“Gilmore Girl” reveals that she had an abortion

American actress and dancer Kelly Bishop is best known for her role as matriarch Emily Gilmore on the seven-season TV drama Gilmore Girls as well as playing Marjorie Houseman in Dirty Dancing (1987). The primary storyline of Dirty Dancing is an unwanted pregnancy and a botched abortion; as it turns out, abortion is a storyline in Bishop’s new memoir The Third Gilmore Girl. The autobiography will be released on September 17 by Gallery books, and Bishop told People magazine that she reveals many details about her celebrity life.  

According to Bishop, she announced to her mother Jane that she wanted no children when she was still a child herself. “I was quite young,” the now 80-year-old Bishop told People. “I remember my mother even reminded me when I was an adult, ‘You were a little girl when you said, “I’m not going to have children.”’ I meant it. And that was fine. I mean, that’s a choice.” Her determination to remind childless is what drove her to seek an abortion in her thirties, after a failed marriage to someone she describes as a “compulsive gambler.” 

“It was such a relief just knowing that the option was there,” Bishop stated. “Of course, it never occurred to me that I would accidentally get pregnant. That never even crossed my mind. But the fact that that was available and legal, it was just a relief.” Abortion activism has been part of Bishop’s life for some time, despite the fact that she sees herself as “not really political.” In 2004, she attended an abortion rally in Washington, D.C., with Gilmore Girls creator Amy Sherman-Palladino and producer Helen Pai. She included her abortion in The Third Gilmore Girl to reach out to young women. “I just wanted to include it so that young women of today get a sense of where we were then,” she said.  

Bishop told People that although she was originally going to leave her abortion out of her memoir – despite not having “any feeling of shame and wrongdoing” – she decided to include it in order to contribute to the normalization of feticide in post-Roe America. “That’s something private that I just was not going to put in until the Supreme Court got rid of Roe v. Wade,” she said. “And more and more women – actresses, but other celebrity-type women – were coming out of my generation, saying, ‘I had an abortion. I had an abortion.’” 

Indeed, there have been a number of prominent abortion memoirs in the last two years alone. Britney Spears revealed that Justin Timberlake pressured her into an abortion in her 2023 memoir The Woman in Me, but stated that it was a deeply traumatizing experience. Paris Hilton also described having an abortion at age 22 in her memoir that same year because she says she was not ready to have a child. Actress Kerry Washington described her abortion as “surrendering my insides to a surgical vacuum” in Thicker Than Water: A Memoir. Comedian Leslie Jones of SNL revealed in her autobiography that she used abortion as birth control, aborting three of her children.  

Celebrities are telling their abortion stories to normalize a “procedure” that is the focal point of fierce political fights across post-Roe America. But their stories are revealing in a different way.  In almost every instance, money was not an issue. The parents were financially secure, even wealthy. Each of these children died because the parents insisted that they were “not ready” in some way, despite being financially well-off adults. Each engaged in the baby-making act while not wanting babies; each had succumbed so thoroughly to the contraceptive mindset that the children which naturally arrived after acts of reproduction were treated as an unwelcome shock, as if it were somehow unnatural that sex frequently results in babies. 

And inadvertently, each of these abortion memoirs tells us something profound about our culture – not that abortion is normal, but why: because we are so broken that we have forgotten basic facts about what it means to be mothers, fathers – and human beings. Thus, the famous and powerful leverage their star power and wealth against the most nameless vulnerable, and “abortion memoirs” have become the hot new trend.