Sally Field Shares Her Pre-Roe Abortion Experience; “We Can

Prior to the codification of Roe v. Wade in 1973, abortion was completely illegal in 30 states, leading women and girls to go to often desperate measures to end an unwanted pregnancy. In a recent video posted to her Instagram account, actress Sally Field detailed her harrowing experience of getting an abortion prior to Roe v Wade, something she says she still feels “shame” about “because I was raised in the ’50s and it’s ingrained in me.”

Content Warning: Sexual and medical abuse.

In 1964, Field was 17 years old, and she describes herself as naive, unworldly, and powerless — lacking resources and broad family support— and aimless. “I’d graduated from high school, but no one ever said ‘How about college?’ I had nothing. I didn’t know what was going to be. And then I found out I was pregnant.”

Fortunately for Field, a family friend, a doctor, knew how she would be able to get an abortion, and he drove Field, along with her mother and his wife, to Tijuana, Mexico.

“We parked on a really scrungey-looking street — it was scary — and he parked about three blocks away and said ‘See that building down there?’ and 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,” she recalls. “I guess he thought if I were dying maybe he could help me.

What happened, Field says, was “beyond hideous and life altering.”

She goes on to describe a procedure done without anesthetic. The little ether she was given to breathe in was only enough to make her arms and legs feel “numb and weird.” Through her pain, she soon realized that the technician administering ether was molesting her as the procedure was happening. “I had to figure out how can I make my arms move to push him away. … It was this absolute pit of shame.”

Once the procedure was done, she was roughly hurried out the door. But even as she highlights the horrific experience she had, Field commends the “generosity and bravery” of the family friend who helped her, because if anyone found out his role in her abortion he could have lost his medical license or worse.

Fields’ abortion allowed her to pursue acting. Within months she was going on auditions, and by the end of 1964, without experience beyond high school plays and without an agent, she landed the role of “Gidget,” which catapulted her quickly to fame.

“I was the quintessential all-American girl next door,” she says. “And the thing that I wrote about in the book [Field’s 2018 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,” she continues, highlighting those who have to seek abortion care out of state, and how many can’t due to lack of money, means, or even knowledge.

“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,” she says. “We can’t go back. We can’t go back. We have to all stand up and fight.”

Watching the video, it’s clear that 60 years later, this is still an emotional topic for Field. Since Roe v Wade was overturned in 2022, access to abortion care has become much harder for great swathes of the country, particularly in the southeast, leading to medical emergencies, and even death, to say nothing of the trauma of carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term. Sadly, for many, we have gone back, but it’s not too late to do better moving forward.