Uma Thurman Shares Her Personal Abortion Story in Solidarity With Texans

Like the rest of America, Uma Thurman has been keeping a watchful eye on the legislative nightmare that is Texas’ six-week ban on abortion. The actress and mother of three was so disheartened by what’s been happening with reproductive rights that she wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post and shared her personal experience of having an abortion in her late teens while living in Cologne, Germany.

Thurman wrote:

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.

Thurman said she deeply empathizes with Texans, who now face a complete rollback of their reproductive rights and have been deputized to enforce the law by essentially spying on and suing each other. “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,” she wrote.

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