39 Celebrities who have had abortions – and spoken out about them
Abortion is a human right. Abortion is basic health care. Celebrities who have had abortions and spoken out about them are in good company among the one in four women who will get abortions in their lifetime.
Abortion should be no more stigmatized than any other medical decision. But as the Supreme Court looks poised to roll back Roe v. Wade after 50 years of legal abortions, the ongoing crisis of abortion access is becoming even more of an emergency. “Celebrities today regularly reveal the details of their drug addictions, sexual obsessions, marital infidelities – but no celebrity in recent memory has admitted to ending a pregnancy,” Susan Dominus wrote in 2005.
It means so much to so many people that this is no longer true. Celebrities have become increasingly bold in sharing their abortion stories. Celebrities speaking out about abortions helps to remind us that abortions are extremely common, that all kinds of people get them, and that abortions allow people to pursue the life they want on their own timeline.
“The prospect of losing my rights to govern my own body is making me physically ill”.
It’s also important to remember that no matter what the Supreme Court says, rich and connected people will always be able to get abortions. People who live in the South and the Midwest, poor people, people of color, immigrants, and refugees will be forced to carry pregnancies against their will.
People don’t realize, Diana Greene Foster, the lead researcher of the landmark Turnaway Study told GLAMOUR US, “how much not having money slows you down from being able to get an abortion, find a clinic, pay for it, get to the clinic, stay overnight sometimes, buy childcare, get out of work.” Celebrity attention helps – it helps personalize these stories and publicize them. No one should feel obligated to share their deeply personal medical history with the public. But when they bravely do, it means a lot.
This article was originally published on GLAMOUR US.
Leigh VogelGloria Steinem
Gloria Steinem’s book My Life on the Road opens with a dedication that will yank a tear out of your eye. “Dr. John Sharpe of London, who in 1957, a decade before physicians in England could legally perform an abortion for any reason other than the health of the woman, took the considerable risk of referring for an abortion a twenty-two-year-old American on her way to India,” she writes.
“Knowing that she had broken an engagement at home to seek an unknown fate, he said, ‘You must promise me two things. First, you will not tell anyone my name. Second, you will do what you want to do with your life.’ Dear Dr. Sharpe, I believe you, who knew the law was unjust, would not mind if I say this so long after your death: I’ve done the best I could with my life. This book is for you.” Let that energy direct you to the National Network of Abortion Funds.
Ilya S. SavenokPhoebe Bridgers
“I had an abortion in October of last year while I was on tour,” Phoebe Bridgers wrote on Twitter, the day after the news leaked that the Supreme Court had voted to overturn Roe v. Wade. “I went to Planned Parenthood where they gave me the abortion pill. It was easy. Everyone deserves that kind of access.”
Axelle/Bauer-GriffinNicki Minaj
Getting pregnant as a teenager and deciding to get an abortion was “the hardest thing I’d ever gone through,” Nicki Minaj told Rolling Stone in 2014. “I thought I was going to die,” she said. The rapper was only 16, and she said that she has felt “haunted” by the experience, though she still identifies as pro-choice. “I wasn’t ready,” she said. “I didn’t have anything to offer a child.” For some women, abortion is an agonizing decision. For others, it’s easy and uncomplicated. Either way, it should be safe, legal, and available.
David LivingstonUma Thurman
In September 2021, Uma Thurman published an essay in The Washington Post that detailed the abortion she received as a 15-year-old; she hoped to influence public opinion around the absurd Texas abortion ban. “I was just starting out in my career and didn’t have the means to provide a stable home, even for myself. We decided as a family that I couldn’t go through with the pregnancy, and agreed that termination was the right choice,” she wrote. The procedure was painful, but “I had internalized so much shame that I felt I deserved the pain.
“There is so much pain in this story. It has been my darkest secret until now. I am 51 years old, and I am sharing it with you from the home where I have raised my three children, who are my pride and joy,” she continued. Research has found that people who receive abortions are more likely to have children by choice in the future. “Women who receive an abortion are more likely to have an intended pregnancy within the next five years compared to women who are denied,” the Turnaway Study found.
E! EntertainmentKeke Palmer
“I feel as if women[’s] rights laws are going backwards,” Keke Palmer tweeted presciently in 2019. “Individual choice is being taken. I’m truly so confused at the world [right now] and the policies that follow.” Palmer tweeted—but later deleted—that she’d had an abortion at 24. “I was worried about my career responsibilities and afraid that I could not exist as both a career woman and mother,” she wrote.
After deleting that tweet and explaining that Twitter is a hard place to talk about complicated things, she added, “Making individual choices is not a betrayal to your faith. Mainly, because God knows your heart and your journey. God never judges. I hate that it’s always a this vs that, instead of an ‘I understand YOUR PERSPECTIVE.’”
Kena BetancurBusy Philipps
“It’s not brave for me to say I had an abortion at 15, because it’s a medical thing—a thing, a choice that I made, and I don’t regret it at all,” Busy Philipps said in 2019. Philipps has written and spoken about her abortion and encouraged other women to do the same, launching the hashtag #YouKnowMe to try to help abortion deniers understand that the procedure is not something that happens to shadowy, unknown women but to people they love and are close to. “I don’t have a shame," Philipps has written. “I’m glad I didn’t have that guy’s baby.”
Dia DipasupilWhoopi Goldberg
In Angela Bonavoglia’s 2001 book The Choices We Made, 25 people spoke about their experiences with abortion, including Whoopi Goldberg, who gave herself an abortion at 14 under horrific circumstances. “I talked to nobody. I panicked,” she said. In the book she talks about trying multiple potentially deadly methods, including ingesting poisonous substances. “I was more afraid of having to explain to anybody what was wrong than of going to the park with a hanger, which is what I did.”
Goldberg’s story should never, ever be repeated.
Rich FuryCecily Strong
In 2021 on Saturday Night Live comedian Cecily Strong appeared as Goober the Clown and discussed getting an abortion the day before her 23rd birthday. “I wish I didn’t have to do this, cuz the abortion I had at 23 is my personal clown business, but that’s all some people in this country wanna discuss all the time!” Speaking for abortion havers in general, she said, “We kept this secret for so long, despite being so grateful it happened!” And she went on, “Here’s my truth: I know I wouldn’t be a clown on TV here today if it weren’t for the abortion I had the day before my 23rd birthday. Clowns have been helping each other and their pregnancies since the caves. It’s going to happen, so it might as well be safe, legal, and accessible.”
Eakin HowardBillie Jean King
Billie Jean King got pregnant unexpectedly at 27, she wrote in an op-ed in The Washington Post in 2021. Abortion was legal in California in 1971, but with absurd restrictions—it was prohibitively expensive, and King had to go before a hospital committee and explain why she should be granted an abortion. “Arguing to a dozen or so people I had never met why I qualified for an abortion remains one of the most degrading experiences of my life,” she wrote. She also needed the signed consent of her husband.
Noam GalaiJemima Kirke
In a video supporting the Center for Reproductive Rights in 2015, Girls and Sex Education actress Jemima Kirke shared her story about getting an abortion as a college student. “My life was just not conducive to raising a healthy, happy child,” she said. “I just didn’t feel it was fair.” Paying out of pocket for an abortion as a college student was a struggle, she said. “I did have to empty my checking account.”
Dia DipasupilAmber Tamblyn
“In 2012, I had an abortion,” Tamblyn wrote on Twitter in 2019. “It was one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever had to make. I still think about it to this day. But these truths do not make me regret my decision. It was the right choice for me, at that time in my life. I have not a single doubt about this.”
Amy SussmanTess Holliday
“My mental health couldn’t handle being pregnant again & I made the best decision for ME & ultimately my family,” wrote model Tess Holliday on Instagram in 2019, of getting an abortion after having two kids. “It wasn’t the ‘easy thing to do,’ it was excruciating on many levels, but necessary. Do I regret it or question my choice? Not at all.”
Momodu MansarayMilla Jovovich
In 2019 on Instagram, Milla Jovovich shared her abortion story, which had occurred two years earlier, when she had two children and was pregnant with a third. “I was 4 1/2 months pregnant and shooting on location in Eastern Europe. I went into pre term labor and told that I had to be awake for the whole procedure,” she wrote. “It was one of the most horrific experiences I have ever gone through. I still have nightmares about it. I was alone and helpless. When I think about the fact that women might have to face abortions in even worse conditions than I did because of new laws, my stomach turns.”
Valery HacheCatherine Deneuve
In 1971, 343 French cultural figures signed an open letter which read: “One million women have abortions each year in France. I declare that I am one of them. I declare that I’ve had an abortion. We demand open access to contraceptives; we demand open abortion.” The letter was drafted by Simone de Beauvoir and signed by hundreds of women including Deneuve.
Steven FerdmanLil’ Kim
At 18, just as her career was about to take off, Lil’ Kim got pregnant. BET reports that Kim told the radio show The Breakfast Club, “I don’t know if I have regrets about not keeping it. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. But then I’d say, ‘What would happen to my career?’”
Dia DipasupilSusan Sarandon
“I had an abortion in my 20s,” Sarandon told The Guardian in 2006. “My first [and only] marriage was falling apart. I had an affair with an insane guy and I knew having a kid with him wasn’t the right thing.”
Axelle/Bauer-GriffinRosanna Arquette
“I’ve had a couple of abortions in my life,” Rosanna Arquette wrote on Twitter in 2019. “It was my decision and Each time it was very sad hard and painful. But It was my choice and I was lucky to have good care. no one has the right to take away a women’s right to choose what’s best for her. Women will vote you out.” Arquette’s story is an important reminder – there is no hierarchy to people who’ve gotten abortions. You should be able to get as many abortions as you need, for any reason.
Axelle/Bauer-GriffinKathy Najimy
Kathy Najimy was 19 and a college student when she realized she was pregnant via her ex. “I had a really mean bossy bully doctor who tried to make me feel bad, and he said, ‘Well, you got yourself into this. Do you know what you’re going to do?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I’m going to have an abortion.’” In a 2018 video, she reflected on the other girls who might have seen that doctor and been “swayed by this person who really didn’t care about their life or their health.”
Michael KovacRita Moreno
In her 2011 memoir, Rita Moreno wrote about her experience when Marlon Brando forced her to have an abortion when they were in a relationship in her 20s. Abortions were illegal at the time, and Brando paid for a shady practitioner who botched Moreno’s abortion. She had to be hospitalised.
Bruce GlikasVanessa Williams
In an interview on ABC in 2012, Vanessa Williams shared that she got an abortion as a teenager. “Being pregnant is the most frightening thing that happens in your life,” she said. “I knew in high school that’s something that I was not prepared to do or fight or struggle with.”
Alberto E. RodriguezChelsea Handler
When Chelsea Handler was 16, she got pregnant and her parents took her to Planned Parenthood to get an abortion. “I felt parented, ironically, while I was getting an abortion. And when it was over, I was relieved in every possible way,” she wrote in Playboy in 2016. That same year, she got pregnant again, and again got an abortion. “We all make mistakes all the time. I happened to fuck up twice at the age of 16. I’m grateful that I came to my senses and was able to get an abortion legally without risking my health or bankrupting myself or my family. I’m 41 now. I don’t ever look back and think, God, I wish I’d had that baby.”
Arturo HolmesLaura Prepon
Laura Prepon was pregnant with her second child when she learned at her 16-week scan that the fetus’s brain and bones were not going to develop properly, and that Prepon was at risk from the pregnancy, she told People in 2020. She got an abortion. If and when the Supreme Court rolls back Roe v. Wade, states will pass laws that ban abortion, even when the procedure would save the pregnant person’s life.
John ParraAni DiFranco
“Here’s the truth: I have had two abortions, I have borne two children, I think I had an early miscarriage once, and of course, I’ve had more periods than I care to count,” Ani DiFranco wrote in LitHub in 2019. Girls and women who seek abortions receive this social message, she wrote: “You are a slut who forces others to suffer for your carelessness and stupidity. You are a bad girl, a fallen woman, an irresponsible and cheap human being. Patriarchal culture will spin a force that is bigger than all of us into your own personal character flaw and your mistake will be your own. Oh, and because of this mistake, your life is no longer rightfully yours. Having an abortion will make you a thief at best, walking around in a stolen life.”
But in DiFranco’s illuminating, invigorating essay, she makes it clear that she feels none of this promised regret or sadness. Thinking of her two abortions, she reflects, “I was in awe that the life inside me had the power to overtake me at any moment and jump from my clutches into the hands of another. It was an exercise in the terrifying math of the near miss. Your life as you envisioned it could have effectively ended three, five…ten years ago. Just imagine. What kind of shell of your former dreams would you be now?”
NBCToni Braxton
In her memoir, Unbreak My Heart, Toni Braxton shared that she got an abortion in her 30s. She was “bankrupt” and taking Accutane (isotretinoin), a medication that can cause severe birth defects if an person gets pregnant while using the drug. “I was suddenly faced with a choice I’d never thought I’d have to make,” she wrote. “Amid my major misgivings about abortion, I eventually made the gut-wrenching decision.” For Braxton, a descendent of two generations of pastors, the decision was fraught with guilt and pain.
Leon BennettMinka Kelly
“When I was younger I had an abortion. It was the smartest decision I could’ve made," Minka Kelly wrote in an Instagram post in 2019. “For a baby to’ve been born to two people—too young and completely ill equipped—with no means or help from family, would have resulted in a child born into an unnecessary world of struggle. Having a baby at that time would have only perpetuated the cycle of poverty, chaos and dysfunction I was born into.” She continued, “Lest we forget, outlawing abortion has never stopped women from attempting it.”
Rich FuryAlyssa Milano
In 2019 on her podcast Sorry, Not Sorry, Alyssa Milano shared that she’d had two abortions in 1993. “I was in love for the first time, in the breathless way you can only be in love when you are young,” she said. But she knew she was “not ready” to be a parent. She decided to get an abortion, despite guilt from her Catholic upbringing. “It was my choice. And it was absolutely the right choice for me,” she said. “It was not an easy choice. It was not something I wanted but it was something I needed–like most health care is.”
David LivingstonSherri Shepherd
“I’m speaking as a girl who had a lot of abortions, and I swear to God, if they had shown me a picture of the fetus…,” Sherri Shepherd trailed off, speaking on The View in 2012 about an anti-abortion law in Texas that forced pregnant women seeking abortions to look at sonogram images of their pregnancy. “I didn’t have the mental capacity to deal with having a child,” she said, tearfully.
Duane ProkopAshley Judd
“As everyone knows, and I’m very open about it, I’m a three-time rape survivor,” Ashley Judd said at the 2019 Women in the World summit. “And one of the times I was raped, there was conception. And I’m very thankful I was able to access safe and legal abortion. Because the rapist, who is a Kentuckian, as am I, and I reside in Tennessee, has paternity rights in Kentucky and Tennessee. I would’ve had to coparent with my rapist.”
She went on, “So having safe access to abortion was personally important to me and, as I said earlier, democracy starts with our skin. We’re not supposed to regulate what we choose to do with our insides.”
Frazer HarrisonJameela Jamil
Abortion “saved my life,” Jameela Jamil shared on Instagram in 2019. “I was mentally/physically/emotionally and financially unstable and most importantly DID NOT WANT A CHILD. That should be enough. My life matters more than an unborn human.” She added, “I had not a minute of regret. I only felt deep relief and gratitude that I lived in a country that made abortion accessible and safe.” Jamil noted that laws banning abortion most impact poor women, and do not actually stop abortion.
Axelle/Bauer-GriffinSharon Osbourne
Sharon Osbourne has told a deeply painful story about getting an abortion at 17 and being shamed and judged by her mother, who didn’t accompany her to the procedure. “I went alone. I was terrified,” she told The Daily Mail in 2004. “It was full of other young girls, and we were all terrified and looking at each other and nobody was saying a bloody word. I howled my way through it, and it was horrible.”
Michael TullbergMaureen McCormick
How common are abortions? Marcia Brady has had them. In her book Finding My True Voice, Maureen McCormick, the actor behind the iconic character, writes that she had multiple abortions. In an interview with People in 2008, McCormick explained that she shared her story with her daughter. “When I told her I had two abortions, her mouth dropped open. But then she looked at me and said, ‘I know you’re telling me this so I don’t have to go through the same misery you went through.’” McCormick said that being open with her daughter helped them bond, and that her daughter told McCormick she was proud of her.
Aaron DavidsonAli MacGraw
In 1985, Ali MacGraw appeared on the cover of People Magazine with the headline, “Abortion: No Easy Answers.” In fact, MacGraw had no regret or confusion about her abortion. “I had my child at 31. That experience is the most extraordinary and important thing in my life. In my early 20s, however, I simply wasn’t ready emotionally or financially for the kind of responsibility that good parenting involves.” She was making very little money, and getting an abortion was awful. “Once you made the decision to have an abortion in those days, the process became humiliating and terrifying. You started with the horror of the underground network of telephone calls. Unless you were rich, that is. It was easier to get a safe, clean abortion if you had money.”
She eventually got connected with a provider. “I didn’t know anything about him; I didn’t even know if he was a doctor.” She went because she felt that she had no other option. The illegal, unregulated procedure cost $2,000 and was “unspeakable,” she said. But she wasn’t sorry. “I didn’t then and still don’t feel any shame about what I did.” Years later in the late 1970s, when Roe v. Wade had upheld the legal right to abortion, MacGraw’s mother, then 80, told her that she’d had an illegal abortion herself back in the 1920s. Back then, “I hoped I would die rather than bring shame on my family,” she told her daughter. But years later, she told a stunned MacGraw, she wished she had the energy to volunteer for the pro-choice cause.
Don ArnoldHannah Gadsby
Hannah Gadsby survived being raped, became pregnant, and got an abortion. In 2019, speaking of state laws that restrict and ban abortion, she told Variety, “Had I been in that state, under these laws, under these politics at that time in my life, I would be dead. It’s as simple as that.” She went on, “I was assaulted, raped, and very, very vulnerable. How was I going to raise a child? I would have ended up dead. How is that pro-life? You can’t say women can’t have abortions and then provide absolutely no infrastructure to help them.”
David CorioSinead O’ Connor
Sinead O’ Connor has spoken—and sung—about having an abortion. “I was left with the decision of whether or not to have the child, knowing that the father wasn’t going to be around,” she told Spin in 1991, of having had an abortion the year before. “I decided that it was better not to and that I would have a child at a later stage when his father would be around and involved. I didn’t feel that I could handle it by myself.”
The Irish songwriter explained that the abortion was a hard and painful decision for her and added, “I wouldn’t lobby for or against abortion, but I would lobby very strongly for the right of women to have control over their own bodies and make decisions for themselves. Nobody has the right to tell anyone else what to think or believe. Especially the Catholic church with the amount of murdering and pillaging that it’s done.”
ANGELA WEISSStevie Nicks
Imagine that you meet a person who has amazing taste in music but holds the terrible, violent idea that women should be forced to give birth. Show them this quote. “If I had not had that abortion, I’m pretty sure there would have been no Fleetwood Mac,” Stevie Nicks told The Guardian in 2020.
Nicks had an abortion in 1979—she was working too hard to have a baby, she said. “I knew that the music we were going to bring to the world was going to heal so many people’s hearts and make people so happy. And I thought: You know what? That’s really important. There’s not another band in the world that has two lead women singers, two lead women writers. That was my world’s mission.”
BravoKatie Maloney-Schwartz
Katie Maloney-Schwartz of Vanderpump Rules shared last year that in the course of her relationship with Tom Schwartz, she got pregnant and the couple agreed that she would get an abortion, ENews reported. “Tom and I, 10 years ago, when this came up, we were not in that position to become parents,” she said.
On a podcast she added, “I think that’s what a lot of people are missing in this whole discussion that we’re talking about women’s rights to their body.” Choosing to have an abortion involves considering finances and resources, but “it’s also about mental health as well,” she said. “And [some] people are not mentally capable and mentally stable enough to have children.”
Axelle/Bauer-GriffinAlia Shawkat
In 2019, protesting abortion bans in Alabama and Georgia, Alia Shawkat tweeted that she’d had an abortion years before. “I was 20 and my partner at the time wasn’t allowed into the United States because he is Palestinian,” she wrote. “I wasn’t ready to raise a child alone or to be a mother.”
NBCSuzanne Somers
In 1988 in her book Keeping Secrets, Somers detailed her experience trying to self-administer an abortion with disastrous consequences – she almost died. Today, self-administered abortion can be safe with the abortion pill.
Pablo CuadraJoan Collins
At 88, Joan Collins explained her right to abortion clearly and fiercely. “I had an abortion,” she said on an episode of Piers Morgan’s Life Stories. “It would have been the death of my career, and I was by then 26. Of course I hesitated, but I realized that if I was going to have a child, I was going to be able to bring the child up properly, and I believed very strongly that I’m in charge of my body.”
