Saying out loud that you've had an abortion is, even in Britain, a provocative act. The hashtag trending on Twitter this week, where women are posting the phrase #ihadanabortion in their thousands, aims to break that taboo. What started as a trickle of voices soon became a choir, a football stadium, a T-Mobile advert; crowds and crowds of women coming out, liberated and noisy.

It's when you see the lists of names scrolling down the page like water spilling from an overflowing bath, and their tiny but similar stories (ignoring, of course, the tweets from male anti-choice activists bemoaning a "silent holocaust", which actually made me gasp), that you feel how powerful this might really be in unsmearing the pity and pain associated with abortion, an important part of women's lives that so often goes unspoken of and thereby kept hidden, shameful, and weighty with imagined meaning.

This is the pro-voice movement. While it's not ideal that women must expose their personal medical history in order to defend their own choices, judging by the online response, this is a technique that has an effect. Like the opposite of a sonogram (which anti-choice activists like to use to conjure up an image of a baby, lost, smiling and beating-of-heart) the trending hashtag and act of tweeting one's experience removes the horror of the decision, not trivialising but normalising ; highlighting how common the choice to abort an unplanned or unviable foetus really is, and how (looking at the timelines of those who've tweeted and seeing their later posts about Katy Perry's shoes, reality telly and the silly things their kids say) life trundles on afterwards without, shockingly, much changing at all.

Source: Eva Wiseman Observer (UK), 28 November 2010