Whoopi Goldberg delivered a powerful monologue on The View over the US Supreme Court’s draft ruling which would overturn Roe v. Wade.
Roe v. Wade is the milestone decision that legalized abortion across the US in 1973. A leak of the US Supreme Court's draft was published by Politico on Monday, and many politicians and celebrities have reacted to it negatively.
Per Deadline, the 66-year-old daytime host argued during a segment on the show: “Everybody wants to tell me what to do. This is my body! My doctor and myself and my child – that’s who makes the decision. Women in this country lived forever with it being illegal, okay?”
“Women, when they decide that something is not right for them, they’re going to take it into their own hands. Well, we got tired of tripping over women in bathrooms, public bathrooms, who were giving themselves abortions because there was nowhere safe, nowhere clean, nowhere to go," she continued.
The Color Purple actress then referenced Roe v. Wade and how the law came about because "people wanted people to have somewhere safe and somewhere clean. It has nothing to do with your religion. This is not a religious issue, this is a human issue."
She then expressed that “getting an abortion is not easy” and that it's a hard decision people make in their lives.
The actress articulated: “If you don’t have the wherewithal to understand that, to start the conversation with, ‘I know how hard this must be for you,’ if you’re starting it by telling me I’m going to burn in hell, then you’re not looking out for me as a human being, whether I subscribe to your religion or not, and that is not okay.”
Goldberg's emotional monologue received applause from the audience.
The Emmy award winner previously spoke about her own abortion in an essay for Angela Bonavoglia's The Choices We Made as she recalled her experience terminating a pregnancy at 14 — before Roe v. Wade became legal.
She wrote: "I talked to nobody. I panicked. I sat in hot baths. I drank these strange concoctions girls told me about — something like Johnnie Walker Red with a little bit of Clorox, alcohol, baking soda (which probably saved my stomach) and some sort of cream. You mixed it all up. I got violently ill.”
“At that moment I was more afraid of having to explain to anybody what was wrong than of going to the park with a hanger, which is what I did,” she added.
According to a report, if Roe v. Wade is overturned, 26 states are likely to restrict abortion - impacting more than 40 million women of child-bearing age.
