Uma Thurman has shared her opposing views on Texas' controversial new abortion law in a new opinion piece that details her own abortion she had as a teenager.
Writing for The Washington Post, the actress described how she had "followed the course of Texas’s radical antiabortion law with great sadness, and something akin to horror." The legislation, which took effect earlier this month, bans abortions at approximately six weeks, which is before many women know they are pregnant. Thurman wrote that she was sharing her experience in the hopes of "drawing the flames of controversy away from the vulnerable women on whom this law will have an immediate effect."
Thurman explained that she was in her late teens when she was impregnated by a "much older man." At the time, she was just starting out in her career and "living out of a suitcase in Europe." She did not have the means to provide a stable home to a child and, after speaking it through with her family, made the difficult decision to have an abortion.
Thurman recalled the abortion "hurt terribly" but did not complain because she felt she deserved the pain. Then the doctor performing the procedure said something she would never forget.
"My fingers were tightly locked across my chest, and when the procedure was done the doctor looked down at me said, 'You have beautiful hands — you remind me of my daughter,'" she wrote. "That single gesture of humanity is seared in my mind as one of the most compassionate moments I have ever experienced. In his eyes, I was a person, I was a daughter, I was still a girl."
"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," the mom of three continued. "Choosing not to keep that early pregnancy allowed me to grow up and become the mother I wanted and needed to be."
Addressing the new Texas abortion law, Thurman called it "another discriminatory tool against those who are economically disadvantaged, and often, indeed, against their partners."
"I am grief-stricken, as well, that the law pits citizen against citizen, creating new vigilantes who will prey on these disadvantaged women, denying them the choice not to have children they are not equipped to care for, or extinguishing their hopes for the future family they might choose," Thurman wrote.
"To all of you — to women and girls of Texas, afraid of being traumatized and hounded by predatory bounty hunters; to all women outraged by having our bodies’ rights taken by the state; and to all of you who are made vulnerable and subjected to shame because you have a uterus — I say: I see you," she added. "Have courage. You are beautiful. You remind me of my daughters."
Related Stories: