Katherine Rafferty, associate teaching professor of communication studies at Iowa State University, is available to talk about her ongoing work exploring women’s narratives and decision-making around medication abortions.
“My research shows women often describe their experiences as complex, rife and not an easy choice. This nuance, however, is often lost in larger cultural discourses and political debates around abortion, which tend to gravitate toward binary emotions of either regret or relief,” says Rafferty.
Rafferty co-authored the first case study in the U.S. analyzing women’s online blogging narratives about their medication abortion experience. These unsolicited personal narratives were anonymously submitted to a website that is not openly politicized and was founded by a woman who shares her own abortion story in the About Us section. The study found that there were four areas of communicative tensions:
1. Only choice vs. other alternatives (the decision)
2. Knowledgeable vs. unprepared (the medication abortion process)
3. Relief vs. regret (identity after abortion)
4. Silence vs. openness (managing stigma after abortion)
Rafferty shared her findings during a panel discussion at the grand opening and launch of the Institute for Reproductive Grief Care in March 2022. The institute is an active campus in San Diego, where organizations and individuals come together for education, research, and healing of grief after reproductive loss, and to accelerate the widespread adoption of a standard of care for those impacted by reproductive loss.
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