A-list actress Sophie Turner was fresh off her star-making role as Sansa Stark in the HBO series “Game of Thrones” and had been married to Joe Jonas for just a few months when she found out she was unexpectedly pregnant. Shocked, she momentarily considered having an abortion, but chose instead to keep her daughter and now speaks glowingly about the joys of motherhood.
Turner spoke about the surprise pregnancy in an interview with British Vogue. She was 24 years old and on a retreat in Bali. “It was my first day there and I was meeting my roommate for the first time,” she recalled. “Before we settled down to chat, I told her that I just needed to go and take a pregnancy test. I took the test and was like: ‘I’m pregnant, so nice to meet you!’”
At first, she said the idea of abortion had crossed her mind.
“Maybe because I was so young, I sat on it for a week,” she said. “Thankfully there were therapists there to help me talk things through. I told my husband when I got back. I remember throwing the pregnancy test at him, saying, ‘What do you think we should do? Do you think we should have it?’ When you’re in your early 20s, life is so frivolous. At that point, I really didn’t know if I wanted to be a mother, but something changed in me that day. I just knew I had to have her.”
Turner is now the mother of two, Willa and Delphine, with the oldest, Willa, born in the middle of the COVID-19 lockdown. She said she was grateful for the opportunity to have 10 months of free time to bond.
“At that age, everything changes so quickly. One week they’re breastfeeding and the next they’re sitting there eating avocado. It’s a real miracle to just watch them grow up in front of your eyes,” she said, adding of Delphine, “Because my ex and I travel so much, I wanted Willa to have a sibling. I wanted them to have each other. They’re so much fun, total girlie girls and absolute rays of sunshine in my life.”
She and her husband, pop star Joe Jonas, have been going through a publicly acrimonious divorce, and she said her daughters gave her the strength to get through it.
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“There were some days that I didn’t know if I was going to make it. I would call my lawyer saying, ‘I can’t do this. I just can’t.’ I was just never strong enough to stand up for myself,” she said. “And then, finally, after two weeks of me being in a rut, she reminded me that it was my children I was fighting for. Once anyone says to me, ‘Do it for your kids,’ I’m doing it. I wouldn’t do it for myself, but I’ll find the strength for them.”
And though she has found joy in motherhood for herself, she still supports legal abortion, telling British Vogue that she wants to raise her daughters in her home — the United Kingdom — due to pro-life laws in the United States. “[W]omen in the US are being stripped of their rights, left, right and [center],” she said. “It all contributed to this feeling of I have to get out, I have to get out.”
Killing a child, born or preborn, is no one’s valid right; it is robbing another human being of his or her right to live. Oddly, abortion advocates can never seem to point to what other “rights” women are seemingly being “stripped of” aside from the false right to kill their own child, who is a distinct human being. And some, like VP Kamala Harris, have even claimed that the ‘right’ to abort a child is a woman’s “most fundamental right.”
Though many celebrities have openly advocated for abortion, plenty of others have proven that one can be a mother without sacrificing their career.
Renee Elise Goldsberry tearfully thanked her husband and children after winning a Tony award for her role as Angelica Schuyler in “Hamilton,” which she said proved that she could be a mother and still win. Catherine Zeta-Jones was pregnant while filming her role as Velma Kelley for “Chicago,” and then won an Oscar, which she accepted at nine months pregnant. Gal Gadot, now a box-office super star, was also pregnant while filming Wonder Woman.
The reality is, women don’t need abortion to be successful. And, as Turner illustrates, while becoming a mother at an unexpected time can be scary, it doesn’t mean an end to a career — or that the birth of that child won’t also bring happiness and fulfillment.
