From Experience to Evidence:When Digital Abortion Stories Become Health Communication

Abstract

In recent times, digital patient narratives circulate around clinical and public health information. This article reads two Planned Parenthood YouTube narratives, Alex My Story (2021) and Lucky (2023), to ask what a personal account of abortion can offer someone who has not yet had an abortion. The study begins with the words, form, and presentation of the two videos and uses research in medical humanities, digital health communication, and experiential evidence to frame the reading. The stories can be useful without becoming representative evidence. They give particular experiences a public form that allows another person to recognise possibilities and imagine what an abortion might be like. At the same time, the setting of the stories can bring a personal account close to other kinds of health information. This proximity can make a possible experience seem more likely than the story itself can establish. The article calls this movement epistemic scaling and uses it to distinguish between evidence of an experience and evidence of the experience. Digital abortion stories are most useful when they help people imagine possible experiences while leaving questions of frequency, risk, and clinical expectation to evidence that can answer them.