Sally Field has spoken about the “horrendous” and “traumatic” illegal abortion she underwent as a 17-year-old in 1964, as she called on voters to get behind Kamala Harris in the upcoming US presidential election.
The Oscar-winning actor first revealed her abortion in her 2018 memoir In Pieces, but wrote in the caption of her video, shared on Instagram, that she was “so hesitant to do this, to tell my horrific story.”
“It was a time even worse than now,” she writes. “A time when contraception was not readily available and only if you were married. But I feel like so many women of my generation have experienced similar, traumatic events and I feel stronger when I think about them. I believe that, like me, they should want to fight for their grandchildren and all the young women of this country.”
In the video, Field said she still feels “very ashamed” about the abortion “because I grew up in the 1950s and it is deeply ingrained in me.” She was 17 when she underwent the procedure in 1964 — nine years before Roe v Wade introduced a constitutional right to abortion, which was upheld until the U.S. Supreme Court struck down abortion rights at the federal level in June 2022.
The actor said she had “no choices in my life” and little support from her family when she discovered she was pregnant. A family friend who was a doctor took her, her mother and his wife to Tijuana, Mexico, so she could have the abortion.
“We parked on a really dirty looking street, it was scary and he parked about three blocks away and said, ‘See that building down there?’ And he gave me an envelope with cash and I had to walk into that building and give them the money and then come right back to him,” Field said, adding that she believed he had traveled with her in case she died.
The procedure was “beyond horrible and life-changing” and she “had no anesthesia,” she said.
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“There was a technician who gave me a few puffs of ether, but then he took it away, so my arms and legs just felt numb (and) weird, but I felt everything — how much pain I was in,” she said.
“Then the situation became darker. I realized that the technician was actually harassing me, so I had to figure out: How can I make my arms move to push him away? So it was just this absolute pit of shame. And when it was done, they said, ‘Go, go, go, go!’, as if the building was on fire. And they didn’t want me there, you know, it was illegal.
She thanked her doctor for his “generosity and courage” in risking his driver’s license by taking her to Mexico, recalling that she had never left her home state or been on a plane before the trip. But a few months after the illegal abortion, she started auditioning and soon after booked her breakthrough role in Gidget.
“These are the things that women are going through right now: when they try to go to another state, they don’t have the money, they don’t have the resources, they don’t know where they’re going. Field said. “And it goes beyond that, and do that to our little girls and our young women, and have no respect and disregard for their health and their own decisions about whether they feel like they can bear a child at that time .”
In her caption, the actor called on voters to support Harris and Tim Walz, or “those with ballot initiatives that could protect reproductive freedom.”
“”PLEASE. WE CANNOT GO BACK!!” she finished.
Field previously supported Harris for president when Joe Biden resigned. to Variety in July that she was “so grateful” to Biden and that she supported Harris “with all my 77-year-old heart.”
Public opinion polls have long shown that most Americans favor access to abortion, but many Republican-led state legislatures have sought to restrict access, citing mainly conservative religious beliefs.
While Roe v Wade was overturned two years after the end of Donald Trump’s presidency, three U.S. Supreme Court justices appointed by him were part of the conservative bloc that overturned the landmark decision, fearing that a second Trump presidency could disrupt reproductive would further restrict women’s rights.
Trump’s wife Melania recently revealed that she is a passionate supporter of women’s right to abortion, writing in her new memoir: “It is imperative to ensure that women have autonomy in deciding their preference for having children, based on their own beliefs, free from any government interference or pressure.”