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Kelly Rissman
US News Reporter
Kelly Bishop opened up about a very “private abortion” she had when she was younger.
In an interview with People, the 80-year-old actor reflected on her stage and screen career, from her groundbreaking role in the 1975 Broadway musical A Chorus Line to her role as Emily Gilmore on the beloved drama Gilmore Girls. All of which she touched upon in her upcoming memoir, The Third Gilmore Girl, where she candidly recalled many of her most private experiences including her decision not to have children.
Bishop is the stepmother to Norma Sheryl Leonard, the daughter of Bishop’s late husband, former ESPN and CNN host Lee Leonard, who passed away in 2018. She noted she had always known she didn’t want children since she was young.
“I was quite young,” Bishop told the outlet. “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,” the Dirty Dancing actor recalled. “And that was fine. I mean, that’s a choice.”
She added that she was thankful for Roe v Wade when she was in her thirties when she was able to get an abortion.
“It was such a relief just knowing that that option was there,” Bishop explained. “Of course, it never had 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.”
She wasn’t planning on talking about her abortion in her memoir, but not because of any residual “shame.”
“That’s something private that I just was not going to put in until the Supreme Court got rid of Roe v Wade,” Bishop 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.’”
Reproductive rights have been an important cause for Bishop, with the actor recalling attending a 2004 pro-choice rally in Washington, DC, with Gilmore Girls creator Amy Sherman-Palladino and producer Helen Pai. Although she doesn’t describe herself as “political,” she noted that she believes that by sharing her own abortion experience, she can connect to younger readers grappling with the shame and stigma revolving around abortion.
“I just wanted to include it so that young women of today get a sense of where we were then,” Bishop said, noting that her past experiences could help them inform their decisions in the present.
