Actress: Sally Field talks about having a secret abortion at 17

Hollywood star Sally Field (77, “Mrs. Doubtfire”, “Lincoln”) talks about an abortion she secretly had in Mexico as a teenager. The procedure was banned in the USA at the time. In an emotional video message on Instagram, the actress describes the “traumatic” experience and says that young women in the USA are now going through something similar because of strict abortion regulations. “We can’t go back,” warns Field. “We have to fight.”

“This is one of the reasons why so many of us support Kamala Harris and Tim Walz,” she wrote on the video. Voters in every state should pay attention to ballot initiatives that can protect reproductive freedom.

Abortion rights are an important US election campaign issue

The dispute over abortion rights is one of the central issues in the US election campaign. The Democrats led by candidate Kamala Harris repeatedly warn that the rights of women in the USA are in great danger. A good two years ago, the Supreme Court overturned the nationwide right to abortion. Ex-President Trump had shifted the majority on the court significantly to the right through several replacements, thereby making this decision possible. Now the states can decide on abortion rights – in many of them abortions are now largely banned.

So many young women of her generation had to have secret abortions, Field says in the video. A doctor friend of her family drove her from California to Tijuana, Mexico, and sent her to a building in a bad neighborhood with an envelope containing money. The painful procedure was carried out without anesthesia. Then they were sent away immediately.

The mother of three sons also describes how her life changed completely shortly afterwards. In a competition for the title role in the TV series “Gidget” she beat out the many competitors. Her TV debut as a surfer girl was the starting signal for her acting career.