With the recent move to overturn Roe V. Wade, there is no longer the federal constitutional right to abortion that has been in place for close to 50 years. It takes away the ability of a woman to make decisions about her own body in many states in the country. The response to this decision made by the Supreme Court has been met with great anger, disappointment and sadness. It has also shed a light on stories of women from all walks of life who made the decision to have an abortion because it was the best one for where they were at a certain time in their life. That includes well-known women. Had they not had the ability to make that choice for themselves, their lives would be very different.
Many celebrity women have opened up about their experiences, whether in books, interviews or on social media. One woman shared her experience making the decision on reality TV. See, in their own words, their stories, how they came to their decision and felt about it, and their strength.
01
Nicki Minaj
“I thought I was going to die. I was a teenager. It was the hardest thing I’d ever gone through,” she said. “It’d be contradictory if I said I wasn’t pro-choice. I wasn’t ready. I didn’t have anything to offer a child.”
02
Shekinah Jo
“I got pregnant early in my life and I knew I wasn’t ready to be a mother. So I had two abortions. But now with Georgia rolling back on women’s rights? All women need to be careful,” she said on ‘Love and Hip Hop Atlanta’ years ago. “Now in my life I don’t regret it. I wasn’t ready to have kids.”
03
Zerlina Maxwell
“I had an abortion when I was 18 years old. I’m not sure if I’ve ever talked about it on here but I’m not ashamed so I’m sharing today because if #youknowme then you know someone who has had an abortion.”
04
Chilli
Early in her career, while dating producer Dallas Austin, the TLC singer said she made the decision to have an abortion.
“”I didn’t have the support, and so I was so scared and didn’t know what to do,” she said, “and chose to not have it – one of the biggest mistakes. I’m 20, my career hadn’t even really started, you know, so how do I do all that? How do I be a mommy?” she recalled. “It messed me up. I don’t know – it broke my spirit.” She added, “I feel like I became, I don’t know – kind of like, not my strong self anymore. I feel like I gave in and I broke to what someone else wanted. And I would break down and I would just cry – because I wasn’t a mommy. I cried almost every day for almost nine years.”
05
Amina Buddafly
“I made the best decision in that moment,” the singer and former “Love and Hip Hop New York” star shared. “I don’t like regrets in general. I don’t like to think about anything that I can’t change that’s in the past in a negative way. It is what it is and I have to be positive and move on from it. But I’m really sad about it and I’m going to be sad for a long time.”
06
Sanya Richards-Ross
“Everything I ever wanted seemed to be within reach,” she wrote in ‘Chasing Grace: What the Quarter Mile Has Taught Me About God and Life’ about finding out she was pregnant just weeks before the Olympic Games in 2008. “The culmination of a lifetime of work was right before me. In that moment, it seemed like no choice at all. The debate of when life begins swirled through my head, and the veil of a child out of wedlock at the prime of my career seemed unbearable. What would my sponsors, my family, my church, and my fans think of me?”
07
Whoopi Goldberg
Before she was an EGOT winner, Whoopi Goldberg was a young teenager trying figure out her situation. “I found out I was pregnant when I was fourteen. I didn’t get a period. I talked to nobody. I panicked. At that moment I was more afraid of having to explain to anybody what was wrong than of going to the park with a hanger, which is what I did.”
08
Keke Palmer
“I was 24, in Europe, very far away from home,” she shared in a tweet as part of support in the fight against abortion stigma. “I was worried about my career responsibilities and afraid that I could not exist as both a career woman and mother. #YouKnowMe”
09
Vanessa Williams
“Being pregnant is the most frightening thing that happens in your life,” she said about learning she was pregnant in high school. “I knew in high school that’s something that I was not prepared to do, or fight, or struggle with.”
10
K Michelle
On her former VH1 reality show ‘K Michelle: My Life,’ the singer opened up about having an abortion after her ex, who had four children already, had proven himself to be someone she wouldn’t be able to rely on.
“I never thought that was something that I would do at this point in my life, and when that decision was made…I beat myself up really bad,” she said.
11
Toni Braxton
“I was suddenly faced with a choice I’d never thought I’d have to make. Amid my major misgivings about abortion, I eventually made the gut-wrenching decision … In my heart, I believed I had taken a life — an action that I thought God might one day punish me for. … My initial rage was quickly followed by another strong emotion: guilt.”
12
Tami Roman
The actress and reality TV personality received an abortion while on ‘The Real World’ in 1993. “When I decided to show that journey, for me, it was dealing with all of the emotional rollercoaster of should I do this, should I not do this? Should I have a child? Should I not have a child? Am I ready? No I’m not ready. I’m still trying to get me together. I can’t help somebody else until I can help myself. And ultimately the best decision for me was to terminate the pregnancy,” she said recently. “I wanted to show people by example, be responsible. Because this is hard to go through. You don’t want to have to terminate your child. You want to be ready for that process. And also you want to be with the person, in love with the person that you’re having this child with. I had none of that. So for me that was the decision that I made.”
13
Elisabeth Ovesen
Known for the brand she built as Karrine Steffans, Ovesen opened up about choosing to have two abortions while in an allegedly abusive marriage.
“I have been married three times, and in the past year, aborted the two babies conceived with my third husband,” she wrote in an op-ed for XO Jane in 2016. “God knows I loved him. God knows I still do. But it was his drug and alcohol addictions and the abuse I suffered from him that made it impossible for me to see myself stuck with him for the rest of my life.”
She added, “I figured the marriage could be undone, but our children would be forever, and they deserved a better father and a happier, healthier mother.”
