Sally Field Shares Harrowing, Illegal Abortion Story

“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,” Field captioned her video. “We can’t go back.”

By Audra Heinrichs | October 8, 2024 | 12:26pm

Photo: Getty Images Abortion Celebrities 2024 Election

Sally Field Shares Harrowing, Illegal Abortion Story

It’s less than a month to Election Day and, in an effort to mobilize voters behind Vice President Kamala Harris, Sally Field shared her “traumatic” story of getting an illegal abortion in Mexico when she was just 17.

In a video shared to Instagram on Sunday, the Oscar-winning actor described the “beyond hideous and life-altering” procedure that took place 60 years ago, in 1964, nine years before the landmark Roe v. Wade Supreme Court ruling in 1973.

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“I’ve been so hesitant to do this, to tell my horrific story,” Field captioned the post. “It was during a time even worse than now. A time when contraception was not readily available and only if you were married. But I feel that so many women of my generation went through similar, traumatic events and I feel stronger when I think of them. I believe, like me, they must want to fight for their grandchildren and all the young women of this country.”

The Oscar-winner previously shared her abortion story in 2018, in her memoir, In Pieces, but went into greater detail in her video: “I had no choices in my life, I didn’t have a lot of family support or finances. I graduated high school but no one ever said, ‘How about college?’ Nothing. I didn’t know what I was gonna be,” Field said. “And then I found out I was pregnant.”

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Field, along with her mother, a family doctor, and his wife, then drove to Tijuana. She remembered the doctor parked on a “scrungy-looking street” three blocks from where the abortion would take place, gave her an envelope of cash, and directed her to the building. Like the overwhelming majority of women who underwent abortion in that era, Field wasn’t given an 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 weird, but I felt everything—how much pain I was in,” she said. “Then the situation turned darker. I realized that the technician was actually molesting 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 then, when it was finished, they said, ‘Go go go go go!’, like the building was on fire. And they didn’t want me there, you know, it was illegal!” Field added.

Still, Field credited her family’s doctor, saying “he would’ve lost his license if anyone had found out. “Without his “generosity” and “bravery,” Field said she wouldn’t have been able to pursue her now-decades-long (and decorated) acting career.

“By the end of that year, I was Gidget,” Field concluded. “I was the quintessential, all-American girl next door.”

“It’s one of the reasons why so many of us are supporting Kamala Harris and Tim Walz,” she wrote in the video’s caption. “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!!”

In September, Kelly Bishop, of Gilmore Girls fame, also shared her abortion story for the first time in her new memoir, The Third Gilmore Girl. “That’s something private that I just was not going to put in until the Supreme Court got rid of Roe v. Wade,” she told People. “And more and more women—actresses, but other celebrity-type women—were coming out of my generation, saying, ‘I had an abortion. I had an abortion.’”