Uma Thurman shares her abortion story

I telephoned home. My mother was gravely ill in the hospital. My father went to her bedside to discuss my options. We had never spoken about sex before; this was the first time, and it was terrible for all of us. They asked me about the status of my relationship — it was not viable — and warned me how difficult it would be to raise a baby as a teen on my own. My childish fantasy of motherhood was soundly corrected as I weighed answers to their very precise questions. I was just starting out in my career and didn’t have the means to provide a stable home, even for myself. We decided as a family that I couldn’t go through with the pregnancy, and agreed that termination was the right choice. My heart was broken nonetheless.

An older female friend in Germany offered to help me. In her doctor’s office in Cologne, I was given a local anesthetic and had an abortion. I lay awake on the table while the doctor, who was a kind man, explained every step of the process as it happened. It hurt terribly, but I didn’t complain. I had internalized so much shame that I felt I deserved the pain. My fingers were tightly locked across my chest, and when the procedure was done the doctor looked down at me said, “You have beautiful hands — you remind me of my daughter.” That single gesture of humanity is seared in my mind as one of the most compassionate moments I have ever experienced. In his eyes, I was a person, I was a daughter, I was still a girl.

There is so much pain in this story. It has been my darkest secret until now. I am 51 years old, and I am sharing it with you from the home where I have raised my three children, who are my pride and joy. My life has been extraordinary, at times filled with heartbreak, challenge, loss and fear — just like so many women’s lives — but also marked, like theirs, by courage and compassion. I conceived my beautiful, magical children with men whom I loved and trusted enough to dare to bring a child into this world. I have no regrets for the path I have traveled. I applaud and support women who make a different choice. The abortion I had as a teenager was the hardest decision of my life, one that caused me anguish then and that saddens me even now, but it was the path to the life full of joy and love that I have experienced. Choosing not to keep that early pregnancy allowed me to grow up and become the mother I wanted and needed to be.

I have nothing to gain from this disclosure, and perhaps much to lose. In revealing the hole that this decision carved in me, I hope that some light will shine through, reaching women and girls who might feel a shame that they can’t protect themselves from and have no agency over. I can assure you that no one finds herself on that table on purpose. The Texas abortion law was allowed to take effect without argument by the Supreme Court, which, due in no small part to its lack of ideological diversity, is a staging ground for a human rights crisis for American women. This law is yet another discriminatory tool against those who are economically disadvantaged, and often, indeed, against their partners. Women and children of wealthy families retain all the choices in the world, and face little risk.

I am grief-stricken, as well, that the law pits citizen against citizen, creating new vigilantes who will prey on these disadvantaged women, denying them the choice not to have children they are not equipped to care for, or extinguishing their hopes for the future family they might choose. To all of you — to women and girls of Texas, afraid of being traumatized and hounded by predatory bounty hunters; to all women outraged by having our bodies’ rights taken by the state; and to all of you who are made vulnerable and subjected to shame because you have a uterus — I say: I see you. Have courage. You are beautiful. You remind me of my daughters.

Oh brother. It's well written but has she put her MONEY where her mouth is? Independently wealthy white woman says what?

“…so much pain in this story.”

More pain than would be accumulated over a lifetime by a person forcibly brought into this ethical (and increasingly, literal) wasteland? Brains, not ovaries, make for the best thinking devices, mammal.

[quote]In my late teens, I was accidentally impregnated by a much older man.

Why tell young women pregnancy happens by accident, and make it seem like this man just dropped it out of the sky on her? It would be revolutionary if she just stated she had a choice in the matter of having sex with this man.

When we finally get to the point where we can accept that most women who have abortions don't agonize about the decision and are relieved and go on with their lives afterwards without regret, we will have grown the fuck up as a culture. A lot of women who do want babies have miscarriages and stillbirths and grieve deeply, because they really wanted those babies, and we mostly pretend it doesn't happen, either.

Who was the much older man?

Sorry. But she’s an airhead, a complete fool. Her whole family are kooks. Her whole explanation of her pregnancy seems like ,magical thinking. Even a teen nw days raised in a family environment of “artistes “ doesn’t get pregnant by accident. And her family is nuts beyond belief. I get you were all hippies and raised you’re child in the free to be you and me era, but your little girl was sleeping with and impregnated by a man as old as your dad. Wake the fuck up. Where were you as parents when she desperately needed a parent?

I know way too much Hollywood shit and should just shut my big mouth

I

Everything but the bloodhounds snappin' at her rear end.

I'm sorry, but she couldn't give the child up for adoption? So she killed a child just so she wouldn't be burdened with it or derail her career?

There are reasons to have an abortion. Something biologically wrong with the child or mother that is life-threatening or would result in incredible despair for either child or mother. But being a stupid 15 year old who gets knocked up by a guy old enough to be her dad is not a reason to have an abortion. Allow the child the opportunity to grow up in another family if you're incapable of handling it yourself.

Now...having said that...I still think abortion should be legal, if only because I realize that there are many women and young girls who will choose abortion over adoption (I do not think I have the right to legislate my beliefs stated above to restrict another person's choice) and if it's illegal they could end up dead, maimed, or incapable of having a child in the future.

I've got that out, I'm not gonna say any more.

Adoption is not an option while seeking fame. And she was. Life happens, she made stupid decisions that others girls might not have chosen . . Get off your high horse. If you don’t have a vagina or uterus you don’t get a vote. End. Of. Conversation.

Bye Felicia.

Women can die giving birth, and the U.S. has the highest rate among developed countries in maternal death. It’s nothing anyone should be forced to go through.

[quote] Now...having said that...I still think abortion should be legal

No you don't, you rancid cunt.

Pregnancy also entails being off psych meds for at least eight months while a woman's hormones play havoc with her body. Would you consider that experience a mere inconvenience? "Canadian researchers tracked women in Ontario from 1994 to 2008. They found that 5 percent of deaths during pregnancy or the first year after pregnancy were due to suicide. And these women used especially lethal methods to kill themselves, such as hanging, jumping or falling. This suggests they may be at higher risk of completing suicide than others, the study authors said.

I think she was vague about the details surrounding the sex because she didn't want it to pull focus from the topic. My guess is that he was/is famous or the encounter wasn't consensual.

She terminated a pregnancy, R10. A fetus isn't viable outside the womb before twenty weeks.

Uma has said on record that she met Gary Oldman in England when she was 18, in the late 80's. They were subsequently married for a couple of years. So, maybe it was Gary Oldman.

Anyone pre-Gary would be automatically implicated in impregnating someone under 18, and that would likely blow up into story unto itself, probably ending the person's career and permanently linking them to Uma in the public/online sphere forever. Maybe Uma has complicated feelings about it. I think I would, after so many years.

[quote]I get you were all hippies and raised you’re child in the free to be you and me era

She was raised mostly in the 1980s, not the 1960s. She's 51 years old now.

You remind me of my asshole far-right parents who called me a "hippie bastard" in 1990 just before they kicked me out of the house. It was 1990. The hippies had been gone for at least 15 years, but they still held on to that hate.

I do have to say it's kind of weird that Datalounge, full of posters who pride themselves of being cultured and educated, is so full of people who think an accidental pregnancy "can't happen" because if you have sex then by god you deserve any pregnancy you get.

R19 Sadly we've had an influx of fraus and fascists over the last years.

Though I'm sure we have the occasional prisspot queen who's become Mother Teresa in her dotage.

Were she and Malkovitch a thing? I thought he was involved with Michelle Pfeiffer whiie shooting Dangerous Liaisons.

I don't think you have to be a far-right asshole to be stunned by the pathetic negligence of Uma Thurman's parents in this story.

She herself writes that she had been working since age 15, usually surrounded by much older people, and was living out of a suitcase in Europe at the time this happened...and in addition to being totally unchaperoned and unsupervised in this environment, her parents had never previously talked to her about sex at all? It's lucky she wasn't trafficked. Predators are great at sniffing out kids with "checked-out parents" who are craving guidance, approval and love.

And the late 80's were a different time as far as consent, sexual misconduct, power dynamics etc.

I'm sorry this happened to Uma. I'm glad she was able to find compassionate care in this lonely situation, and not surprised that she had to find it outside the United States (and far away from her utterly useless and dysfunctional parents).

R10 must be a woman or a "person who can get pregnant and deliver a child through zir vagina front hole, not a rubber doll sex toy from zir anus".

Uma's mother was married to Timothy Leary so yeah, I doubt she was a model of traditional parenting.

I don't think we need to shame a 15-year old for having an abortion when it seems they barely understood the relationship that brought about the pregnancy, other than it didn't work. It's probably a good thing she didn't have the baby. The much older man is the problem here. What the hell! was he thinking, teen alone without parents, an easy target.

Oh dear. It seems my big daddy cock broke the condom and I've shot my massive load into your sweet tight fecund teen pussy.

Some of you need to get out more

R25, agree, and am baffled (based on Uma's telling of the story in WaPo) that her parents' reaction to this news (over the phone) was to "ask her about the status of the relationship" and to "warn her of how difficult it would be to raise a child on her own as a teen." Not a word about the predator.

I think most people in the year 2021 facing a similar revelation from a teenage daughter would go straight to the police and report the guy for rape.

A point of clarification - she said she was in her late teens when she had the abortion.

That is still young, but I think many reading this assumed she became pregnant and had the abortion at 15, because that age is mentioned just prior to that point.

[quote]I started my acting career at 15, working in an environment where I was often the only kid in the room. [BOLD]In my late teens, I was accidentally impregnated by a much older man. [/BOLD]

She wasn't necessarily underage; she says she was in her late teens. It's shocking that her parents never talked to her about sex in the mid 1980s when AIDS was considered a national crisis. And, she probably didn't have the opportunity to learn sex education at school because she was already living a nomadic actor's life at 15. Those were the days before you could google condoms and birth control on the Internet.

Maybe she was mistakenly using some poorly calculated rhythm method, or she mistakenly thought the pull-out method was effective. Or maybe she had been drinking, and it impacted her ability to apply her birth control method correctly...or even give proper consent. Or maybe she was just very hormonal, and she couldn't resist her urges. (Hormones kick in during our teens, but our decision-making part of the brain isn't fully developed until age 25.). Whatever happened, she doesn't "deserve" to have to raise a child for 18 years. Nor does she "deserve" to carry a growing organism in her body for 9 months, causing her to be sick, tired, and emotionally exhausted, leading up to a painful labor and delivery.

That would be like saying a man "deserved" to suffer from a deadly disease just because he had a few minutes of sex.

The "accidentally" part of the sentence implies to me that either she or the man, or both, were using birth control, and she still became pregnant.

While she says she hadn't spoken about sex with her parents before, I don't think that means she didn't know anything about it. Though it does seem weird that her hippie parents would have been so uptight about it.

She did Baron Munchausen and Dangerous Liaisons in 1988. John Neville or Jonathan Pryce, or Malkovich?

I'm not sentimental at all about abortion. This world is a jungle, and you have to survive any way YOU can. Another egg didn't get to planet Earth? You didn't survive Auschwitz? You sank with the Titanic? You went back to your desk in the World Trade Center? Sorry.

Or the directors of either of those films, Stephen Frears or Terry Gilliam (who signed a petition in support of Roman Polanski, so I imagine him--purely speculatively--being casual with that kind of thing).

She also had a fling with Mick Jagger, but that might have been in the 90s.

Those are guesses, but sounds like Uma is keeping the specifics to herself.

It's gonna be such a long wait for her memoir!

I think the fact that she'd never had a sex talk with her parents indicates that they weren't the hippie free-love types, at least not by the time Uma was growing up.

daaaamn r33 that's cold

The hippie credentials of Uma's hippie/Buddhist dad, Robert A.F. Thurman, are pretty shallow. He was previously married (and had a child with) Marie-Christophe de Menil (of the mega-wealthy, art-collecting de Menils of Texas, heirs to the Schumberger fortune).

So it's a hippie/academic affectation, closely allied with serious/society-type money.

I like the family confab on the path forward. Very A Very Special Episode.

Adoption destroys the lives of women who give up babies. Abortion doesn't. Any woman who moans about an abortion lives to regret it only because she never got pregnant again. I have one friend like that. I have many women friends who had abortions and children later, who never look back. My friends who gave up babies are fucked up messes. The one who's son found her and did everything he could to bring her into his life, was the most fucked up. I've also read the book The Girls Who Went Away, the stories of girls who gave up babies. It's heartbreaking.

People need to get over the myth of adoption and abortion and do some research.

Completely agree r40.

My next door neighbors adopted their kids. Their son was the child of a teenage couple. Cue 18 years later and the bio mom was desperate to develop a relationship with this kid. Unfortunately for her, he just wasn’t interested. I think her desperation scared him off frankly. But can you blame her really?

As an adoptee, R40, can I just say thank you for composting me.

Malkovitch was a notorious and highly successful coochie hound. He must have a lot of charm.

<- or a rapist? She probably aborted because she didn't want to give birth to his mutant offspring.

R42 Every birth is luck. Every life is luck. If you didn't exist, you wouldn't know the difference. This is about women's rights, not the story of your life.

R45, fuck off and die. That's OK, yeah?

The rancid cunt at R45 needs to find the grease fire bearing their name.

CHUCK IT DOWN THE PAN!

R22 she said very clearly that the pregnancy and suitcase-living happened in her late teens. 18 and 19 year olds are free to go out into the world and do as they wish. When I was 18 I moved 400 miles away from my parents and had zero supervision. It was called going to college. As for the never talking about sex, that's more common than you think. The real world isn't like the movies where the parents sit the kid down and have an in depth conversation about fucking. My parents never mentioned sex to me. It's because they're so uptight and everyone would have died of embarrassment. You're grasping for a reason to blame them but it's really not her parent's fault she got pregnant.

It was definitely more common during the time she grew up for parents to not discuss sex with their kids. People really didn't start opening up about these things until era of the internet. My mom was a teen mother herself and she never talked about sex with us.

Uma was cursed with that Indian Sanskrit name

I have NIL interest in this woman's private life and I've only paid to see two her movies..

But I can say that I thought she was convincing in this one playing an undisciplined woman who became a slave to her own obsessive passions.

A lot of vitriol at R45, above. It's not incorrect that every pregnancy is the one sperm who won a swimming contest against 150 million others.

R52 holy cow I never heard of that movie.

[quote] I'm sorry, but she couldn't give the child up for adoption? So she killed a child just so she wouldn't be burdened with it or derail her career?

NO child was killed. Yet, as a teen, she was a child. Her life would have been devastated (along with threats to her own health) if she carries this fetus to term

My parents didn't sit me down and give me the full powerpoint on fucking, either (I'm a young Gen X-er, and, thus, Cryptkeeper Age by DL standards), but I knew enough to know that a much older person trying to get close to a young person was bad news.

If Uma were 10-15 younger and in that situation, she'd have been getting jumped by Ghislaine and Jeffrey.

I think that sort of thing is rather common in the modeling world

1 in 4 American women will get an abortion. That's how common it is.

I'm not against abortion or a woman's right to choose but I am not gonna be blase about it either. It is tragedy and a shame, every time. I don't know how you summon the strength to do it, let alone live with it. Pretty grim choice but should be safe and legal.

I think the slams against R45 were just a reaction to blunt selfishness of the post. Pretty cold.

Can the anti-abortion "child killing" troll just FUCK OFF AND FUCKING DIE ALREADY????

You first.

Just block it R61. She's one of our resident trolls and not gay.

Thurman was emancipated from her parents as a teen in order to pursue her career.

My guess for the older man--unless he's someone who's never been mentioned in connection to her before now--is Malkovich. I remember interviews with her from the Dangerous Liaisons era that gushed about what great friends they were then. There was a Rolling Stone interview from that time in which the journalist overheard an answering machine message from Malkovich in which he said, 'I just wanted to hear your voice.' He was having an affair with Michelle Pfeiffer during the movie which blew up, but wouldn't be surprised if he leaned on Uma afterwards.

[quote]Women can die giving birth, and the U.S. has the highest rate among developed countries in maternal death. It’s nothing anyone should be forced to go through.

While dying is the worst thing that can happen, it's by no means the only traumatic possibility when carrying a pregnancy/giving birth. Women routinely develop gestational diabetes, high blood pressure, break their pelvises, have incontinence issues that last for years, lose their dental health because of calcium loss (yes, the fetus draws the calcium out of your very bones, boys) as a result...the list of problems goes on and on. If a woman doesn't want to take on those risks, she doesn't have to. She has NO obligation to carry a pregnancy to term in order to make assholes like R10 happy.

Uma cancelled the roast.

I wonder what “late teens” means. I think if she was 18 or 19, she would have specified the age. I think she was younger than 18.

The weird thing about this story is, she made the Adventures of Baron Munchausen in 1988, when she was 18. I read a book about the making of the movie called “Losing the Light.” I love this movie but so many things went wrong with the shooting.

Anyway the author mentions how Ray Cooper, one of the actors and I think the music director? and Charles McKeon, another actor and some of the other men on set constantly speculated on when Thurman would lose her virginity…not sure how they “knew” she was a virgin? Maybe she told people on the set?

Anyway, it was pretty gross, the way they talked about it. That guy Cooper even made up a limerick about it. I can’t remember the whole thing but it started something like this:

“Our lovely young Uma, as lithe as a puma…”

It was also mentioned how Oliver Reed had invited her out for a drink and ended up waiting as she never showed up.

So, I guess it’s certainly possible she lost her virginity on the set of Baron Munchausen. If so..who was the much older man? Reed? Or Jonathan Pryce, John Neville, Eric Idle, Winston Dennis, Bill Paterson, Robin Williams, Sting? Or director Terry Gilliam?

I wonder how many harrowing abortion stories we'll hear from actresses now? We've got Michelle Williams, gloriously timed with her scandalous director-affair baby GG reveal, now Uma... which other delicate flower has SHOCKED, ABSOLUTELY SHOCKED us by revealing she's had their oft sprayed uterus scraped?

Sting

I was wrong, it was CONGRESSIONAL abortion confessionals next on the docket! But I was close.

[quote] holy cow I never heard of that movie.

R52, It's on Youtube now

I just remembered, the man the people on set were betting she’d lose her virginity to was English. So, not Robin Williams or Terry Gilliam. Maybe it was Gary Oldman, who wasn’t onset but someone she was dating?

r17 she met Oldman in early 1989. She turned 19 in April 1989, so had most of the previous year to date someone at 18.

r75 Apparently men in the Baron Munchausen crew were taking bets on who could sleep with her. Oliver Reed is said to have sexually harassed her. Sarah Polley has said that she witnessed Reed (in boots) viciously stamp on Thurman's (bare) foot. Thurman was 17 when she filmed Baron Munchausen so it predates her relationship with Oldman.

Weren't there were rumours about her and Robert Plant in the late 80s?

Good God, woman, have some dignity.

It's crazy to think Sarah Polley was on that set. Good for her for speaking up in Uma's defense.

I had an abortion in my 24th trimester. It was the best thing for all concerned.

Seems like the guy who impregnated her was married.

I'm glad she told her story, but as stated above, not every woman needs to feel shattered by the experience of an abortion. Not every woman needs to have a baby with "loving men" after having had an abortion (see! I'm not a baby-hater).

Some women just don't want to have children, had sex without birth control, and got pregnant accidentally.

She was also linked to Don Johnson when she was 18. He had JUST broken up with Streisand, was linked to Penelope Ann Miller and would officially reunite with Melanie Griffith within a couple of months. I can understand how Thurman would not see their relationship as viable.