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It's crucial to support Kamala Harris and Tim Walz to restore and preserve reproductive freedom, Field says.
Oscar-winning actress Sally Field has posted a video to Instagram detailing her harrowing experience of having an illegal abortion in the 1960s and exhorting voters to support Kamala Harris for president and reproductive rights in referendums around the nation.
Field became pregnant at 17 and didn’t have much family support or money. However, a doctor who was a friend of her family drove her from Southern California to Tijuana, Mexico, to have an abortion. They parked on “a really scrungy-looking street,” Field says, and the doctor gave her an envelope of cash and directed her to a building where she would undergo the procedure.
“It was beyond hideous and, you know, life-altering,” Field recalls. “I had no anesthetic. There was a technician giving me a few puffs of ether, but he would then take it away, so it just made my arms and legs feel numb. … But I felt everything of how much pain I was in. Then I realized that the technician was molesting me. So I had to figure out how can I make my arms move to push him away! And … so it was just, you know, this absolute pit of shame, 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! And my doctor, I’m sure, his generosity and his bravery! Because he would have lost his license, you know, if anyone had found out.”
After she returned home, something “glorious” happened, Field says. “Fate, or whatever you believe, reached in, and a few months after that, I began auditions.” She didn’t have an agent and had acted only in high school productions, but, she says, “by the end of that year, I was Gidget,” the California surfer girl in the TV series of the same name.
“I was the quintessential all-American girl next door,” she says. And the thing I wrote about in the book [her memoir, In Pieces], in reality, I was the quintessential all-American girl next door because so many young women in my generation of women were going through this. And these are the things that women are going through now,” as about half the states have banned or severely restricted abortion since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
“I’ve been so hesitant to do this, to tell my horrific story,” Field writes in her introduction to the video. “It was during a time even worse than now. A time when contraception was not readily available and only if you were married. But I feel that so many women of my generation went through similar, traumatic events and I feel stronger when I think of them. I believe, like me, they must want to fight for their grandchildren and all the young women of this country.
“It’s one of the reasons why so many of us are supporting Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. Everyone, please, pay attention to this election, up and down the ballot, in every state — especially those with ballot initiatives that could protect reproductive freedom. PLEASE. WE CAN’T GO BACK!!”
Field is the mother of a gay son and a strong LGBTQ+ ally.
