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Posted on 05/14/2026 11:16:02 AM PDT by Morgana
When a new book dismisses abortion survivors and women whose abortions don’t go as planned as ‘social contagion,’ it doesn’t just misread a movement—it erases our lived reality—talk about a wrong and bad idea about women!
In her new book, Reproductive Wrongs: A Short History of Bad Ideas About Women, Sarah Ruden devotes part of her final chapter to me and to The Abortion Survivors Network by name. I should be flattered, I guess. (Hat tip to Katelyn Walls Shelton for sharing this chapter with me. If you aren’t following Katelyn yet, head over to her Substack for great content including an upcoming review of the book). Back to the subject at hand….
Ruden describes the “abortion survival movement” as an Internet‑driven “social contagion,” likens groups like ours to “white‑power Christians” and “defenders of anorexia,” and suggests that our work resembles a “pyramid scheme” that mines trust in order to raise money and build political power.
If you’ve walked with us as a survivor, a family member, a partner, a donor, or a friend, you deserve to hear directly from me about what we actually do—and why this framing hurts not just survivors, but women whose abortions do not go as planned.
What the book says about us
In the closing pages, Ruden moves from literature and history into the present day and lands squarely on The Abortion Survivors Network. She quotes our website (maybe it will lead her readers to visit and read through research reflection abortion failure across methods) and then sets us alongside “marginal Internet‑centered groupings as various as white‑power Christians, defenders of anorexia, and purported abortion survivors,” arguing that these groups share “similar structure and psychology.”
According to Ruden, leaders in movements like ours present “a new, allegedly integral, meaningful, and widespread but in fact rather far‑fetched identity in order to exploit loneliness, alienation, suspicion, and fear.” She claims that the “key commodity being mined is trust, and it is refined into the capacity to raise money, turn out crowds, recruit volunteers, apply political pressure, marshal votes.” She even suggests that the small number of survivors in visible public roles makes the whole thing feel like “a sort of pyramid scheme, one that amasses not mainly the money of the credulous but their cultlike devotion.”
In other words: we are portrayed not as a community of people responding to a painful, complicated medical and relational reality, but as marketers of an identity, manipulators of trust, and willing cogs in an authoritarian machine. I have a lot that I could say about this narrative and how misinformed and frankly, what appears to be, threatened, this book appears to be by making these claims, but I’ll focus instead on who really are. That matters more to me.
Who we really are
The Abortion Survivors Network was not born out of a communications strategy; it was born out of people:
* Out of adults and yes, children, who discovered, years and sometimes decades later, that they had survived an abortion attempt. -Out of parents who were told one thing would happen during a procedure and lived through something entirely different.
* Out of children whose birth and medical histories are tangled up with decisions their parents made in crisis.
When survivors come to us, they are not looking for a “far‑fetched identity.” They are trying to make sense of the fact that they are alive when someone expected them not to be, or that their child is alive after the medical system said that outcome was impossible. They are sorting through trauma, disability, complicated medical records, broken trust, and sometimes a deep spiritual crisis.
Our work is not to hand them a ready‑made narrative and plug them into a machine. (I can tell you how diverse and personal all of these stories we are entrusted with hearing are). It is our work and our honor to:
* Listen to their story without rushing them into a microphone.
* Connect them with others who share similar experiences, so they know they aren’t alone.
* Offer information, and practical resources to help them navigate the aftermath.
* When they are ready—and not before—support them if they choose to share their story publicly.
This is slow, unglamorous, relational work. It looks a lot more like support group facilitation and social work than a “pyramid scheme.”
What’s missing: women whose abortions don’t go as planned
One of the most painful omissions in Ruden’s treatment is what it overlooks: women whose abortions do not go the way they were told they would. I’m not only talking about women whose children survive attempted abortions—though that happens more often than many realize. I am also talking about:
* Women whose abortions lead to complications or long‑term health impacts.
* Women who are assured the baby will not survive, only to deliver a living child.
* Women who live with grief, regret, or moral and spiritual questions that don’t fit neatly into anyone’s talking points.
For them, the story is not theoretical. It is not a “communications campaign” or a “grand narrative.” It is a medical chart, a NICU stay, a disability diagnosis, a strained marriage, a changed faith. When those women or their children reach out to us, we don’t start with where they “should” land politically.
We start with:
* What happened?
* How are you?
* What do you need right now?
When a book like Reproductive Wrongs dismisses this entire reality as “social contagion,” it tells these women and survivors that their experiences are too inconvenient to count. And when an experience is inconvenient, the message is clear—the person is, too.
Trust is not our product; it is our responsibility
I want to linger on one of Ruden’s most striking claims: that the “key commodity being mined is trust, and it is refined into the capacity to raise money, turn out crowds, recruit volunteers, apply political pressure, marshal votes.”
If you’ve been part of The Abortion Survivors Network in any way, you know that trust is not our product.
It is our responsibility.
Survivors and families come to us after their trust has already been shattered—trust in medical professionals, in institutions, in the people who were supposed to tell them the truth. Some no longer trust their own memories or experiences because they’ve been repeatedly told, “That doesn’t happen,” or “You must have misunderstood.”
Our work is to restore trust:
* To validate that what they lived through is real, even if it is rare or uncomfortable.
* To give them space to name both the harm and the hope in their stories.
* To ensure they are never again used as props—by anyone—for someone else’s agenda. And trust me, I’m the biggest mama bear of survivors and mothers.
Yes, we fundraise. We have to in order to provide resources, community, and education. But if we ever ask for anything, it is so that survivors can receive care without paying for it, and so that more people understand this reality exists—not so that we can “marshal votes.”
Can we talk honestly about hard stories?
I believe we can have real, honest disagreements about abortion law and policy. You may not share my convictions, and I know many of my readers sit in very different places on that spectrum. But any serious conversation about women’s health and reproductive justice has to make room for:
* Women whose abortions lead to unanticipated, sometimes devastating outcomes.
* Children and adults who survived abortion attempts or procedures that did not go as planned.
* Extended family members impacted by these circumstances.
When we pretend that the middle group doesn’t exist—or explain them away as a “cultlike” phenomenon—we do exactly what the book claims to oppose: we sacrifice real women and children on the altar of ideology.
An invitation
If you’ve been part of our work, I want to thank you. Your prayers, your financial support, your willingness to listen—all of it has helped create a space where survivors and families are finally heard and supported.
If you’re new here and what I’ve written raises questions or challenges your assumptions, I welcome that.
You don’t have to agree with me about everything to care about the people we serve.
Read survivors’ stories. Look at the medical literature, especially as we have it gathered on our website’s resources page. Listen before you dismiss. Be curious! Ask hard questions—including of yourself and what you do and don’t know-and ask hard questions of me.
And if you are a survivor yourself, or someone whose abortion did not go as planned, and you’re reading this in silence: you are not alone, and you are not a “social contagion.”
You are a human being with a story that matters. We are here for you.
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