Name: 【TED】Aspen Baker: A better way to talk about abortion (Aspen Baker: A better way to talk about abortion)
Uploaded: 2015-09-23T22:00:00.000Z
Duration: 10 min 59 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

It was the middle of summer and well past closing time in the downtown Berkeley bar where my friend Polly and I worked together as bartenders.

Usually at the end of our shift we had a drink -- but not that night.

Not sure what I'm going to do yet," I told Polly.

Without hesitation, she replied, "I've had an abortion."

Before Polly, no one had ever told me that she'd had an abortion.

I'd graduated from college just a few months earlier

and I was in a new relationship when I found out that I was pregnant.

When I thought about my choices, I honestly did not know how to decide,

How would I know what the right decision was?

I worried that I would regret an abortion later.

Coming of age on the beaches of Southern California,

I grew up in the middle of our nation's abortion wars.

I was born in a trailer on the third anniversary of Roe vs. Wade.

We cared about God, the less fortunate, and the ocean.

As a kid, the idea of abortion made me so sad that I knew if I ever got pregnant

But Polly had given me a very special gift:

and the realization that abortion was something that we can talk about.

According to the Guttmacher Institute, one in three women in America

But for the last few decades, the dialogue around abortion in the United States

has left little room for anything beyond pro-life and pro-choice.

But as much as abortion is hotly debated, it's still rare for us,

whether as fellow women or even just as fellow people,

to talk with one another about the abortions that we have.

Between what happens in politics and what happens in real life,

and in that gap, a battlefield mentality.

An "are you with us or against us?" stance takes root.

There are so many important issues that we can't talk about.

And so finding ways to shift the conflict to a place of conversation

So, 15 years ago, I cofounded an organization called Exhale

to start listening to people who have had abortions.

The first thing we did was create a talk-line, where women and men

Free of judgment and politics, believe it or not, nothing like our service

We needed a new framework that could hold all the experiences that we were

The personal experiences that weren't fitting neatly into one box or the other.

We didn't think it was right to ask women to pick a side.

We wanted to show them that the whole world was on their side,

as they were going through this deeply personal experience.

Beyond abortion, pro-voice works on hard issues that we've struggled with globally

issues like immigration, religious tolerance, violence against women.

It also works on deeply personal topics that might only matter to you

They have a terminal illness, their mother just died,

they have a child with special needs and they can't talk about it.

Listening and storytelling are the hallmarks of pro-voice practice.

Sounds maybe, easy? We could all do that.

Pro-voice is hard because we are talking about things everyone's fighting about

or the things that no one wants to talk about.

I wish I could tell you that when you decide to be pro-voice, that you'll find

beautiful moments of breakthrough and gardens full of flowers,

where listening and storytelling creates wonderful "a-ha" moments.

I wish I could tell you that there would be a feminist welcoming party for you,

or that there's a long-lost sisterhood of people who are just ready

But it can be vulnerable and exhausting to tell our own stories

we will hear things that demand that we shift our own perceptions.

There is no perfect time and there is no perfect place

There's never a time when everyone will be on the same page, share the same lens,

So, let's talk about listening and how to be a good listener.

There's lots of ways to be a good listener and I'm going to give you just a couple.

You can ask yourself or someone that you know,

Another way to be a good listener is to use reflective language.

If someone is talking about their own personal experience,

If someone is talking about an abortion and they say the word "baby,"

Subtitles ListPlay Video

【TED】Aspen Baker: A better way to talk about abortion (Aspen Baker: A better way to talk about abortion)

talk

listening

feel

word