Lena Dunham is ‘proud’ of those who aborted their babies, wishes she had
Actress and producer Lena Dunham is setting yet another precedent for abortion-obsessed Hollywood: wishing for the opportunity to have had an abortion. In fact, Durham is “proud” of those who had abortions and wishes she could count it as something she had done.
The star of Girls released the latest episode of her Women of the Hour podcast titled “Choice.” Dunham called her audio show a “safe space” for her audience to think about issues like abortion.
“I’m a pro-choice woman,” Dunham admitted from the beginning.
She credited her mother for her stance: “From an early age, she taught my younger sibling and me to say ‘anti-choice’ instead of ‘pro-life’ because she wanted to make sure that we knew that everyone is pro-life. Somepeople are anti-choice.”
Something I’ve thought about a lot is the fact that there is stigma around abortion,” she complained. “We all know that there’s cultural stigma, it’s hard to put an abortion on network TV.”
“I always thought that I myself didn’t stigmatize abortion. I’m a – uh abortion rights activist, it’s a huge part of who I am,” she prefaced. She then told the story of how she once tried to distance herself from abortion:
But one day, when I was visiting a Planned Parenthood in Texas a few years ago, a young girl walked up to me and asked me if I’d like to be a part of her project in which women share their stories of abortions. I sort of jumped. ‘I haven’t had an abortion,’ I told her. I wanted to make it really clear to her that as much as I was going out and fighting for other women’s options, I myself had never had an abortion.
“And I realized then that even I was carrying within myself stigma around this issue,” Dunham continued. “Even I, the woman who cares as much as anybody about a woman’s right to choose, felt it was important that people know I was unblemished in this department.”
In the end, her mother and her friends’ abortions persuaded her to change.
“So many people I love – my mother, my best friends – have had to have abortions for all kinds of reasons,” Dunham said. “I feel so proud of them for their bravery, for their self-knowledge, and it was a really important moment for me then to realize I had internalized some of what society was throwing at us and I had to put it in the garbage.”
To do that, Dunham concluded: “Now I can say that I still haven’t had an abortion, but I wish I had.”
In April 2016 she wrote in support of Hillary Clinton, pledging to move to Vancouver, Canada, if Donald Trump won the election. After Trump’s win, Dunham wrote she will not be moving to Canada, saying, “I can survive staying in this country, MY country, to fight and love and use my embarrassment of blessings to do what’s right.”