With the passage of strong Pro-Life laws in many states this year, though unfortunately not in Texas, anti-Life celebrities are chiming in with their stories about abortion. Actors and musicians from all walks of life have been especially vocal on platforms like Twitter sharing with the hashtag #YouKnowMe to “normalize” the killing of preborn children.
Far from advancing the false claims that abortion is “healthcare” and “necessary” for women, the many celebrity abortion stories show how traumatic, inhumane, and devastating abortion is. Although abortion activists can ignore the preborn children killed in abortion, pregnant mothers know they are carrying a child and cannot pretend otherwise.
People Magazine featured a recent slideshow highlighting many celebrities’ abortion stories shared in recent months or in years past. The stories range from young teens whose parents escorted them to abortion mills to women who underwent elective abortions well into adulthood. Some women came to deeply regret the decision, while others treat the death of their preborn child flippantly. Still others insist they have no regret while also clearly mourning the child killed in the abortion. The common thread between these varied, sad stories is fear. The stories, though all different, demonstrate that abortion is not “empowering” but results from the perception that there is no choice and fear of choosing Life.
Many of the celebrities describe vividly the terror they experienced while being pregnant. Outspoken anti-Lifer Whoopie Goldberg described being pregnant as a teen, saying, “At that moment I was more afraid of having to explain to anybody what was wrong than of going to the park with a hanger, which is what I did.” Although these same celebrities insist that abortion must be legal to “protect women,” they do not acknowledge that, whether legal or illegal, abortion is chosen for the same reason: fear.
Actress Busy Philipps inspired many other celebrities to speak about abortion after bringing up the subject on her late-night show. She said, “I had an abortion when I was 15 years old and I’m telling you this because I’m genuinely really scared for women and girls all over the country.” Philipps was reacting to the passage of Pro-Life protections in Georgia, suggesting that all 15-year-old girls should be able to undergo elective abortion.
To put this radical claim in perspective, the age of consent in Georgia is 16, so a girl undergoing elective abortion would be a victim of statutory rape or another crime. Abortion activists see nothing wrong with sending young, vulnerable girls to the predatory abortion industry which has ignored and covered up such crimes in the past.
Surprisingly, many celebrities acknowledged the child killed in the abortion, so often ignored by abortion activists. Actress Minka Kelly wrote, “When I was younger I had an abortion. It was the smartest decision I could’ve made, not only for myself & my boyfriend at the time, but also for this unborn fetus.” Kelly continued, “Having a baby at that time would have only perpetuated the cycle of poverty, chaos, and dysfunction I was born into.” Thus, Kelly argues that killing her preborn child was better than her child being born into poverty. This is an insulting claim to countless people born into difficult circumstances; of course, they are not better off dead.
In a similar claim, actress Jameela Jamil stirred up controversy earlier this year by asserting that being killed in an abortion was good for her baby, acknowledging that she was, in fact, killing the baby. At the time, she wrote, “I had an abortion when I was young, and it was the best decision I have ever made. Both for me, and for the baby I didn’t want, and wasn’t ready for, emotionally, psychologically and financially. So many children will end up in foster homes. So many lives ruined. So very cruel.” Jamil suggests that the countless families working to reunite families in the foster care system are cruel but killing innocent and defenseless children is somehow good.
On the daytime talk show The View, Sherri Shepperd gave a shocking explanation for why she opposes Pro-Life laws that require mothers to see a sonogram before undergoing an abortion. She said, “I’m speaking as a girl who has had a lot of abortions, and if they had showed me a fetus, I probably wouldn’t have but I would have put my child in a lot of situations that wouldn’t have been good because I didn’t have the mental capacity to deal with having a child.” In other words, Shepperd admits that seeing her preborn child likely would have changed her mind and caused her to choose Life. What she does not acknowledge is that whether or not the child is seen, we know that a preborn child is just that: a living human being with a beating heart.
Although anti-Life celebrities share their abortion stories in an attempt to inspire acceptance for killing preborn babies, their stories do quite the reverse. The disturbing stories reveal the fear and sadness at the heart of so many abortion decisions. Mothers know that abortion takes the Life of a child; the only reason most women would choose such barbarity is desperation, as so many of these stories show.
Preborn babies deserve Life, and their mothers deserve better than abortion.