Actress Jemima Kirke has opened up about her decision to have an abortion, in a bid to shed light on the need for better reproductive rights for women.
The 29-year-old 'Girls' star, who is now a mother-of-two, became pregnant by her boyfriend in 2007 while still at university. But ultimately, she decided that she wanted to terminate the pregnancy.
“I wasn’t sure that I wanted to be attached to this person for the rest of my life,” she says in the video above. “My life was just not conducive to raising a healthy, happy child. I just didn’t feel it was fair.”
Kirke did not want to tell her mother that she was pregnant and so had to pay for the abortion herself. She recalls how she scraped together the money, by clearing out her bank account and asking her boyfriend for money.
But even then she couldn't afford to get the anaesthesia, so she decided to go without.
"The anesthesia wasn’t that much more," she explains. "But when you’re scrounging for however many hundreds of dollars, it is a lot. I just didn’t have it."
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She adds: “It’s these obstacles and this stigma that makes these things not completely unavailable. And that’s the tricky part, we do have free choice, and we are able to do whatever we want, but then there are these little hoops we have to jump through to get them.”
Kirke says she is fighting for reproductive rights to create a more supportive and accepting society for her daughters (one step-daughter) to grow up in.
"I’m already anticipating their issues with self-esteem, their issues with their bodies, the whole luggage that comes with being a woman," she says.
“I would love if when they’re older, and they’re in their teens or their 20s, if the political issues surrounding their bodies were not there anymore.”
Amen to that.