Uma Thurman is protesting Texas’ restrictive new anti-abortion law by opening up for the first time about the abortion she obtained when she was a teenager.
In a Washington Post op-ed, the actress said the legislation fills her “with great sadness, and something akin to horror.”
“I am sharing my own experience,” Thurman, 51, continued, saying it was her “responsibility” to speak out and “stand up in their shoes.”
“In my late teens, I was accidentally impregnated by a much older man,” she disclosed, adding that she originally wanted to keep the pregnancy until her parents “warned me how difficult it would be to raise a baby as a teen on my own.”
“My childish fantasy of motherhood was soundly corrected as I weighed answers to their very precise questions. I was just starting out in my career and didn’t have the means to provide a stable home, even for myself,” Thurman admitted. “We decided as a family that I couldn’t go through with the pregnancy, and agreed that termination was the right choice. My heart was broken nonetheless.”
“There is so much pain in this story. It has been my darkest secret until now,” Thurman closed. “The abortion I had as a teenager was the hardest decision of my life, one that caused me anguish then and that saddens me even now, but it was the path to the life full of joy and love that I have experienced. Choosing not to keep that early pregnancy allowed me to grow up and become the mother I wanted and needed to be.”
Thurman is the mother of three children: Luna, nine, Levon, 19, and Maya, 23. She shares Maya and Levon with ex-husband Ethan Hawke and Luna with former fiancé Arpad Busson.
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