Chelsea Handler Opens Up About The Abortions She Had At Age 16

In a new essay for Playboy, actress and comedian Chelsea Handler opened up about the two abortions she had when she was 16 years old. In the personal essay, published in the magazine's "Freedom Issue" and on Playboy's website on Monday, Handler wrote about how Planned Parenthood and America's abortion laws helped her make a "thoughtful" decision after she made what she calls "irresponsible" decisions. Handler said that, as a teen, she became pregnant after having unprotected sex with her boyfriend. "When I got pregnant I just thought, 'Why not? I can have a baby,'" she wrote. But her parents, she says, recognized that "the idea that I would have a child and raise it by myself at that age, when I couldn’t even find my way home at night, was ridiculous," and took her to Planned Parenthood. "When it was over," she wrote, "I was relieved in every possible way." She also revealed that after getting pregnant a second time that year, she could barely scrape together the $230 it cost to get a "safe abortion" at Planned Parenthood. However, she was grateful for being able to "get an abortion legally without risking my health or bankrupting myself or my family." Handler has previously spoken about not wanting to have children, joking to People, "I'd have to over-correct so much from my parents that I would be a nightmare mother." Her revelation comes just after the Supreme Court ruled to strike down restrictions on abortion clinics in Texas. Handler credited her ability to make a decision about whether or not to have children to Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court's 1973 ruling on a woman's legal right to abortion. She calls the efforts to overturn that ruling "infuriating," writing that "once you go forward in history, you don't go backward." Read her full essay over on Playboy.