The late May repeal of
Roe v. Wade
,
the legal case that enshrined in the United States the right to interrupt pregnancy, has provoked numerous demonstrations in the streets of the country – including the arrest of several US congresswomen, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for civil disobedience after a protest outside of the Supreme Court—, combs and messages in favor of women's reproductive rights on July 4, Independence Day.
But it has also sparked a trail of stories and confessions from numerous actresses and singers who have suffered an abortion, either naturally or after a thoughtful decision.
Until now, there were few (even very few) celebrities who had dared to share their experience publicly and today they do so in solidarity with those who are going through or have already experienced the same situation,
“I stopped to think: 'Am I going to talk about this?
A lot of women go through similar things.”
The last to make her abortion public was the Swedish actress Alicia Vikander.
The 33-year-old Ex Machina
interpreter
suffered an "extreme and painful" pregnancy termination before having her first child in 2021 with fellow actor Michael Fassbender.
“We have a son now, but it took us some time”, confessed the protagonist of
Tomb Raider
in an interview granted on Sunday, July 24, to the British newspaper
TheTimes
.
The one who also recently made public her nine miscarriages was Sharon Stone.
The protagonist of
Basic Instinct
explained how she had dealt with this situation through a comment on an Instagram post from
People
magazine , in which the story of the dancer Peta Murgatroyd, known for her participation in the television program, was told. American
Dancing with the Stars
, who was talking about the recent abortion she had suffered while her partner was in Ukraine.
"We, as women, do not have a forum to discuss the depth of this loss," lamented the actress, who is the mother of three children by adoption: Quinn Kelly, Laird Vonne and Roan Joseph.
More information
Sharon Stone: “I lost nine children to miscarriages.
Women do not have a space to discuss the depth of these losses”
“It is not a small thing, neither physically nor emotionally, but they make us feel that it is something that we must endure alone and secretly with a kind of sense of failure, instead of receiving the compassion, empathy and healing that we so badly need” Stone added.
Telling about it and that society perceives it as something natural, against the taboo that has so far surrounded abortions, is beneficial and therapeutic for women who mourn this loss.
“It is very important that they speak up, especially in a society like ours, in which the idea prevails that personal success is based on achieving everything you want and, if possible, immediately, just a click away
” ,
Lucía Torres Jiménez, psychiatrist, psychotherapist and expert in gestational and perinatal grief with extensive experience as a perinatal psychiatrist at the Gregorio Marañón Hospital (Madrid) and as medical director of the TranquilaMente mental health center, contextualizes.
"Discovering that even these people who represent the image of absolute success also face situations of loss and pain puts us in reality," she adds.
abortions that save lives
The outrage at the setback that, almost 50 years after its approval, the ban on abortion in the United States has also caused actresses like Rita Moreno, 90, to recall the interruption of the pregnancy that she experienced decades ago, years before of the approval of
Roe against Wade
, law that then received, says the interpreter, with great joy.
“I am really nervous, scared and horrified that this is happening.
I cannot believe that some of these people tell us what to do with our bodies, ”she expressed in an interview with Variety
magazine
after the Supreme Court ruling
.
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The winner of an Oscar as best supporting actress for
West Side Story
in 1962
she was forced to have an abortion by her then-partner, Marlon Brandon.
"He was a real doctor, Marlon paid him $500, unlike those you find in an alley," said the actress in her memoirs, published in 2011, of that procedure that turned out to be a disaster and left her with sequels that required a second operation.
“Marlon took me to the hospital.
The doctor didn't really do anything except make me bleed.
In other words, he didn't do it right.
He didn't know it then, but he could have died.
What a mess.
What an awful mess!” she added.
Broken that toxic relationship, which led the artist to even think about her suicide, she married the cardiologist Leonard Gordon, with whom she had her only daughter, Fernanda.
Another traumatic experience that has been resurrected after the repeal of
Roe v. Wade
has been that of a contemporary actress to Moreno, Debbie Reynolds.
Singing in the Rain
star
, already the mother of Carrie and Todd Fisher, told Joan Rivers in an interview in 1989 how she had become pregnant with her third child, who would die after seven months of gestation.
“In those days abortions were not allowed, if you were sick, if you had been raped, if the child had died... That was the law.
It didn't matter, ”explained Reynolds, who was denied an abortion: her doctor's recommendation was to wait to give birth to her deceased baby.
However, the doctors had to force the situation and remove the fetus from Reynolds' body, since the artist's life was in danger.
"They couldn't leave it anymore because the child was in the sack, but, of course, after so long, all the poisons and everything would have killed me," she revealed.
Like Reynolds and Moreno, and already with a generational leap, the singer Halsey is another of the Americans who has told how abortion "saved her life", in her case with an open letter published in
Vogue
last July 1.
"One of my miscarriages required 'aftercare,' a mild way of saying I would need an abortion, because my body couldn't terminate the pregnancy on its own and I was risking sepsis without medical intervention," explained the 27-year-old artist. years.
The pop star, who together with her partner Alev Aydin welcomed their son Ender Ridley in July 2021, suffered three miscarriages before turning 24. Despite the traumatic experience, which even led her to rewrite her will , is clear about its position on the voluntary termination of pregnancy.
“She saved my life and made way for my son to have his.
Every person deserves the right to choose when and how to live this dangerous and life-changing experience.
I will hold my son with one arm and fight with all my might with the other, ”she concluded in her letter.
There is also a long list of singers and actresses who voluntarily decided in their teens to end a pregnancy and who have now spoken about their experience: Mila Jovovich, Ashley Judd, Ireland Balwin, Alissa Milano, Lilly Allen, Uma Thurman, Jennifer Grey... ”It hurt terribly, but I didn't complain.
I had internalized so much shame that I felt like she deserved the pain,” Thurman explained in an op-ed in
The Washington Post
.
The protagonist of
Kill Bill
decided to terminate a pregnancy in her late teens during a stay in Germany, a decision that she made together with her family.
"It was the hardest decision of my life, something that caused me anguish then and that saddens me even now," she assured.
the protagonist of
pulp fiction
He has three children, Maya, 23, and Luna, nine, and son Levon Roan, 19, whom he described as his "pride and joy".
“There are adolescents who report a lot of suffering in the process of having an abortion, even if it was a voluntary decision.
They remember with pain how they made the decision, how they coped with economic difficulties, their partner's position at the time and how this affected their relationship: the loneliness and fear of seeing each other in the operating room, or the uncontrolled crying that arose in that moment without understanding why.
On many occasions, the story reveals a traumatic component, since they talk about how the smell of that room or some detail of it has been engraved in their memory, causing emotional or physical reactions such as nausea every time something connects them with that scene”,
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As hard as Thurman lived was the experience for Jennifer Grey.
The protagonist of
Dirty Dancing
-a film in which one of the dancers undergoes an illegal abortion in the sixties- detailed in her memoirs,
Out of the Corner,
her life of excesses and rebellious adolescence, in addition to her abortion at 16 years.
“No teenage girl should be swimming in water this dark…” she wrote.
“I would not have my life.
I wouldn't have had the career that I had, I wouldn't have had anything.
And it wasn't for not taking it seriously.
He had always wanted a son.
I just didn't want it when I was a teenager," explained the actress in an interview with the
Los Angeles Times.
following the release of his biography.
At age 41, Gray would give birth to her daughter, Stella Gregg, now 20, with her then-husband Clark Gregg.
“It is a very serious decision and it stays with you.
But abolishing the law is fundamentally wrong.
We must get all women to stand up and use their voice now because we have assumed, since 1973, that our election was safe and that it was never going to be overturned."
In all the experiences shared by these celebrities there is guilt and trauma, but also a deep feeling to continue defending the reproductive rights of women.
As the feminist and activist Gloria Steinem would write to Dr. John Sharpe, the doctor who would perform an abortion on her in London in 1957, to whom she dedicated her book
My Life on the Road
and to whom she promised that she would do with her life as she pleased : "I did the best I could."
