Tell us about your personal experiences and questions surrounding abortion

WPLN News is asking for your personal experiences around abortion for background conversations. We also will be answering our listeners’ abortion questions on our daily show This Is Nashville. If you have a question, please leave us a voice message here. 

WPLN queremos escuchar a sus historias personales del aborto. Puedes compartir en español aquí.

From health care reporter Blake Farmer:

When my wife and I were trying to have children, we needed help. In vitro fertilization was a success, thank goodness, but we were left with more than a dozen fertilized embryos. So we had them discarded, a move that some feel is akin to abortion. The thought had never crossed my mind until the doctor brought it up.

I share this, with my wife’s permission, to acknowledge that stories about our fertility decisions are nuanced and highly personal. Yet these personal experiences are often left out of the articles journalists write about the politics and court decisions around abortion access. Why? It’s hard to ask people to talk about their own experiences with abortion — whether that’s an abortion they chose to have, one they considered but chose not to have or other fertility issues (IVF, miscarriages, etc.) that bring up similar questions about the beginnings and ends of pregnancy.

WPLN News has told these stories, and we want to tell more. So consider this an invitation to join the conversation. Like mine, your story doesn’t need to be exceptional. In fact, it’s the commonplace experiences that help us understand how this issue touches so many.

And this is more than a call for abortion stories. Maybe you miscarried and were surprised to learn the subsequent procedures to protect your health are effectively abortions. Or you might have experiences with giving up a child for adoption, or with the foster case system. In any way, we want to hear why this issue matters to you.

In the form below, please give us a short overview of your experience surrounding abortion and tell us how to get in touch with you for a background interview. You can choose whether you want to hear from me or from a female reporter.

In the background interview, you would not be recorded, quoted or identified, unless you tell us you want to be. You would simply be helping us enrich our coverage of abortion access, as it’s expected to go away in the coming months.