Cher Reveals She Made a Difficult “Choice” During a Pregnancy, In Her New Memoir

Cher’s origin story begins like anti-choice propaganda: In 1945, a 19-year-old Jackie Jean Sarkisian, pregnant by a husband she barely knew, left her marriage after three months and returned home. There, Jackie Jean’s mother—who had given birth to Jackie Jean when she was 13 years old—demanded she get an abortion.

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Years later, Jackie Jean described the experience: “I remember waiting in an old-fashioned chrome chair. The chrome was cold, yet the sweat was running off me, I was so scared. When they told me it was my turn, I got onto the table. But as I lay there, I somehow knew I couldn’t go through with it, so I got off.” As Cher, in her eponymous Cher: The Memoir (Dey Street), remembers her mother saying, “Can you believe I came that close to not having you?”

But in Cher, nothing is simple, least of all the lives of women attempting to exist within a system stacked against them. “She was at a dreadful point in her young life with only two roads to choose from, neither of which were easy,” Cher writes of her mother’s decision. “Confused and afraid, she headed down one road but then turned back and took the other. I survived as a consequence, and I’ve never questioned how close she came to not having me. It was her body, her life, and her choice to make. Thank God she got off that table, though, or I wouldn’t be here to write these pages.”

Cher’s memoir—the first in a two-book project, written, per the New York Times, with the help of three ghostwriters and a weeklong visit from her editor—spans the time from her mother’s conception to a pivotal, early 1980s chat with her old friend, Francis Ford Coppola, who encourages Cher to really give acting a go. It’s remarkably candid, filled with intimate moments in the making of a star: Here is Cher, at 17, living at the Hollywood Studio Club in the early ‘60s; here she is, for the first time, performing in the nascent personal style that would define her persona, after baggage handlers lost her trunks before a San Francisco gig where she opened for the Beach Boys.

There are, too, teenage encounters that the reader may question, like the dates Cher went on with Warren Beatty when he was 25 and she 15; she later became good friends with him when she was dating David Geffen. (In 2022, a woman filed a lawsuit against Beatty, alleging that he sexually assaulted her when she was 14 and he was 35; a judge dismissed the suit, without prejudice.) Her decades-long partnership with Sonny Bono began when she moved in with him at age 16 and he was 27; she writes that they slept in his bedroom in separate twin beds, and that she earned her keep by cooking and cleaning.

There are, in adulthood, romantic relationships and love affairs with “beautiful” Gregg Allman and, later, Gene Simmons, who was prone to over-the-top gestures like skywriting “I Love You Cher” above the Beverly Hills Hotel on her birthday, or renting an Army tank filled with her favorite chocolate bar, Snickers.

But for Cher, who endured three miscarriages by the time she was 21, the first two requiring substantial medical care, one of the longest-lasting and hard-won loves in her memoir is the one she had with the doctors who assisted in her reproductive health care over the decades. Her experiences in doctors’ offices and hospitals, as well as her mother’s, are a through line.

After she had Cher, Jackie Jean (who would later change her name to Georgia) also had two abortions, which Cher describes with compassion and simmering rage. Jackie Jean sought the first while working as a waitress and living in a cheap hotel in Scranton, Pennsylvania, as “her life was spinning out of control.” With the help of a regular at the restaurant, Jackie Jean sought the aid of a woman who secretly performed illegal abortions for $100, and ended up in such debilitating pain that she went straight to the home of a nurse and ended up bedbound for three weeks. When she later asked her customer what he would have done if she’d died, he responded he would’ve dumped her body in the river or risked going to jail. “Police kicking down the doors of clinics and private homes was as everyday as their raids on brothels and gambling dens,” Cher writes. “Those who were caught helping women faced prison sentences (once again, not unlike now) of an average of three to five years and lost their license to practice if they had medical qualifications.”

Later, after Jackie Jean and Johnnie reunited and had another daughter together (Cher’s sister, “Gee”), Johnnie, hooked on heroin, nearly burned the house down with the family inside while “preparing his latest fix.” Jackie Jean took the girls and left. Pregnant again, “she had another illegal abortion and once again it almost killed her,” an experience Cher remembers with terror.

Cher’s thoughts on and experiences with reproductive health care often highlight the problems in her romantic relationships: At one point, while watching a TV show about abortion, Cher remembers casually commenting that women should be allowed a choice. Bono snapped at her, shutting her down. In describing the birth of her own first child, Chaz (who Cher refers to throughout as “Chas,” with his permission, and as she explained in an author’s note, it was “the name he went by during the years covered in this book”), Cher recalls Bono art-directing shots of him smoking “looking pensive out of a window,” while she panicked in the hospital bed. It’s not from Bono that she seeks or receives comfort, but from “my wonderful gynecologist, Dr. Alfred Heldfond,” and a Swedish nurse, Elizabeth, who had become Cher’s closest friend. “I loved Elizabeth so much—even more when I found out later that her mom died that day, but she still insisted on attending.”

Later, when Cher was pregnant with her youngest, Elijah, her first with then-partner Gregg Allman, Heldfond flew with her from Hawaii to California to ensure her medical safety and “agreed to deliver my baby as his last before he retired.”

Cher had been pregnant with Allman once before. The first time, she was newly divorced from Bono, and they decided to marry. The morning after their Vegas wedding, Allman left for rehearsals and Cher remembers finding a plastic bag of white powder in his Dopp Kit. “I couldn’t wonder about it for too long, though,” Cher writes. “I still had my pregnancy to think about.” A doctor, who, she writes, had treated her through her two miscarriages and a birth, discovered she had ovarian cysts. “I can go ahead and take care of these,” he said. “I’d known him for so long,” Cher writes, “I pretty much knew what he meant when he offered it as a choice. I was thinking about how I’d had to be on bed rest when I was pregnant with Chas and couldn’t go in a car for four months except for checkup appointments. I needed to be at work on Monday. I needed to be singing and dancing. I had a child, mother, and sister to take care of. I knew I had to make a choice, and I knew what it was. It made it harder that I didn’t have Gregory to talk to about it, but I made my decision and I was so grateful to my doctor’s compassion for giving me one.”