actress, while Haverford wanted me to be in the sciences. I took most of my classes at Swarthmore, and the rest at Bryn Mawr. By sophomore year, I was working as a professional actress in Philadelphia.

After graduation, I devoted all of my energy to my acting career. However, after four years I finally had to admit how miserable I had grown. The entertainment industry feeds off of images and stereotypes. As an actress, being successful meant nourishing these caustic fallacies by manufacturing my own image. I am sorry to say my misguided understanding of success only amplified lifelong body insecurities and left me with a nasty eating disorder. Counting calories came easier to me than telling time, and looking in the mirror naked was a daily masochistic ritual. I would love to say these tendencies made me an anomaly in our culture, but the truth is, as women our duty as faithful participants in consumerist America is to hate our bodies. The guilt we inhale is our worst enemy, yet we are barely aware of its presence.

Everything changed for me when a friend shared her experiences as a doula—a person who acts as a support during a woman's labor and after she brings her baby home. I became obsessed with birth. For the first time, I understood the biological purpose of my body. The fat that sits below my belly button wasn't something that could ruin my day any longer, but rather the evolutionary bubble wrap between my uterus and the external world. My uterus wasn't there to embarrass me monthly with horrific mood swings and tampon strings, but to create life. I realized how magical my body was and that selling its image to a room full of men behind a table wasn't my purpose.

Soon enough, I stopped acting and began concentrating all of my attention on helping women cultivate healthy relationships with their bodies. This is how I became a counselor at Cherry Hill Women's Center, an abortion clinic in New Jersey. I learned that one in three women will have an abortion by the age of 45 and that most of these women feel completely alone during the process. I provided a safe space for these women to feel confident with whichever reproductive choice was best for them, whether that was parenting, adoption, or abortion. Some of my greatest memories involved hugs I received from women who decided, in the end, to go through with their pregnancies and become parents. Yet I also deeply cherished holding women's hands as I walked them back to the operating room. I loved that job with all of my heart.

After a year of counseling women on safe sex, I found myself in the staff bathroom holding my own positive pregnancy test. It's hard to describe the feelings that flooded through me as I stared down at the two pink lines. A tornado of disbelief, fear, and wonder ripped through my mind, spinning me into chaos. After the seconds passed and I caught my breath, I knew immediately that I was not ready to give birth.

There is so much misinformation around abortion, so when I realized I was going to have one myself I saw an opportunity to try to change things. The lies that have been spread about abortion are dangerous and harmful. They are masked as“fact” when there is no science behind them. The fact is that abortion is one of the safest and most common outpatient surgeries for women in the United States. A first-trimester abortion takes three to five minutes, and the greatest risk is infection, which is under 3 percent.

Working as a counselor at the women's center, I remember the first time a woman started to cry after I told her that she would still be able to have children after her abortion. Carrying to term would have been devastating for her life at that time, yet she desperately wanted to be a mother in the future. I handed her a tissue while she sobbed,“Thank you, thank you.” I also remember the first time a woman looked at me in shock when I told her it was not mandatory that she feel guilty about her abortion. She was a mother of two and had undergone a previous abortion in her teens. She told me she thought she had been“emotionally broken” for 15 years because she never felt guilty about it.

At first I was going to write a blog about my experience, marking each stage of the journey. However, my executive director told me to look up a woman on YouTube who filmed herself having a medical abortion—after taking the pill RU486. In the video she said she had been so scared to go through with it because of all the misinformation on the internet. A lightbulb went on in my head, and I knew that I was going to do something audacious. I wanted to film the entire abortion, interspersed with interviews with myself throughout the process, and put it on YouTube to try to demystify this very safe and common procedure.

Two weeks later, I had a first-trimester abortion at my clinic. Having an abortion in America is generally not an easy process. As the war over reproductive freedom rages on, a woman's experience with abortion can be traumatic. This was not my experience. On the day of my procedure, as I set up my cheap camera next to the surgical table, I realized I had a whole room full of people who cared about me. I felt so supported throughout the entire process. After talking with hundreds of women about their experiences, I knew, sadly, this was very rare.

I had no idea how drastically my life would change once Cosmopolitan published my first-person account,“Why I Filmed My Abortion,” on the magazine's website. Over the course of two weeks, I was interviewed by more than 30 media outlets from around the world. Most interviewers salivated over the idea of the death threats, hate mail, and danger that came from publicly showing my abortion. The anger, confusion, and hatred did flood into my online mailboxes, but so did thousands of intimate abortion stories from women around the globe.

I believe the world needed to see my video. For many people, it was a release to finally see a representation of abortion that was similar to their own. For many people, it threatened the code of silence that keeps female sexuality within its confines. What I believe upset most people was that I refused to be a victim. I was unashamed and unapologetic.

I've received a lot of criticism for taking abortion too lightly. This is exactly what I had hoped to challenge. I want to talk about abortion freely without any judgment and allow people that same freedom. All we hear is the sad and angry side of abortion. I believe my film gained as much attention as it did because we desperately needed to see the other side of the spectrum. We needed to see a positive abortion story. This is why I helped launch the organization NotAlone.US.

NotAlone.US was founded in July 2013 by sisters Brett and Beth Merfish and their mother, Sherry (whose own story of her 1972 abortion received a huge response after Beth Merfish wrote about it in a New York Times op-ed piece). I joined the team this past spring. The mission of this online campaign is to support and encourage women to share their abortion stories through YouTube videos and written accounts. By doing so, we want to let women who have had abortions know they are not alone. We believe the most effective way to destigmatize our abortion stories and to support one another is to speak openly, allowing our identities to stand proudly next to our life experiences.

In a way, it was Haverford that helped prepare me for this battle. While we had our differences, it was Haverford that taught me how to confront, and it was Haverford that taught me to stand up for those who have been silenced. The stigma around abortion keeps women from reaching out for help. It spreads manipulative misinformation on women's options and strikes fear and guilt into the very bravest of our kind. The stigma around abortion has silenced millions of women for generations, and it needs to end.

Emily Letts currently lives in Chicago. Besides her work with NotAlone.US, she is working on a dual master's in public health and social work at the University of Illinois with a concentration in women's health. Her video has received more than four million views, and it won the Judge's Choice award in the Abortion Care Network's first Abortion Stigma Busting Video Competition.