Episode 11: Culture & Abortion, Part 2: The Stories We Tell About Abortion
What do we learn about abortion before we ever experience it ourselves?
For many people, the answer comes not from a doctor, a clinic, or a law book, but from stories — films, television programs, theatre, news coverage, podcasts, and conversations with the people around us.
Those stories matter.
In the second instalment of Choice Chat’s Culture & Abortion series, The Stories We Tell About Abortion, host AJ Ware speaks with Canadian writer, performer, and podcaster Rachel Cairns about the powerful role storytelling plays in shaping how abortion is understood. Rachel created the stage show Hypothetical Baby and the podcast Aborsh. Her work grew, in part, from her own abortion experience and from discovering how much she had never been told, not only about abortion itself, but about Canada’s history of reproductive rights and the experiences of people close to her.
That realization became a starting point for a much larger conversation.
Rachel and AJ examine the abortion stories that commonly appear in popular culture and, just as importantly, the stories that are often missing. Mainstream portrayals can still centre a narrow range of experiences: people without children, moral conflict, dramatic decision-making, or circumstances shaped by an American political and legal environment.
Real life is considerably more complicated.
People who already have children have abortions. People can know with certainty that abortion is the right decision and still experience sadness. Someone may want children deeply, but not at that particular point in their life. Economic insecurity, housing, childcare, employment, relationships, disability, race, class, and access to health care can all shape reproductive decisions.
Rachel brings some of those complexities directly into her storytelling.
Humour is part of that approach. Abortion is frequently portrayed as tragic or traumatic, but human experiences rarely fit so neatly into one emotional category. Humour, irreverence, relief, frustration, love, sadness, and certainty can coexist. Allowing those contradictions into our stories makes them more truthful, not less serious.
The conversation also raises an important Canadian question: how much of our cultural understanding of abortion has been shaped by stories originating in the United States?
Canada has its own history, health-care system, legal framework, and reproductive-rights movement. Yet American political and cultural narratives often dominate the media Canadians consume. When those narratives become the default frame through which abortion is understood, they can obscure our own history and the realities of abortion care in Canada.
The episode ultimately moves beyond representation itself. Rachel connects reproductive choice with the economic and social conditions that make meaningful choice possible, including affordable housing, childcare, income security, and strong public health care.
That broader perspective is central to reproductive justice: the ability not only to decide whether to have children, but to raise families in safe, sustainable communities with the resources needed to live with dignity.
Perhaps the episode’s most important message is that there is no single abortion story.
There are many.
Some are complicated. Some are straightforward. Some are funny. Some are painful. Some involve parenthood; others do not. Some change over time.
Making space for those stories does more than reduce stigma. It allows abortion to be understood as what it has always been: part of the complex reality of people’s lives.