When Jemima Kirke, of HBO’s Girls fame, got an abortion, she was in college. She couldn’t tell her mother. She emptied out her checking account. She underwent the procedure without anesthesia, because she couldn’t get enough money together and the drugs cost extra. “When you’re scrounging for however many hundreds of dollars, it’s a lot. I just didn’t have it.”
Kirke describes her experience in a new PSA for the Center for Reproductive Rights. Her video is part of CRR’s “Draw The Line” campaign which uses personal narratives of real women to change the conversation around reproductive rights.
She is calm and candid as she talks through her decision, now eight years behind her. “I wasn’t sure that I wanted to be attached to this person for the rest of my life. My life was just not conducive to raising a healthy, happy child. I just didn’t feel it was fair. I decided to get an abortion.”
Chris Iseli, chief communications officer of CRR, described the “Draw The Line” as the latest effort for the “reproductive rights health and justice movement to go on the offense around the issues that we’re pushing back on. For a very long time, the opposition has sort of captured the public discourse around our issues. Too often, our response was to just push back on that, to talk about what we’re fighting back against, rather than what we’re fighting for. The ‘Draw the Line’ campaign was conceived as a way of advancing a positive vision for what we think the future of reproductive healthcare in the U.S. should look like.”
Much of the national conversation around rape tends to focus on extreme circumstances, like exceptions in the case of rape or incest, or non-existent pro-choice platforms, like the claim that the Democratic Party’s official stance is “an abortion all the way up until the day of birth is fine.”
But Kirke’s story — a relatively undramatic one, wherein she simply decided she was not in a place in her life when she wanted to have a baby, nor did she want to be tied to her then-boyfriend forever — is far more indicative of what most women who seek abortions experience.
“The situation that Jemima describes is just the truth,” said Iseli. “Quite honestly, I think most people feel as though they shouldn’t have to justify that decision to anybody. And speaking about it frankly and forthrightly in the way Jemima does, that’s an important message for people to take away. Sometimes it’s not about rape or incest or extreme circumstances; sometimes you find yourself with an unintended pregnancy that you’re not able to go forward with. It should be up to you.”
For viewers who mostly know Kirke through Girls, a show that is often criticized for its too-privileged characters, the details of Kirke’s narrative, her financial struggles in particular, might be surprising.
“What’s really sort of striking and touching about her story,” said Iseli. “I think people think of somebody who they see on television all the time as being among the people who [are] privileged: they can get care when they need it, and those who aren’t have more trouble. I think it helps to humanize the issue, to know that these are issues that even Jemima Kirke faces.”
Iseli first heard Kirke’s story last year at an event in Brooklyn as part of “V to Shining V,” a nationwide day of awareness-raising around reproductive rights led by Lizz Winstead’s organization, Lady Parts Justice. After Iseli and his colleagues from the Center for Reproductive Rights spoke, Kirke got up and told her story.
Iseli asked if she’d be willing to put her story on video as part of the campaign, “to make it okay for people to talk about these experiences and to make it clear that, in order to really defend these rights and principles, we have to be able to talk about them.”
“Draw the Line” is part of a wider movement toward “abortion storytelling,” which has grown in popularity as organizations aim to increase awareness as a means to widespread acceptance. Last year, Emily Letts, a 25-year-old abortion counselor, decided to film her abortion after she was unable to find a video of a surgical abortion anywhere on the internet. She wrote about her choice on Cosmopolitan.com: “We talk about abortion so much and yet no one really knows what it actually looks like. A first trimester abortion takes three to five minutes. It is safer than giving birth.”
The video of Kirke was shot in her home, in her living room. “Those are her thoughts and her point of view on it, without any stage direction from us,” Iseli said.
Iseli compared the “Draw the Line” tactics to the methods employed by the marriage quality movement: a means of demonstrating to the public that “this is not something you can just brush aside. It affects people you know,” he said. “One in three women in the U.S. will make the decision to end a pregnancy at some point in her life. That means there are a lot of women around you who have stories like this, and for whom being able to get safe, legal, high-quality healthcare — or not being able to get safe, legal, high-quality healthcare — made a huge difference in their lives.”