Sally Field shared her ”horrific story of the illegal abortion she underwent when she found herself pregnant at the age of 17 before the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Roe v. Wade.
The two-time Oscar winner indicates, in an Instagram video she posted Sunday, that the experience is a reason to support the Democratic presidential ticket of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, whom Field has endorsed, as well as other candidates and ballot initiatives “that could protect reproductive freedom,” she writes in the caption accompanying the video
And then, in all caps, she writes, “PLEASE. WE CAN’T GO BACK!!”
In the video, Field recalls her feelings and circumstances when she found out she was pregnant at such a young age.
“I had no choices in my life; I didn’t have a lot of family support or finances,” she says. “I had graduated high school, but no one ever said, ‘How about college?’ Nothing. I didn’t know what was going to be. And then I found out I was pregnant.”
Field says, “I still feel very shamed about it because I was raised in the ’50s, and it’s ingrained in me.”
In the caption accompanying the video, she writes that she’d “been so hesitant to do this, to tell my horrific story.
“It was during a time even worse than now,” she adds. “A time when contraception was not readily available and only if you were married.”
In the video, Field says a family friend, who was a doctor, drove her and her mother to Tijuana, Mexico.
“And we parked olly scroungy-looking street, 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 was to walk into that building and give them the cash and then come right back to him,” she says.
Field recalls that she had “no anesthetic” during the procedure. But, she says the technician was 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.”
However, she then “realized that the technician was 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.”
She continues, “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.”
The experience, Field says was “beyond hideous and life-altering,” but she thanks the doctor for his “generosity” and “bravery,” saying “he would’ve lost his license if anyone had found out” what he did.
Shortly after her illegal abortion, Field says, she began auditioning and landed her iconic role of Gidget by the end of the year.
She used her own experience to highlight the current challenges women have been facing since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022.
“I feel that so many women of my generation went through similar, traumatic events and I feel stronger when I think of them,” Field writes in her caption. “I believe, like me, they just want to fight for their grandchildren and all the young women of this country.
“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, they don’t know where they’re going,” she says in the video. “And it’s beyond, how you can go back to that and do that to our little girls and our young women, and not have respect and regard for their health and their own decisions about whether they feel they’re able to give birth to a child at that time. We can’t go back. We have to all stand-up and fight.”
Field ends her caption by encouraging others to share their stories.
