The headline from Salon.com reads “Tweeting an abortion: A blogger takes to Twitter and YouTube as she terminates her pregnancy, and women should thank her.”

Now, I’ll be honest.  When I saw that, I had a mental image similar to that of the piece’s author (Tracey Clark-Flory), that of a woman laying there on the rock slab as they fired up the Dust-Buster and started vacuuming out her fallopian tubes.  But it’s not quite “all that and a bag of chips.”

From Salon.com:

Jackson, the mother of a 4-year-old special needs son, found herself in this predicament after her IUD birth control failed and she explains that her decision to abort was based on financial strain and her high risk of complications. But, she also makes sure to add in a blog post that “‘I don’t want to be pregnant’ is a *good enough* reason to get an abortion.” Naturally, her tweets are attracting anti-choicers like bees to honey and she is indefatigably swatting them away rhetorically. It’s an impressive sight to behold — but her point isn’t to rile conservatives.

Instead, she explains in a YouTube video pasted below, her aim is to remove the shame and “demystify” the experience of terminating a pregnancy, “so that women know, hey, it’s not nearly as terrifying as I had myself worked up thinking it was.” She says, “It’s not that bad, it’s not that scary. It’s basically like a miscarriage.” (Remember, we’ve already written about a woman who tweeted her miscarriage.) In her Twitter feed, she talks spotting, nausea, cramps and Vicodin. She doesn’t make it sound like a walk in the park — and of course it isn’t, her body is working to expel the embryo from her uterus — but there is something reassuring about how she matter-of-factly walks us, and herself, through the whole process.

Ok, so the lady, who had a legitimate fear going into this pregnancy, decided to terminate it quickly, easily, and tell the world about her experience. I’m still not sure why women should thank her, as the author suggests, because all she did was take a pill and Tweet about the equivalent of PMS. Maybe PMS isn’t a walk in the park, but hey, you don’t see guys tweeting about about their male pattern baldness (Tweet: Hey, I lost another five hairs in the shower), an experience many men face which scares the bejeezus out of them.

Why does this chick deserve accolades from women across the world?

I do not know what life is like with a special needs child, but I do know what life is like being a single parent to a normal child, and I can tell you that having a special needs baby is not something I could handle, much less two of them.  I don’t disagree with her decision. It is her life, her responsibility, her choice, and more power to her for making that choice.

BUT

What I do find interesting is the line about how so many women get so worked up over the procedure, and this was just the run-of-the-mill pill popping experience, much like that experienced by your average pharmy addict who overdoses. How freaked out must women get about the actual abortion procedure? And why do they get so freaked out?

Like I said, I’m a man, it’s not my choice, but if something as simple as eating a pill freaks women out like that, maybe they all need to think twice about having sex? 

I know, that sounds odd coming from a guy. “Ladies, quit having sex if you’re scared of the consequences!”  But if you’re incapable of dealing with all the possible outcomes of your actions, you shouldn’t be engaging in those activities. This woman was scared of having a kid, she was scared of aborting the kid, heck, why wasn’t she scared of knocking boots, knowing, from previous experiences with her living baby, that the results of her actions could be sooo bad? Seems to me that her fears are a bit too much, too late. You’ve been out slutting around, woke up the next morning with a “problem,” now you want to rid yourself of the “problem”, and you’re going to pop a pill.  What’s so freaking scary?

It’s not that much different than “I was out drinking last night, slammed too many shots of Jack and Jimmy, and now I’ve got a rip roaring headache. I’mma take an aspirin.” Why is she so upset? It’s a normal consequence of her actions.

Of course, I suppose that that kind of thinking is exactly why it’s the woman’s choice.

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