Whoopi Goldberg gave a passionate speech about human rights on Tuesday’s The View, warning lawmakers that if Roe v. Wade is overturned, which is poised to happen according to a leaked draft opinion from the U.S. Supreme Court, we will go back in time to when people were “tripping over women in bathrooms” who were “giving themselves abortions.” It’s a personal issue for the co-host.
On Monday night, Politico published the draft of a majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito that strikes down the landmark 1973 decision guaranteeing federal constitutional protections of abortion rights. “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” Alito writes.
While a women’s right to have an abortion is still legal in this country, for now, Goldberg declared this issue isn’t about abortion rights, but human rights.
“This is my body and nobody… you won’t let me make my decisions about my body? You are not the person to make that decision” she began. “The reason abortion came about — women in this country lived forever with it being illegal. Okay? Women, when they decide something is not right for them, they’re going to take it into their own hands.”
Goldberg continued, “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 about your religion.”
The Oscar-winner declared: “This is not a religious issue, this is 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 people do lightly, it’s not something you can just do,” Goldberg passionately stated. “It is a hard, awful decision that people make. If you don’t have the wherewithal to understand that, to start the conversation with, ‘I know how hard this must be for you.’ If you’re starting it by telling me I’m going to 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 OK.”
Goldberg previously opened up about getting an abortion as a teenager. In an essay for Angela Bonavoglia’s The Choices We Made, she wrote about finding out she was pregnant at age 14.
“I talked to nobody. I panicked. I sat in hot baths. I drank these strange concoctions girls told me about – something like Johnny Walker Red with a little bit of Clorox, alcohol, baking soda (which probably saved my stomach) and some sort of cream. You mixed it all up. I got violently ill. At that moment I was more afraid of having to explain to anybody what was wrong than of going to the park with a hanger, which is what I did,” she shared.
.@WhoopiGoldberg: “Getting an abortion is not easy. Making that decision is not easy. It’s not something people do lightly.”
“If you don’t have the wherewithal to understand that … then you’re not looking out for me as a human being … and that is not okay.” pic.twitter.com/u1DPPSp0Zm
— The View (@TheView) May 3, 2022
The U.S. Supreme Court’s draft opinion doesn’t just go after Roe, but also a subsequent 1992 decision — Planned Parenthood v. Casey — that largely maintained the right.
“We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled,” Alito writes in the document. “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”
No draft decision of the court has ever been leaked to the press while a case is still pending. The ladies of The View discussed whether it was the left or the right that could have leaked the document, noting both sides would have motivation.
“It is unprecedented for this to happen,” Sunny Hostin said. “Even the Supreme Court is not safe, is not sacred and is politicized.”
