Sally Field Shared She Had an Illegal Abortion in 1964

As reproductive rights and women’s health become some of the most contested issues ahead of the 2024 presidential election, actress Sally Field shared her own experience with abortion in a new video that she shared on Instagram on Sunday, October 6. The Oscar-winning actress spoke about a “traumatic” illegal abortion that she had more than 60 years ago before Roe v. Wade affirmed the right to abortion in the United States—and was overturned in 2022.

“I still feel very shamed about it because I was raised in the ’50s, and it’s ingrained in me,” she said. “I had no choices in my life, I didn’t have a lot of family support or finances. I graduated high school but no one ever said, ‘How about college?’ Nothing. I didn’t know what I was gonna be. And then I found out I was pregnant.”

She added that she had to enlist the help of a family friend and drive to Mexico for the procedure.

Continuing her story, she said that she “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. And we parked on a really scroungy-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 cash and I was to walk into that building and give them the cash and then come right back to him.”

Field shared more details, saying that the experience was “beyond hideous and life-altering” and that she “had no anesthetic,” except “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 weird, but I felt everything—how much pain I was in.”

“Then the situation turned darker,” Field continued. “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? So, 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. And they didn’t want me there, you know, it was illegal!”

She finished by saying that she was too young to know what to do and that it was surreal for her to experience that and then jump into acting—specifically finding herself in wholesome roles, like Gidget.

“And more probably, because I was too naive to know anything. I’d never been out of the state, I’d never been on an airplane. And fate, you know, something glorious outside of ourselves, whatever you believe, reached in,” Field finished. “And 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. And I began auditioning. And by the end of that year, I was Gidget. I was the quintessential, all-American girl next door.”

Field also discussed the situation in her 2018 memoir, In Pieces. During her video she mentioned it, saying, “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.”

She concluded her message with a call to action for voters and reminded everyone how consequential this year’s election will be.

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