Lena Dunham: ‘I still haven’t had an abortion, but I wish I had’
Actress Lena Dunham announced during the most recent episode of her podcast “Women of the Hour” that she wishes she had undergone an abortion in order to combat “stigma around this issue.”
Dunham said that “something I’ve thought about a lot is the fact that there is stigma around abortion.”
“We all know that there’s cultural stigma, it’s hard to put an abortion on network TV,” she added.
Dunham, a writer and producer of HBO’s “Girls,” said that her mother taught her to describe herself as “a pro-choice woman.”
“From an early age, she taught my younger sibling and me to say ‘anti-choice’ instead of ‘pro-life’ because she wanted to make sure that we knew that everyone is pro-life,” Dunham said. “Some people are anti-choice.”
Dunham said that as an “abortion rights activist,” she always thought that she never did anything to “stigmatize abortion.”
“But one day, when I was visiting a Planned Parenthood in Texas a few years ago, a young girl walked up to me and asked me if I’d like to be a part of her project in which women share their stories of abortions,” Dunham said. “I sort of jumped. ‘I haven’t had an abortion,’ I told her. I wanted to make it really clear to her that as much as I was going out and fighting for other women’s options, I myself had never had an abortion.”
“And I realized then that even I was carrying within myself stigma around this issue,” Dunham continued. “Even I, the woman who cares as much as anybody about a woman’s right to choose, felt it was important that people know I was unblemished in this department.”
Dunham said that many of her loved ones have “had to have abortions for all kinds of reasons.”
“I feel so proud of them for their bravery, for their self-knowledge, and it was a really important moment for me then to realize I had internalized some of what society was throwing at us and I had to put it in the garbage,” she said. “Now I can say that I still haven’t had an abortion, but I wish I had.”
The actress’ remarks gained a great deal of attention on social media.
(H/T: Newsbusters)
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