The silence hasn't exactly broken, but it's cracked a bit, down the side. They're calling it the new "coming out", the slow but certain rise in the numbers of women talking publicly about their abortions. But that doesn't feel like quite the right phrase. Having an abortion (as 196,082 women did in England and Wales last year) doesn't define who you are – it's something you do when you have no other choice. So the term "coming out" feels misplaced, but still, I understand the need to define it, to name it, because this – the talking, the women publishing accounts of their terminations – is something.

Until recently, women had abortions alone. They told their close friends perhaps, their partners, but theirs felt like single stories – little graffiti messages in pencil, papered over quickly. But people have started to write them in places they'll last. Two in the New York Times, some in the Guardian. One woman documented her abortion with a hidden phone and put the photos online, their simple Instagram bloodlessness a telling counterpoint to the graphic propaganda used by pro-lifers, the babies in jars sucking foetal Photoshopped thumbs.

This month Ihadanabortion.org started collating the growing number of women documenting their experiences in an attempt to demystify the process and change the "abortion narrative". The one supported by Ireland's recent billboards that claimed "Abortion tears her life apart", despite, in a survey, the majority of women reporting the exact opposite. The one supported by increasing US-style vigils at British clinics; the one about regret, shame, pain. The one that maintains the stigma and means it still feels risky to talk honestly about abortion without judgement, without someone looking away or, worse, squeezing your arm and doing sensitive "sidehead".

Does that narrative affect how women feel afterwards? If "trauma" is the socially sanctioned response, then do they feel isolated if that response doesn't fit? Interestingly, scrolling through the site, the stories that make the biggest impact are the ones that say: "Guys, it was actually no big deal." We are primed for the worst. That noisy message about right and wrong, and grief and shame, has an effect, even on people who know better. So the abortion stories that say: "It didn't hurt, I didn't feel weird afterwards, it was a brilliant decision that I'm glad I was privileged enough to be able to make and I've never come even close to regretting it" are the ones that feel the most taboo-breaking. Even now. Even when these women are saying a positive thing, a celebratory thing. It seems as though we are more comfortable thinking of abortion in the realm of horror, when in fact it is so often something that makes things better.

While I don't think everybody should feel like they have to share their own experiences (God, often, immersed in the internet, I feel the exact opposite – sometimes I find myself shouting at the screen at people to bloody put their life away, back in the box where it belongs), and bearing in mind that those experiences are rarely owned by just one person (they involve others, and retelling them can reverberate), it's important to applaud the people who do. Plurality is important. Repetition is important. We need to hear about not just the awful abortions and the easy ones, but the ones in between. First-person stories give heart and breath to newspaper statistics – they put abstract numbers and half-thoughts into context, bring faces from shadows. And in doing so, they effect change – they influence how we vote, who we listen to, and then, how we live.

Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or visit theguardian.com/profile/evawiseman for all her articles in one place. Follow Eva on Twitter @EvaWiseman