Chelsea Handler has never been one to shy away from sharing details of her personal life—both the hilarious and the painful—and now, she’s showing her strength and bravery in a recently published personal essay for Playboy. In the essay, entitled “My Choice,” Handler courageously shares that she had two abortions as a teenager after unwanted pregnancies from the same man left her facing the difficult task of potentially raising a child.
“Getting an abortion wasn’t the first idea that popped into my unripened brain,” Handler explained. “I was going through a very bad stage in my life. I hated my parents and I was having unprotected sex with my boyfriend, who was not someone I should’ve been having sex with in the first place, never mind unprotected sex. I wasn’t really playing with a full deck of cards, and when I got pregnant I just thought, ‘Why not? I can have a baby. Maybe I’ll have twins and give them rhyming names!'”
Handler’s parents informed their daughter that she had other options, including abortion. “They acted like parents for one of the very first times in my life and took me to Planned Parenthood. I felt parented, ironically, while I was getting an abortion. And when it was over, I was relieved in every possible way,” she said. In fact, when Handler became pregnant again later that year, she elected to have another abortion.
“I didn’t have just one abortion; I had two in the same year, impregnated by the same guy,” Handler admitted. “I didn’t have the money the second time. I had to scrape together the $230 to pay Planned Parenthood, but it was a safe abortion. Getting unintentionally pregnant more than once is irresponsible, but it’s still necessary to make a thoughtful decision. We all make mistakes all the time. I happened to fuck up twice at the age of 16. I’m grateful that I came to my senses and was able to get an abortion legally without risking my health or bankrupting myself or my family.”
Handler’s essay, along with SCOTUS’s recent ruling preventing a Texas abortion clinic from shutting down, serve as the necessary reminders to our society that reproductive rights are human rights, and nobody has the right to police someone’s body.