Canada – Review: Personal and political collide in ‘Hypothetical Baby’ at Factory Theatre

Performer-writer shares her abortion experience

By: Andrea Perez
March 6, 2025

DO YOU HAVE a uterus? What kind of birth control do you use? Have you ever had an abortion? And … did these questions make you uncomfortable? Performer and writer Rachel Cairns has decided to answer these publicly for her audiences and turn her abortion, a typically intensely private affair, into art.

Hypothetical Baby, a Nightwood Theatre production in association with The Howland Company, cracks open a world of socio-economic, personal and grander political questions about abortion in Canada and beyond. After its successful indie run in 2023, in this tight 90-minute show, Cairns tells the real-life story of her own unexpected IUD pregnancy in 2019 while working as an artist (and shoe shiner) in Downtown Toronto. This solo show is charming, honest and nimbly high-energy.

Continued: https://nextmag.ca/review-personal-and-political-collide-in-hypothetical-baby-at-factory-theatre/

06.03.2025

Film, Art, Books

abortion story

Courtney Ch’ng Lancaster

Hypothetical Baby

one-woman play about abortion

Rachel Cairns

Canada

Activism

Jordan’s Abortion Conundrum

The country’s strict laws leave women with impossible choices and facing financial struggles, stigma and dangerous procedures

Meghan Davidson Ladly
November 29, 2024

Amal watches her children play on the living room floor of her house on a quiet street in a suburb of Jordan’s capital. As dusk settles over the sloping hills of Amman, she sinks into a sofa and lights a cigarette, adjusting her hijab.

“It is illegal, but you can’t know how I feel,” she says. “I couldn’t think of anything except getting rid of this pregnancy. Even my kids — I couldn’t think of them. And I knew I had to make a decision.”

Continued: https://newlinesmag.com/spotlight/jordan-abortion-conundrum/

Why the American abortion debate is affecting access in Kenya

Oct 31, 2024
By Neha Wadekar, Joe Mwihia, Job Wander, Associated Press
Video: 8:42 minutes (with transcript)

Abortion is a closely watched issue in this year's election, and not just in the U.S. As president, Trump cut funding for international groups that offer and counsel on abortion services. With support from The Pulitzer Center, special correspondent Neha Wadekar reports from Kenya where advocates are watching for who wins. A warning, this story contains accounts of sexual and gender-based violence.

Continued: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/why-the-american-abortion-debate-is-affecting-access-in-kenya

South Australia’s upper house narrowly rejects ‘Trumpian’ bill to wind back abortion care

Legislation to force women seeking a later termination to be induced, deliver the baby alive, and keep it or adopt it out, defeated by 10 votes to nine

Tory Shepherd
Wed 16 Oct 2024

A child that faces a bedridden life. A girl with intellectual disabilities raped by a family member. Victims of domestic violence or reproductive coercion. There are a variety of distressing reasons women have later stage terminations.

There is no easy definition of when an abortion is considered “late” or “late-term”. It is generally considered anything after 20 weeks’ gestation, but the states and territories have a patchwork of legislation with various milestones.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/16/south-australias-upper-house-narrowly-rejects-trumpian-bill-to-wind-back-abortion-care

The Journey of an Abortion in South Carolina

When, at five months pregnant, Emma Giglio discovered her baby had multiple anomalies in utero, she and her husband made the heartrending decision to terminate their pregnancy. But that was just the beginning of her agony.

By Stephanie McNeal
Photography by Lindsey Shorter
September 5, 2024

It shouldn’t be this hard to find a birthday cake in a college town in suburban Maryland, even on short notice.

That’s what Emma Giglio thought as she walked up and down the busy streets, a bleak January air whipping her face. There were fast food joints, sports bars, casual restaurants offering every cuisine you could imagine. Just nowhere, seemingly, to buy a birthday cake.

Emma and her husband, Zach, kept going. Because they had to, even though at 24 weeks of pregnancy, Emma’s gait had changed. She was so much bigger with this baby than she’d been with her older sons, but that’s how it goes when it’s your third.

Continued: https://www.glamour.com/story/election-2024-the-journey-of-my-abortion-in-south-carolina

05.09.2024

Partners in Abortion Care

Siya Giglio

The Brigid Alliance

Zach Giglio

Pressure, peer influence driving unsafe abortions

July 13, 2024
By Gift Oba

Every day, Rasheedat, 34 years, is reminded of the path she chose 10-years ago when she decided to have an unsafe abortion.

Filled with guilt and agony, the Business Administration graduate from the Moshood Abiola Polytechnic Abeokuta, Ogun State, wonders if she will ever be able to bear children.

Recounting her experience to DAILY POST, Rasheedat disclosed how fear of being mocked, rejected and abandoned by her family drove her to seek an unsafe abortion.

Continued: https://dailypost.ng/2024/07/13/pressure-peer-influence-driving-unsafe-abortions-experts/

Idaho – When “abortion travel” becomes a nightmare: A tale of no good choices

She wanted a baby — but her fetus had no chance of survival. How Idaho's abortion laws led to devastating trauma

By NICOLE KARLIS
JUNE 12, 2024

Rebecca Vincen-Brown was still in her first trimester of pregnancy, in the late fall of 2022, when things started to go wrong. She had blood drawn for a standard genetic test called noninvasive prenatal testing, or NIPT, which can detect increased risks for various chromosomal disorders. The results of the test took slightly longer than normal to come back, and when they did, Vincen-Brown received a troubling phone call: The test was “inconclusive” because not enough fetal DNA was detected in her blood.

NIPT cannot diagnose fetal disorders conclusively, but the possibilities were troubling: Her fetus might have triploidy, trisomy 13 or trisomy 18, rare and serious genetic conditions involving either an extra set of chromosomes or an extra copy of one chromosome. While the specifics vary, most infants born with these conditions will live only days or weeks, and almost none will survive to adulthood.

Continued: https://www.salon.com/2024/06/12/when-abortion-travel-becomes-a-nightmare-a-tale-of-no-good-choices/

I’m from the UK. Here’s why I chose to pay for my abortion abroad

I felt safer getting my abortion in a country that forthrightly enshrines abortion access in law.

BY HANNAH SHEWAN STEVENS
10 June 2024

“Your boobs are huge,” my partner quipped from the hotel bed as I wiggled into my swimming costume. I laughed it off and jiggled them in his face before taking one last swim on our holiday in the Dominican Republic, trying to quiet that voice in the back of my head, whispering, “What if you are pregnant?”

Annoyingly, the lying, anxious voices were actually right this time. I was pregnant. The day after, we landed in Montreal, Canada, and took a test to discover that my gigantic boobs were, in fact, a harbinger of a pregnancy. The shock overwhelmed me; I spun between numbness, despair, confusing tinges of happiness for a child I’d never wanted, and anticipatory grief for what was to come.

Continued: https://www.glamourmagazine.co.uk/article/why-i-chose-abortion-abroad

UK – ‘I felt entirely alone’: comedian Grace Campbell on the aftermath of her abortion

When Grace Campbell decided to terminate her pregnancy, she felt relief at being able to exercise a right so many women had fought for. But nothing prepared her for the depression that came after. Here, the comedian reflects on the physical and emotional toll

Grace Campbell
Sun 9 Jun 2024

There it is,” the doctor said, without warning. I turned, the cold jelly sliding off my stomach, to face the screen he had swivelled towards me. There it is, he said, nonchalantly, like he was pointing at the Eiffel Tower as we walked along the Seine. There it is, like he’d found his car in a festival car park. There it is, as he showed me, apropos of nothing, the foetus I was about to abort.

In December last year, I was at home, stuck in a sour state of depression that no amount of brightly coloured vapes and episodes of Schitt’s Creek could remedy. After an intense seven weeks, post-abortion, the bleeding had finally stopped. But the persistent crying, self-hatred and grief followed me everywhere I went.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/society/article/2024/jun/09/i-felt-entirely-alone-comedian-grace-campbell-on-the-aftermath-of-her-abortion

09.06.2024

Trudeau cabinet minister tells her raw personal story in the House of Commons, on the same day two Conservative MPs attend anti-abortion rally

May 9, 2024
Tonda-MacCharles

OTTAWA — Federal cabinet minister Soraya Martinez Ferrada was determined to put a human face — hers — on a political story that was fiercely argued in the abstract this week, inside and outside Parliament.

The tourism minister stood in the House of Commons during question period and told MPs she had an abortion at age 18, after she discovered she was pregnant shortly after arriving back in Chile — a country her parents had fled years earlier as political refugees of the Pinochet regime.

Continued: https://www.thestar.com/politics/federal/trudeau-cabinet-minister-tells-her-raw-personal-story-in-the-house-of-commons-on-the/article_523b0e68-0e3e-11ef-b3ec-63ea474a0567.html

09.05.2024