Advocates for Youth – an organization that advocates for the reproductive rights of young people – has produced a new play called Out of Silence: Abortion Stories from the 1 in 3 Campaign. The play, designed for use on college campuses, is a dramatization of 14 stories submitted to the Advocates for Youth’s 1 in 3 Campaign, a grassroots movement invested in the stigma-defeating power of storytelling.
The play’s vignette format is modeled after Eve Ensler’s famous and popular play, the Vagina Monologues. Advocates for Youth hope that this production will have the same widespread de-stigmatizing effect as Ensler’s Monologues. Out of Silence is composed of 13 scenes from 10 different female playwrights. The goal of the performance is “to create a new conversation about abortion and move beyond the political rhetoric and divisive debate to a more personal understanding of the role abortion plays in women’s lives.” The play, along with the campaign project, wants us to imagine a world in which a massive cultural shift has taken place – a world in which people are not shamed for their reproductive decisions.
You can read more about the play here.
