All products featured on Vogue are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
In the early aughts the writer and activist Jennifer Baumgardner designed a T-shirt emblazoned with a simple sentence: I had an abortion. Baumgardner was, at the time, co-producing a movie of the same name, about the secrecy that has often shrouded the medical procedure. The 2005 documentary profiled eleven women from their 20s to their 80s, representing a spectrum of race and class, who shared an experience in common: each had had an abortion. And they were all willing to talk about it. Likewise, the women who wore the T-shirt (I remember spotting them on the streets of New York and at the 2004 March for Women’s Lives in Washington D.C.) were also sharing something about their personal health history. At the time, the willingness to normalize abortions that the T-shirts represented was appalling to conservative organizations like the National Right to Life Committee. But normalizing abortion was the whole point, of course.
I have to think that Britney Spears, a woman whose history with statement T-shirts is long and legendary, would wear Baumgardner’s tee well. One of the most mentioned revelations from her biography The Woman in Me is that Spears, when she was dating Justin Timberlake, had an abortion. Actress Kerry Washington, in her memoir Thicker Than Water released in September, said that she too had had an abortion early in her career. (Her iconic character Olivia Pope famously underwent one on Scandal as well). Spears and Washington join a chorus of celebrities who have spoken out about their abortions in recent years, Phoebe Bridgers, Busy Phillips, Uma Thurman, and Jameela Jamil among them. These revelations aren’t just about grabbing headlines: The intent, in part, is to change hearts and minds on what remains a deeply divisive topic, and to shine a light on how commonplace the procedure is. (Around one in four women will have an abortion in her lifetime.)
“The more people that are famous who are talking about these experiences that so many women and birthing people around the world face, the more we are normalizing the experience,” says Paige Bellenbaum, founding director of The Motherhood Center in New York, adding that celebrities like Brooke Shields and again Spears have done the same for maternal mental health conversations. Celebrities have a unique power to amplify an issue to a wide and diverse audience, and make a touchy subject less forbidding. “Hearing that someone—anyone—has a similar experience as you, makes you feel validated, seen, and less alone,” says Caren Spruch, the national director of arts and entertainment for Planned Parenthood. This is a dimension of sharing that Washington clearly appreciates. She writes in her book’s intro: “I realized how important it is to speak openly about experiences that have been kept in the dark, because when we do so we liberate ourselves and each other.”
The overturning of Roe v. Wade last year has inspired more women, high-profile and otherwise, to speak out. “Seeing that essential protection be taken away at the federal level really demonstrated to people that it is absolutely vital to speak up about why abortion rights are necessary, and for many that involves sharing their own experience,” says Spruch, whose job at Planned Parenthood is to engage prominent creatives to be a voice for the organization’s mission and to consult with film and TV directors and writers to ensure that reproductive health issues are depicted with sensitivity and accuracy onscreen. Her job is critically important, considering that so much of what we learn about sexual and reproductive health comes not from a class, but through TV and film. Representation of reproductive choices has evolved in recent years.
“For a long time when someone had an unintended pregnancy on screen, they either miscarried, fell down the stairs, or died,” says Spruch, adding that characters were often portrayed as frightened, endangered, ashamed, or judged. Spruch and her team have consulted on many projects like Never Rarely Sometimes Always, Obvious Child, Better Things, and Shrill, that have portrayed reproductive health choices through a humanistic, honest, and realistic lens. The challenge with portraying abortion on screen now, says Spruch, is diversifying the people getting them (more characters of color and trans and nonbinary people, please) and the types of stories we see (guess what, nearly 60 percent of people who get abortions are parents).
Seeing these stories onscreen and hearing from celebrities about their own abortions can potentially have a trickle-down effect on legislation. “In order to change policy, we have to first change the culture, and celebrities sharing their own stories about sexual and reproductive health care helps to destigmatize this care, which in turn helps to change the culture around it,” notes Spruch. Results extend to the ballot box: More and better conversation, and representation, may be helping to sway the views of people who have been uncertain about where they stand on abortion rights, and even to shift opinion among opponents. To wit, approval of Ohio’s Issue 1, which enshrines abortion rights in the state constitution, was a huge win. Similar initiatives have protected abortion access in Vermont, California, and Michigan, and blocked restrictions in Montana, Kentucky, and Kansas. Advocates are hoping to get a similar measure like the one passed in Ohio on the ballot in Florida. Continuing to normalize abortion as healthcare and familiarize it as a procedure that your loved ones (more than likely, a few of them) have had can lead to that much more commitment to protecting it as a right.
In a 1960s tribute poem to the artist Kathe Kollwitz, Muriel Rukeyser asks the question: “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open.”
More women—both those with bestselling biographies and millions of fans, and those who are simply fans themselves—speaking their truths about abortion can do just that.
