On Tuesday’s episode of The View, longtime co-host Whoopi Goldberg gave an impassioned speech about abortion rights stemming from the recent leaked draft opinion of the Supreme Court, which clearly showed intent to overturn Roe v. Wade—the landmark case that eventually established the constitutional right to abortion in the United States.
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In a clip from the show, when discussing her position on the draft opinion, Goldberg passionately defended abortion rights and cited that the decision women make to go through with one is “not easy.”
“I will tell you, this is my body. And nobody—you know, you got people telling me I gotta wear a mask or don’t wear a mask or do this. Everybody wants to tell me what to do. But you won’t let me make a decision about my body. You are not the person to make that decision,” Whoopi began.
She continued:
“My doctor and myself and my child, that’s who makes the decision. And one of the things I really wanna point out before we go is the reason abortion came about. Women in this country lived forever with it being illegal. Women, when they decide 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. This 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, it’s a human issue. If you care about me as a human being, you should know three things: getting an abortion is not easy. Making that decision is not easy. It’s not something that people do lightly. It’s not something that you can just do. It is a hard awful decision that people make.”
She concluded, “And if you don’t have the wherewithal to understand that, to start this conversation with ‘I know how hard this must be for you,’—if you’re starting it by telling me ‘you’re gonna 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.”
As The Hollywood Reporter notes, the EGOT-winning actress previously opened up about performing her first-ever abortion when she was just 14-years-old. You can view the segment in its entirety below.
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