Actress Jennifer Grey opened up about her experience having an abortion, saying she would not have the career she had without it.
Grey, who is known for her role in “Dirty Dancing,” spoke with the Los Angeles Times following the release of her memoir, “Out of the Corner: A Memoir.”
“It’s such a grave decision. And it stays with you,” Grey said.
She added, “I wouldn’t have my life. I wouldn’t have had the career I had, I wouldn’t have had anything. And it wasn’t for lack of taking it seriously.”
Grey told the Times she “always wanted a child. I just didn’t want a child as a teenager. I didn’t want a child where I was [at] in my life.”
The actress detailed her life of partying in her memoir.
“When I try to imagine my own daughter at 16, playing house, essentially living with a grown-ass man, doing tons of blow, popping Quaaludes, and going to Studio [54] — not to mention being lied to, cheated on, then gifted with various and sundry STDs and unwanted pregnancies, it makes me feel physically ill,” Grey wrote, according to the Times.
She added, “No teenager should be swimming in waters that dark.”
Commenting on the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, Grey said, “This is just so fundamentally wrong.”
According to her, it is “sounding a bell for all women to rise up and use their voice now because we have assumed, since 1973, that our choice was safe and that it was never going to be overturned.”
The “Dirty Dancing” star is not the only celebrity to credit her abortion for her success.
In 2020, Fleetwood Mac vocalist Stevie Nicks shared her experience of having an abortion in 1979.
“If I had not had that abortion, I’m pretty sure there would have been no Fleetwood Mac,” Nicks told The Guardian.
She continued, “There’s just no way that I could have had a child then, working as hard as we worked constantly. And there were a lot of drugs, I was doing a lot of drugs … I would have had to walk away.”
Nicks explained she knew “that the music we were going to bring to the world was going to heal so many people’s hearts and make people so happy.”
The singer also thought “you know what? That’s really important. There’s not another band in the world that has two lead women singers, two lead women writers. That was my world’s mission.”