Sally Field bravely shared the story of her abortion at the age of 17 to emphasize the importance of voting for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz and ballot initiatives that protect reproductive freedom.
“It's one of the reasons why so many of us are supporting Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. Everyone, please, pay attention to this election, up and down the ballot, in every state — especially those with ballot initiatives that could protect reproductive freedom. PLEASE. WE CAN'T GO BACK!!,” she captioned her video post on Instagram, where she detailed her harrowing experience.
The actress first publicly revealed her story in her 2018 memoir, In Pieces. On Instagram, she reiterated the details for the next generation. When she was 17, she became pregnant by an unnamed boy. This was also in 1964, nine years before the landmark Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision — once the law of the land — that ensured the right to abortions in the United States.
Having been raised in the Fifties, she said she felt “shame” about the experience, but felt it was important to share her story given the threat to abortion rights across states now that Roe v Wade has been decimated. Field said at the time she had no finances, not much family support, and while she had graduated from high school, “I didn't know what it was going to be, and then I found out I was pregnant,” she said.
A doctor who was a friend of the family drove her, along with his wife and her mom, to Tijuana, Mexico, to what appeared to be a sketchy area. The doctor gave her cash and directed her to a building down the street and told her to come back right afterward. She described the experience as “life-altering,” where she was not given full anesthetic.
“There was a technician giving me a few puffs of ether, but he would then take it away so it just made my arms and legs feel numb and weird. But I felt everything, how much pain I was in, and then I realized that the technician was actually harassing me,” she said of her compounding traumatizing experience. “So I had to figure out, how can I make my arms move to push him away? And, you know, so it was just, you know, this absolute pit of shame.”
She said the people who performed the procedure hurried her out, likely due to the procedure being illegal. She acknowledged her doctor's generosity and courage as he risked his license and more by assisting her in receiving the procedure she needed.
She was not yet professionally acting at the time, but she said soon after she was auditioning and by the end of that year she had the lead role in Gidget. “In reality, I was the quintessential All-American Girl Next Door, because so many young women in my generation of women were going through this,” she said.
“And these are the things that women are going through now, when they're trying to get to another state, they don't have the money, they don't have the means, that they don't know where they're going,” she continued, adding that “We can't go back. We have to all stand up and fight.”
