Kerry Washington opens up about her abortion: ‘This is a form of health care, this is OK’

Kerry Washington’s vulnerable, powerful memoir was published this week, and in it, she shared her own personal abortion story and why she made the choice she made. While the story itself is candidly told, Washington says she struggled with whether to include it in her memoir.

“This story had so much to do with my understanding of myself and the world as my career unfolded,” she tells PEOPLE about why she ultimately decided to tell this chapter of her story.

In her book, “Thicker Than Water,” Washington says she had an abortion in the early 2000s when she was in her twenties. She’d already starred in “Save the Last Dance” and “She Hate Me,” so she decided to protect her privacy by providing a fake name and address to the medical facility where she underwent her procedure.

“My shame and embarrassment inspired a private silence that hid my personal truth and made me complicit in a culture of secrecy that shames women, our bodies, our choices, and our power,” Washington wrote in a forward to a piece in TIME featuring an excerpt from her memoir. “As I was writing my memoir, however, I realized how important it is to speak openly about experiences that have been kept in the dark, because when we do so we liberate ourselves and each other.”

Washington, who is now a mother of three with husband Nnamdi Asomugha, says her unplanned pregnancy was the result of a “heat of the moment” decision where she felt she couldn’t speak up for herself or instill sexual boundaries with her partner at the time.

“This all could have been avoided. If I had spoken up for myself in the moment, I wouldn’t have found myself in that office,” she writes in her book. “But there I was, surrendering my insides to a surgical vacuum, trying to repair the damage born of my silence and need to be loved.”

New research from the Guttmacher Institute shares the most recent statistics on legal abortions since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision last year severely impacted access to abortion nationwide and allowed more than a dozen states to ban or restrict the procedure. Abortions rose in almost every state where it remains legal, but the change was most visible in states bordering those with total abortion bans. The data also suggests that thousands of women have crossed state lines to obtain an abortion in fear of restrictions in their home state.

Planned Parenthood reports that the stigma surrounding abortion harms people who’ve had abortions and those who provide abortions. The stigma causes shame, silence, and isolation and makes it harder for people to get care or ask for support when they need an abortion.

Speaking with Robin Roberts on “Good Morning America” earlier this week, Kerry Washington elaborated on her decision to share her abortion story and fighting the stigma surrounding it.

“We stay in our circles of shame because we don’t talk about it,” she says. “So, I challenged myself to try to write about my experience having an abortion to sort of let go of the shame about having an abortion and say, like, ‘This is what—this happens. A lot of women do this. This is a form of health care. This is okay.’”