Psychologically disturbed.
Via Newsbusters:
Actress and producer Lena Dunham is setting yet another precedent for abortion-obsessed Hollywood: wishing for the opportunity to have had an abortion.
On Thursday, Dunham released the latest episode of her Women of the Hour podcast titled “Choice.” Dunham called her audio show a “safe space” for her audience to think about issues like abortion. Abortion as she saw it, that is.
“I’m a pro-choice woman,” Dunham admitted from the beginning. She credited her mother for her stance: “From an early age, she taught my younger sibling and me to say ‘anti-choice’ instead of ‘pro-life’ because she wanted to make sure that we knew that everyone is pro-life. Some people are anti-choice.”
But in her abortion campaign, Dunham not only saw herself combating “anti-choice” citizens, but also fighting a general “cultural stigma.”
“Something I’ve thought about a lot is the fact that there is stigma around abortion,” she complained. “We all know that there’s cultural stigma, it’s hard to put an abortion on network TV.”
As a show writer and producer of HBO’s Girls, Dunham sure has done a poor job of watching TV. Just last year, ABC’s Scandal showed an abortion scene to the tune of “Silent Night,” and this year, shows like Jane the Virgin, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and You’re the Worst also highlighted abortion. Even Gilmore Girls is teasing abortion plotlines yet to come.
But as far as stigma, Dunham saw herself as a part of the problem.
“I always thought that I myself didn’t stigmatize abortion. I’m a – uh abortion rights activist, it’s a huge part of who I am,” she prefaced. She then told the story of how she once tried to distance herself from abortion:
But one day, when I was visiting a Planned Parenthood in Texas a few years ago, a young girl walked up to me and asked me if I’d like to be a part of her project in which women share their stories of abortions. I sort of jumped. ‘I haven’t had an abortion,’ I told her. I wanted to make it really clear to her that as much as I was going out and fighting for other women’s options, I myself had never had an abortion.
“And I realized then that even I was carrying within myself stigma around this issue,” Dunham continued. “Even I, the woman who cares as much as anybody about a woman’s right to choose, felt it was important that people know I was unblemished in this department.”
In the end, her mother and her friends’ abortions persuaded her to change.
“So many people I love – my mother, my best friends – have had to have abortions for all kinds of reasons,” Dunham said. “I feel so proud of them for their bravery, for their self-knowledge, and it was a really important moment for me then to realize I had internalized some of what society was throwing at us and I had to put it in the garbage.”
To do that, Dunham concluded: “Now I can say that I still haven’t had an abortion, but I wish I had.”