‘I felt I couldn’t tell anyone’: The stigma of abortion keeps women silent. It’s time for us to shout

I was frightened of upsetting or offending someone, even women friends I knew and loved well, writes Amelia Loulli

Abortion, it seems, is the one thing women don’t know how or if they can talk to each other about – and the consequences of this can be devastating (Yui Mok/PA Wire)

In January 2020, a few months before we found ourselves in the first national lockdown, I had an abortion.

I’m not unusual. Research conducted by MSI Reproductive Choices tells us that one in three women in the UK will have at least one abortion by the time they are 45 years old. Like a lot of us, I’ve read this statistic a lot over the last few months on social media, as abortion laws across the world have come increasingly into the spotlight.

There’s been the overturning of Roe v Wade in the United States, the recent marches in Poland after a woman who was five months pregnant died of sepsis following the tightening of their restrictive laws, and here in the UK, a mother of three sentenced to more than two years in prison for obtaining drugs to have an abortion after the legal cut-off.