Jackie ‘O’ Henderson reveals she had devastating abortion in her 20s with her ex-husband Lee Henderson: ‘My son would be turning 23 this year’

Jackie ‘O’ Henderson has revealed she suffered a devastating abortion in her 20s during her relationship with her ex-husband Lee Henderson.

The radio host, 49, first opened up about the heartbreaking decision in her recently released memoir, The Whole Truth.

She said she became pregnant “unexpectedly” during her early romance with British photographer Lee around 2001, when she would have been about 26 years old.

In the emotional clip, Jackie explained that she and Lee came to the very difficult decision to have an abortion because neither of them were ready to become parents.

‘I was unexpectedly pregnant. It was morning sickness. But I wasn’t ready for motherhood yet,” Jackie said.

Jackie said that although she and Lee were getting married soon (and tied the knot in 2003), they were still “young and growing” and didn’t feel equipped to be parents at the time.

“It was an incredibly difficult decision, but through tears we made the decision we thought was right. Because we weren’t ready for it. We just weren’t,” she said.

Jackie recalled the difficult and conflicting emotions she struggled with at the family planning clinic in Woollahra as she detailed the operation.

She said she spent 10 minutes in the waiting room before going in for the surgical abortion, which uses suction to remove pregnancy tissue and takes less than 10 minutes.

‘It all happens so quickly, so matter-of-factly, so perfunctory. You wake up, and it’s emotional. I’m sure there were tears on my face, and when I think deeply about it all these years later, even if just for a moment, there are tears now too,” she bravely wrote.

Jackie admitted that to this day she is still very emotional about the abortion, especially now that she is a mother to her daughter Kitty, 13, who she welcomed with Lee in 2010.

She said she often wonders what could have happened as she watches Kitty grow up, admitting that while she doesn’t regret her decision, it wasn’t “easy.”

“You try not to fool yourself too much, but you do the math every year. I don’t know why, but I always thought it was a boy. A son. My son would be turning twenty-three this year,” she added.

Jackie heartbreakingly said she feared she would be ‘punished’ and not be able to have children as she told how she came to terms with the abortion.

She went on to talk about the difficult time she had when she struggled to conceive years later, saying she was “grateful.” Lee suggested I try IVF.

The broadcaster later welcomed her daughter Kitty with Lee in 2010 after undergoing several rounds of IVF to conceive.

Jackie and Lee went their separate ways in 2018 after 18 years together, with Jackie also opening up about their turbulent split in her new memoir.

She explained how they started bickering all the time, with Jackie feeling like she was slowly losing her identity before they eventually made the difficult decision to split.

The Whole Truth also saw Jackie reveal her past drug and alcohol addiction for the first time, after struggling in secret for years.

She opened up about how she fell into a deep addiction after the breakdown of her marriage to Lee in 2018 and again during the Covid-19 lockdown.

At the height of her addiction, Jackie was taking about 10 to 12 Stilnox/Zolpidem sleeping pills and 24 Panadeine Forte a day and washing them down with alcohol – which doctors warn is very dangerous.

Jackie explained the depths of her addiction in an emotional segment of her self-titled radio show last week, revealing that her struggles first began more than 15 years ago.

At the time, she was prescribed a strong opioid painkiller for endometriosis – a disease in which tissue similar to the uterine lining grows outside the uterus and causes severe pain.

“I was prescribed that and I noticed that I was taking it more than I needed at the time and I realized that could be a bit of a problem so I stopped taking it at the time,” she said.

However, Jackie went back to the medication after splitting from Lee in 2018 in an attempt to escape the pain she was feeling.

“I went back to it as a way to get to someone happy, and it was a way to escape and it was such the wrong thing to do,” she admitted.

Jackie said she started taking a few codeine and one Stilnox “here and there” with a glass of wine, which she described as a “blackout” situation.

“You can still be awake and have no idea what’s going on,” Jackie said.

“It’s like you function, but you have no memory.”

However, what really ‘kickstarted’ Jackie’s harrowing addiction was isolating at home during the Covid-19 pandemic, when she said she was ‘struggling’ and feeling ‘so sad’.

“The dosage started to increase and it got extreme and I was averaging about 24 Panadeine Forte a day and then I was averaging 10 to 12 Stilnox,” she said.

“Someone was watching me because I don’t know how I woke up most days on a dose like that.”

Eventually, Jackie confided in her best friend Gemma O’Neill about her struggles, which led to them secretly leaving Australia to attend the Betty Ford Clinic in California.

Jackie said Betty Ford told her not to change “anything” about her use before she arrived because it could be “dangerous,” so she was still taking pills the day she flew to the US.

Known for treating Hollywood stars including Keith Urban, Robert Downey Jr. And Lindsay LohanBetty Ford charges between $45,000 and $90,000 AUD for a one-month stay, depending on the program.

When she checked in for a 28-day stay worth $50,000 in November 2022, Jackie didn’t tell any of her coworkers – not even her co-host Kyle Sandilands – and instead claimed she was suffering from long Covid.

Reading an excerpt from the prologue of her memoir, she said: “The whole team wishes me well, I’m sure they’re curious about my temporary leave, but none of them really know why I’m stepping back.

“But it must be so.”

She apologized to her listeners and tearfully admitted that she “lied” by “omission” when she publicly shared on her radio show that she was struggling with long Covid-19 at the time.

“I want to apologize to our listeners and to everyone in my life that I haven’t been involved with in this. “I had to focus on that part first, especially that recovery during the first year,” she added.