Cecily Strong, the “Saturday Night Live” (SNL) comedian who dressed up as a clown and announced she had undergone an abortion, gave birth to a baby girl on April 2 after undergoing in vitro fertilization (IVF).
In Strong’s pregnancy announcement in November 2024, she praised her prior abortion by wearing a grey shirt that read “pregnant, pro-choice, and proud.” She discussed having an abortion 17 years ago, suffering pregnancy loss and infertility afterward, and then finally, being able to conceive. “A couple years ago I did a piece on SNL as Goober the Clown who had an abortion the day before her 23rd birthday,” she wrote. “I’m happy to report that same clown is now very happily pregnant from IVF at 40.”
Last week, when she announced the birth of her daughter on Instagram, she said being a mom was like “the greatest dream, but it’s real.” She also — possibly unintentionally — acknowledged the humanity of her daughter while she was still in the womb (emphasis added):
It’s been a week and a day with my beautiful squirmy baby girl. I recognize all her little squirms and kicks from when she was on the other side of me and now I get to say “see what I was talking about!”
She makes Robert Deniro faces and snorts when she is super determined on the boob. She’s gonna be stronger than me in about a week. Her squeaks and sighs are my favorite noises on earth. Born with a full head of dark hair which made me scream “whoo hoo!” while pushing.
And I’ve been screaming Whoo hoo every day since because she’s absolutely perfect and I won the lottery.
On the Weekend Update segment in 2021 alongside Colin Jost, Strong appeared as Goober the Clown, discussing the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization Supreme Court case, which led to the overturning of Roe v. Wade the following year.
Strong began the skit by complaining about how she had to talk about abortion — all while making clown animals.
In the skit, she said:
I had an abortion the day before my 23rd birthday! Well, actually, I really don’t [want to talk about abortion]. But people keep bringing it up, so I gotta keep talking about freaking abortion.
But it’s a rough subject, so we’re gonna do fun clown stuff to make it more palatable. Whee! Hey, who wants a balloon animal? You want a giraffe?
… And I wish I didn’t have to do this because the abortion I had at 23 is my personal clown business. But that’s what some people in this country wanna discuss all the time, even though clown abortion was legalized in Clown v. Wade in 1973.
She also perpetuated the false statistic that “1 in 3 women” will have abortions in their lifetimes, and added, “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.”
In reality, since Strong made the decision to end her child’s life for the furtherance of her career, she will never get the chance to know what her child might have become if he or she had been placed with a loving adoptive family.
Of course, Strong did not “have to” speak about her “rough” personal abortion experience on national television, but it is revealing that she did so while wearing a clown suit and making balloon animals to distract from the tragedy of abortion, when so many today claim abortion is not an occasion for grief but for celebration.
Additionally, the fact that Strong was able to conceive at age 40 through IVF makes her one of the “lucky” ones, statistically speaking. For women between the ages of 38 and 40, the likelihood of a child conceived via IVF resulting in a successful live birth is somewhere around 23-25%.
IVF has been increasingly criticized as unethical in recent years, as it leads to the dehumanization and commodification of children. Rather than seeing babies as human beings with their own intrinsic dignity and worth, adults see them as products to be obtained by any means necessary when they’re wanted — and, as Strong’s own experience illustrates, destroyed when they aren’t.
