The Abortion Diary is the intersection of self-expression, healing, and the art of story-sharing and story-listening. We are dedicated to creating a space for people to share stories they haven’t been able to share and listen to stories they haven’t been able to hear. These are the stories we share.
About The Abortion Diary
The Abortion Diary Podcast
Abortion happens every day. Millions of people around the world have an abortion each year. But the majority of those people will never talk about their abortion experience. What If millions of people broke their silence and told the truth about their lives and their choices?
These are the stories we share.
Melissa Madera, Ph.D. | Host, Founder, & Director
Originally from Washington Heights, New York, Dr. Melissa Madera (a.k.a. the abortion diarist) is a queer, first generation Afro-Dominican American, and the Jill of all trades at The Abortion Diary. She is the Senior Associate of Research and Education, Reproductive Rights at State Innovation Exchange (SiX). She is also works as an independent consultant mainly working in the reproductive health, rights, and justice space. She is also an affiliated researcher on Project SANA (Self-managed Abortion Needs Assessment), an interdisciplinary research group at The University of Texas at Austin that researches self-managed abortion in the United States. She has worked as a special projects consultant at Plan C Pills. She is also the former Director of Research and Partnerships at Choix, a telehealth clinic founded by experienced family planning clinicians with a vision of using technology to expand access to abortion care.
Melissa created The Abortion Diary in the summer of 2013. Since then she has been running the project, and making its podcast out of pocket and as a labor of love. Her own abortion story and the deep impact sharing it (13 years later) had on her, her family, her friends, and complete strangers inspired her to create The Abortion Diary. Melissa has traveled the world with her podcast, and is a story-sharer and (above all else) a dedicated story-listener.
Since beginning the project in July 2013, she has listened to and recorded over 300 people share their reproductive experiences. These experiences are quite diverse across geographic location (36 U.S. states and 21 countries), socioeconomic background, age (18-85.5), ethnicity, race, religion, and gender, and span from the late 1950s to 2019. Melissa has been featured on the front page of The Washington Post, on NPR’s Weekend Edition, a Q&A with Cosmopolitan Magazine, Latina.com, ThePool.com, Rewire, Q&A with Cosmopolitan Magazine, Univision, MSNBC and The Daily Dot.