Roseanne Barr is no stranger to controversy or to speaking her mind. In a recent interview with Megyn Kelly, the comedian shared her personal story of teen pregnancy as well as her thoughts on abortion.
During the May 17 episode of The Megyn Kelly Show on SiriusXM, Barr spoke with Kelly about her childhood in a Jewish family in Salt Lake City, Utah. As a child, she said, she dreamed of becoming a stand-up comedian. At the age of 18, after having sex for the first time because “everyone else was,” she learned she was pregnant.
Kelly asked Barr if she ever considered an abortion.
“No,” she replied. “I lived in Utah and that wasn’t a possibility. But even if it had been, that’s not for me. That’s not for me. … I have five kids… I’m glad I had them all. I think we’re way past the point that abortion should be anything that anybody thinks of because we have the technology to prevent pregnancy and its just barbaric that we haven’t come farther than that and it really makes me mad when they say ‘women have the right to choose’ and then the choice they’re talking about is that — something so barbaric.”
She added, “They choose this barbarity. There’s a lot of reasons why, and they’re all horrible.”
The interview can be watched below, and the conversation about abortion and adoption begins at the 24:50 mark.
Barr went to a Salvation Army home for unwed mothers and placed her daughter for adoption through a Jewish social services organization in Denver with the hope that she would someday see her daughter again. In fact, she told Kelly that her baby had a distinctive shape to her ear at birth. It was folded over like Barr’s mother’s ear. “And I thought, ‘God made her ear like that so I’ll be able to find her’,” said Barr.
Barr acknowledged that placing her daughter for adoption was “really hard.” She was able to be with her baby for two days, telling her that she would see her again when she was 18. Barr never changed her name because she wanted it to remain the way it was written on her daughter’s birth certificate.
She also noted that she has always had trust in God and it’s because of that trust that she knew her prayers would be answered and she would see her daughter again. She eventually was reunited with her daughter, Brandi Ann Brown, on Brown’s 18th birthday. Barr said seeing her again was like, “We just knew each other for all those years.”
Barr rejected the labels of biological and adoptive mothers, saying that her daughter “has two moms who love her.” Her daughter is now a married 52-year-old “wonderful woman” who runs a nonprofit and has a son who won the state championship in chess at age 16.
