Sally Field Details Her “Beyond Hideous” Illegal Abortion As a Teenager

Sally Field shared the horrific story of the illegal abortion she underwent as a 17-year-old driven to Tijuana, Mexico, in 1964, to stress the importance of voting for Vice President Kamala Harris in an Instagram video posted Sunday.

Recounting the ordeal, which Field described as “this absolute pit of shame,” the 77-year-old Oscar winner explained that she found herself pregnant, and was driven by her trusted family doctor to a “scrungy” street in Tijuana and handed a bag of cash to pay for the procedure. She was given only “a few puffs of ether” during the ordeal, no anesthetic. “I felt everything, how much pain I was in, and then I realized that the technician was actually molesting me,” she said. After the procedure was finished, she was sent away “like the building was on fire. They didn’t want me there. It was illegal.”

Field’s big break came the next year, in 1965, when she was cast in the title role of Gidget as a plucky “quintessential all-American girl next door,” as she described the part. And the shoe fit, though not how the public realized. “I was the all-American girl next door because so many young women, my generation of women, were going through this,” Field explained. “And 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 don’t have the means, they don’t know where they’re going.”

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As a teenager, Field “had no choices in my life.” Her traumatic illegal abortion experience was seven years before the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, and Republican Donald Trump stacked a Supreme Court during his presidency to herald a post-Roe era. Field originally shared the story of her abortion in her 2018 memoir, In Pieces, but posted about it on Instagram to reach a different audience. “I feel that so many women of my generation went through similar, traumatic events and I feel stronger when I think of them,” she wrote. “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.”

In the video, she said, “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. We can’t go back. We can’t go back. We have to all stand up and fight.”

She urged her followers to speak out about their own experiences, writing, “I’d be honored if you’d tell me yours, if you can.”

Harris herself also took to digital platforms over the weekend to underscore her commitment to reproductive rights, sitting for a 40-minute interview with Alex Cooper for the popular Call Her Daddy podcast. That conversation largely revolved around the importance of safe and legal abortions, with Harris at one point calling Trump out for saying he would “protect” women.

“There are now 20 states with Trump abortion bans, including bans that make no exception for rape or incest,” Harris said on the podcast. “Which means that you’re telling a survivor of a crime, of a violation to their body, they don’t have a right to make a decision about what happens to their body next, which is immoral? So this is the same guy that is now saying, who said that women should be punished for having abortions? This is the same guy who uses the kind of language he does to describe women? So yeah, there you go.”

Harris spoke passionately about the issue, saying, “One of the many things I so love about our country, part of the strength of our country and our evolution as a country has been through the fight for the expansion of rights. Not the restriction of rights, but the expansion of rights. And we still have work to do.”

In a bit of synergy, Field prefaced her retelling of her abortion story by saying, “I still feel very shamed about this because I was raised in the 1950s and it is ingrained in me.” In her Call Her Daddy interview, Harris responded to Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ comments that she didn’t have biological children to “keep her humble” by saying that “this is not the 1950s anymore.”