Sally Field has chosen to use her platform to make sure younger women don’t have to endure life-altering experiences the way she did, in regards to abortion care. On Sunday, the Oscar-winning actress spoke out in support of Kamala Harris in an Instagram video, sharing a deeply personal story of the time she had an illegal abortion in Mexico during the mid-1960s.
“I’ve been so hesitant to do this, to tell my horrific story. 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,” Field captioned her video. “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,” she continued writing. “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 began her story in the clip, encouraging her followers to tell their own stories, if they could: “I was 17. I had no choices in my life. I didn’t have a lot of family support in any way or finances. I had graduated from high school, but no one had ever said, ‘How about college?’”
“I didn’t know what I was going to be and then I found out I was pregnant. Luckily, I had a family doctor who was a friend of the family, and he drove me and his wife and my mother in their brand new Cadillac to Tijuana,” the actress recounted. “We parked on a really scrunchy looking street — scary — and he parked about three blocks away and said, ‘See that building down there?’ He gave me an envelope with money and I was to walk into that building and give them the cash and then come right back to him. I guess he thought if I were dying, maybe he could help me.”
“It was beyond hideous and life-altering. 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 and weird — but I felt everything, how much pain I was in,” Field continued. “And then I realized that the technician was actually molesting me. So I had to figure out, how can I make my arms move to push him away?”
“It was just this absolute pit of shame and then when it was finished, they said, ‘Go, go, go, go, go,’ like the building was on fire — they didn’t want me there; it was illegal,” she added. “My doctor … his generosity and his bravery, because he would have lost his license.”
While the procedure itself was a nightmare, Field still does not regret her decision 60 years later.
“A few months after that, I began auditions. I didn’t have an agent. I wasn’t really an actor; I’d been doing it in high school constantly. I began auditioning and by the end of that year, I was Gidget. I was the quintessential all-American Girl Next Door,” she said. “And the thing that I wrote about in the book, in reality, I was the quintessential all-American Girl Next Door, because so many young women, my generation of women, were going through this.”
“These are the things that women are going through now when they’re trying to get to another state, they don’t have the money they need, so they don’t know where they’re going. It’s beyond — how you can go back to that and do that to our little girls and our young women and not have respect and regard for their health and their own decisions about whether they feel they’re able to give birth to a child at that time?” Field concluded. “We can’t go back. We have to all stand up and fight.”
The two-time Oscar-winning, three-time Emmy-winning actress went on to have three children — Peter Craig, Eli Craig and Sam Greisman. Early voting in the 2024 presidential election has already begun, with Election Day itself coming Nov. 5.
You can watch Sally Field tell her story here:
