Today is Ash Wednesday, when the annual 40 Days for Life anti-abortion campaign kicks off. This year, explains ALRANZ president Terry Bellamak, the pro-choice counter-protest has a new focus: breaking the silence.

A large majority of New Zealanders trust women and pregnant people to decide for themselves whether to receive abortion care. Only the people involved understand what is best for themselves and their families. Everyone deserves the freedom to decide whether and when to become a parent.

Every year, 40 days before Easter, anti-abortion groups launch a campaign called 40 Days for Life. Every year, ALRANZ responds by sharing actual facts about abortion under the hashtag #40daysfortruth, and by setting up a Givealittle page to thank abortion providers with treats.

This year, we want to address something bigger.

Abortion care is health care that one in four Kiwis who can become pregnant will decide to receive over the course of their lives. Many people don’t talk about their abortions – not necessarily because they feel ashamed, but because they don’t feel safe.

That is abortion stigma at work.

Abortion stigma is negative qualities projected onto women who receive abortion care. It serves as a justification for treating them badly. Fear of humiliation and violence keeps people silent.

When anti-abortion protesters target pregnant people entering abortion clinics with shouts of ‘whore’ and ‘murderer’ and throw plastic foetuses at them, that is abortion stigma.

When police refuse to intervene in the harassment because abortion is ‘different’ to other kinds of health care where people are not allowed to be harassed, that is abortion stigma.

When ‘counsellors’ think it’s OK to lure pregnant people into their offices with the promise of unbiased counselling, only to turn on the anti-abortion hard sell once the door is closed, that is abortion stigma.

Receiving abortion care is nothing to be ashamed of – it’s health care, and people are not doing anything wrong. What’s actually wrong is deceiving people, harassing people, calling them names, and trying to intimidate them. Those are the things people should be ashamed of.

ALRANZ Abortion Rights Aotearoa wants to end abortion stigma, and the distress and isolation it creates. We believe the best way to do that is to share our stories.

ALRANZ would like to invite anyone who has received abortion care to tell one person about your experience. It doesn’t matter who. The first time you tell your story is the hardest. But very often, you meet with understanding, acceptance, and perhaps a story similar to yours.

ALRANZ would also like to invite you to tell us your story. We will post it anonymously on our new Facebook page, Abort The Stigma. The page works pretty much exactly like the In Her Shoes – Women of the Eighth page in Ireland. You might call it an homage.

Everyone has the right to decide whether they are ready to become parents. When you think about it, it’s quite weird that some people think they should be able to force their own beliefs on others who don’t share them, or that they know better than you do what’s right for your life or body.

Abortion stigma needs to suffer the fate of all moral panics that are really nobody else’s business. Tell your story and help us abort the stigma.

Terry Bellamak is the president of ALRANZ, the Abortion Law Reform Association of New Zealand.

I’ve never understood guns; I’ve never even understood the need to hold a gun. I don’t want any more of them around than the bare necessity. I’m as keen as the next person for the police to not get shot, but I’m just as keen for the next person not to get shot by the police. And doesn’t that matter just as much?

Travelling in countries where armed guards stand around in airports and malls cradling weapons or with hands casually on holsters doesn’t make me feel safer. I lectured my kids before we travelled to the U.S. about what to do if people have guns: Don’t stare, don’t answer back, keep your hands still. Do whatever they say. Nothing is worse than dead, everything else can be fixed, I lie. It occurs to me this advice could apply equally well with security guards or muggers, but I’m not sure it matters. I resent having this conversation, that we are going to this otherwise fabulous country that is so stupid about guns that children have to sing nursery rhymes in school to teach them how to hide from shooters.

In Los Angeles we get in an Uber driven by a young Black man with a bunch of crap all over his passenger seat. My husband waits for him to move it, but the driver tells us no dudes in the front, he’s been sexually assaulted too many times so now all guys get in the back. Our daughters look at me. Dad always takes the front – they’re old enough to have heard stories about being a girl in the front seat of an Uber. We don’t like this flipping of the accepted script. We dither on the sidewalk until he finally caves and scoops his clothes and takeaway cups on to the floor.

Ubers in L.A. are still a novelty for us, although we’ve gotten used to the business-like extras, the free bottles of water or hand sanitizer or sunscreen from career drivers who take that extra star on their rating seriously. One guy had candy canes liberally stuffed in all the armrests which we thought was pretty cool until he couldn’t fit our bags in the trunk because of his giant wholesale tub of a thousand candy canes.

This guy’s name is Curtis. He has a Corolla and there are no candy canes. Instead there are laminated signs tied on to the backs of the seats with dirty string and the text is long and closely printed, rambling between a kind of a life story (Curtis is an entrepreneur, a ‘friendly man, student of multiple martial arts’) and a kind of a plea for tips (‘or at least some conversing’) and a kind of a threat (‘do not be tempted to take my kindness for weakness’).

Curtis is interested in where we come from, and learns that New Zealand is in the middle of summer in the middle of his winter: “that’s wild, man!” He likes sports and he compares rugby and NFL point by point, discusses basketball and baseball and martial arts. He talks about how politics are a mess, Trump, it’s embarrassing to be an American right now, man, and we all laugh a bit. The homeless, the rich, how much Californians love their cars. It’s a long trip and he somehow ends up on the topic of gangs where he grew up. “We have gangs where we live too, but they’re not really a problem,” I say without thinking. It’s true, I think, but I don’t know why I said it, how would I know anything about our local gangs? My kids go to school with their kids. I look at the girls but they say nothing. Maybe it is a problem, I don’t know. Curtis is unimpressed. He used to be a gangbanger he tells us, but he’s a good guy now. The girls say “ohhh.”

A gangbanger.

“Ok, I’ll tell you. I’ve been threatened by the cops and held at gunpoint six times, maybe seven,” says Curtis. “I’ll tell you about the last time, I thought I was gonna die.”

He was at Six Flags, he says. His girl, his kids, they’d gone for a day and been on the rides, and you know how sometimes on the big rides stuff falls out of your pockets? (we nod, we’re fresh from Disneyland. We know.) So his key fob fell out of his pocket on a roller coaster and without it they were all stuck at the damn Six Flags, locked out of the car. It was late, they were tired, and the bitch at the counter wouldn’t let him go back and look for the key fob. “She was such a bitch,” he says. He repeats that he’s a good guy and respects people, you know, because of his martial arts, so he would never ever hurt anyone…but…yeah. That bitch.

A gangbanger, I think.

He got mad. The key fob cost him four hundred bucks and he might have kicked some trash cans. But that’s all. He gets his friend to get his spare key and drive over and meet them but by now it’s late, real late, they’re leaving but the next thing he knows there’s cop cars everywhere, they’re all around his car, blue lights lighting it up. The cops jump out, about a dozen, pull their guns and scream at everyone to get out, get out, get out now. Three little kids are in the back and his girlfriend is hysterical. She won’t let him get out of the car because everyone knows what happens to a Black man who is surrounded by cops and gets out of the car. The cops keep screaming, “Now now now!” and the kids are screaming and his girlfriend is screaming and somehow the cops have got the kids and take them away somewhere, everyone is screaming. “So I got out of the car,” says Curtis.

He said his hands were up and he didn’t move but everyone is still screaming. “They’re all yelling at me, like take six steps to your left, take two steps back, stuff that doesn’t even make sense and I don’t know what to do because everyone is screaming at once, you know. So I stop and they yell even more, and then I hear that noise. You know that noise? Chuh-chick, chuh-chick, the ‘my gun is ready to shoot you’ noise. You know what I was thinking? I was thinking, if I step wrong, they will shoot me. And what if there’s an earthquake, man, like right now? And I get shot because of an earthquake or because I trip on a stone, right now. I’ll die. Imagine that, man.”

I imagine that. I imagine dying because I kicked trash cans, because the lady at the counter was a bitch. I wonder if Curtis has a gun. I wonder if he has one in the car, right now.

I tell him guns aren’t really a problem where we live, either, and even as I say it I think about that shooting, that one time, two blocks away, the kids the same age as my kids who were playing on the sports field and filmed it on their phones. But I keep talking. “The police in New Zealand,” I announce “aren’t allowed to carry guns.” I love trotting out this fact overseas. Nobody knows what to make of it, you can see them trying to imagine such a society and failing, wondering if Kiwis are, after all, just a nation of taller than average Hobbits, a simple folk bumbling through a real-life Shires.

“No way, man. No way.” Curtis doesn’t really believe me, and he isn’t impressed. He keeps talking about the gangs, the drugs and guns. Everyone has a gun, so you have to have a gun, the cops have to have a gun, or what will they do with the bad guys with guns?

I stop listening and stare out the window instead. This trip is nearly over and I want to think about where we are going next, about markets and Mexican food. As we near the city centre, the streets begin to line with the homes of the homeless, and like a lot of things in this country they are not as you’d expect. They are neat row on neat row of brightly coloured nylon tents, laundry strung between on the guy ropes and I wonder how you bang in tent pegs if you live on a concrete city street. We leave Curtis and his Corolla near City Hall, in the middle of a teacher’s union strike. All afternoon teachers and parents and kids mill around, carrying signs, singing chants, crowding the film crews to make sure they get on the next news bulletin. The police line the roads, watching, carrying the inevitable guns. The sun is shining and everyone seems to be enjoying this break from the classroom and the everyday. There are picnics.

Nobody shoots anybody, as far as I know.