In her new book, ‘The Third Gilmore Girl,’ actress Kelly Bishop admits that she had an abortion when she was in her 30s — because she didn’t want to have children, and it didn’t occur to her that she could get pregnant unexpectedly.
The now-80-year-old Bishop, star of “Gilmore Girls” and “Dirty Dancing,” in which part of the plot includes an illegal abortion, told People that even as a young girl she knew she didn’t want to have children. “I meant it,” she said. “And that was fine. I mean, that’s a choice.”
She’s right. It is a choice to not have children — but it’s never an acceptable choice to kill a child once that child has been conceived.
Bishop said it was “such a relief” to have the “option” of killing her preborn child — lending credence to the idea that if the option doesn’t exist, many women wouldn’t abort. “Of course,” she continued, “it never occurred to me that I would accidentally get pregnant. That never crossed my mind. But the fact that that was available and legal, it was just a relief.”
Bishop was in her 30s when she had the abortion, so it’s shocking for her to explain that she didn’t realize she could experience an unplanned pregnancy. Countless young women today likely feel the same, wrongly believing that “safe sex” using a condom will stop them from becoming pregnant. The only ways to truly avoid pregnancy are abstinence or sterilization. Sexual education, however, largely promotes the false notion of “safe sex” over abstinence to millions of teenagers who then believe they won’t get pregnant if they use birth control… and therefore jump into sex before marriage.
Bishop, who became pregnant while married, said she wasn’t planning to include her abortion in her memoir because she hasn’t experienced “any feeling of shame and wrongdoing” over it. But ultimately, she decided to share because “the Supreme Court got rid of Roe v. Wade.”
“And more and more women — actresses, but other celebrity-type women — were coming out of my generation, saying, ‘I had an abortion. I had an abortion.'” Maybe Bishop didn’t want to feel left out.
But despite her flippant attitude towards her baby and her claim that she doesn’t feel any shame, many celebrities who have shared their abortion stories have. Britney Spears called her experience with the abortion pill “excruciating” and said that her baby’s father, Justin Timberlake, pressured her into doing it. Her life doesn’t appear to have been the same since.
TLC band member Chilli also shared her abortion regret saying the abortion was what her boyfriend wanted and she “didn’t have the support” to have the baby. “It messed me up,” she said through tears. “I don’t know; It just, it broke my spirit. […] I feel like I became kind of like not my strong self anymore. I felt like I gave in and I broke to what someone else wanted. And I would break down and I would just cry because I wasn’t a mommy. I cried almost every day for almost nine years and then I was caught up, I had to have a baby.”
Bishop said another reason she decided to share her abortion story was “so that young women of today get a sense of where we were then.”
Fifty years or so ago, when Bishop had the abortion, abortion had just been legalized in the United States and was climbing to an all-time high of 1,429,000 abortions in 1990. In the 1970s, when Bishop had her abortion, ultrasound technology was only beginning to become widely available in America, and it was obviously not as clear in its displayed imagery as it is today.
Today, women have the technology at their fingertips that proves the humanity and personhood of preborn children and exposes how those children are killed during each type of abortion procedure.
Any shame women feel over an abortion is not because of pro-life laws. To ignore the shame that women feel or make that shame seem abnormal does a disservice to the women who are mourning their children.
If you are suffering from abortion regret or trauma, help is available.
