A star of a reality show franchise recently spoke about undergoing an abortion as a teenager. Though she framed it as a positive event in her life, she also admitted it was traumatizing.
Erin Lichy appears on “The Real Housewives of New York,” a show under the “Real Housewives” franchise. Inspired by the show “Desperate Housewives” from the early 2000s, the idea was to show the lives of wealthy women who “lead glamorous lives in a picturesque Southern California gated community where the average home has a $1.6 million price tag and residents include CEOs and retired professional athletes.” The first show was “The Real Housewives of Orange County,” but there have since been numerous spin-offs in cities around the globe, including New York City, Atlanta, Salt Lake City, Miami, Dubai, and others.
In an interview with Glamour, Lichy said she had an abortion at 18 after just beginning college. “I literally remember the feeling washing over me in my dorm bathroom, and I just lost it,” she said. “I was sitting on the floor for maybe an hour and a half hysterically crying, just like, ‘What am I gonna do? Oh my God.’ It was so terrifying to me.”
Lichy said she went to Planned Parenthood because she was too scared to tell her parents or her friends, though she said her boyfriend was supportive and the abortionist at Planned Parenthood was “kind.” Still, she said, just talking about the abortion “makes me emotional.”
READ: Pressured towards abortion, she found support at a pregnancy center
Though the article attempted to frame abortion as a positive, Lichy said the experience was “traumatizing” — so much so, that she never spoke to her boyfriend again. “I couldn’t,” she said. “Something broke inside me, and I just didn’t even want to have any connection to it.”
She eventually did tell her mother about the abortion, and her mother told her that she, too, once had an abortion… a fact that Lichy gushed over. “The most beautiful part about it was that she said, ‘It happened to me too,’” Lichy said. “It felt like women supporting women. Like, even though she’s my mom she wanted me to know.… Everybody has a story. I would bet that most girls have a similar story, even if it’s [about using] Plan B.”
It seems incredibly odd that Lichy would find it “beautiful” to know that she had a sibling whom her mother aborted. Regardless of how one may feel about abortion, there’s nothing to celebrate about a terrified teenage girl feeling that her only option is to have an abortion, rather than knowing she has the support and resources to raise her child without sacrificing her education or career.
Call on President Trump to pardon the FACE Act prisoners on his first day in office.
