Sally Field Shares ‘Horrific’ Illegal Abortion Story From The 1960s

Actress Sally Field has opened up about her own abortion experience to highlight threats to reproductive freedom in the United States.

Field, 77, received an abortion in the 1960s – before Roe v. Wade was passed – when she was just 17. The procedure was done months before her 1965 sitcom Gidget was set to air.

“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,” the Oscar winner recalled in an Instagram video. “I didn’t know what I was gonna be, and then I found out I was pregnant.”

Field credited the “bravery” and “generosity” of her family doctor who, along with his wife and Fields’ mother, drove her to Tijuana to receive care.

“We parked on a really scungy-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 said, describing the experience as “beyond hideous and life-altering.”

“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,” she 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 the absolute pit of shame.”

When the procedure was finished, Field said she ran out of the room as if “the building was on fire.”

“They didn’t want me there, you know, it was illegal,” she explained. She said she would always be grateful to her family doctor, who could have lost his license if he had been caught helping her.

“A few months after that, I began auditions,” Field said. “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 the year, I was Gidget. I was the quintessential, all-American girl next door.”

“Pay attention to this election,” Field urged. “We can’t go back.”