Sharon Stone recalled having an abortion as a teenager and criticised restrictions on reproductive healthcare during an appearance on IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson podcast, released Wednesday, 30 September.
The Basic Instinct star discussed her experience with Obama and her brother, Craig Robinson, including how a lack of sex education contributed to her becoming pregnant without initially realising it. 'He didn't have any knowledge or information that I should have some kind of birth control,' Stone said of her boyfriend at the time. She said she did not realise she was pregnant until he noticed she had gained weight. 'My parents thought it was the freshman 15,' Stone said. 'Like when I tell you I could have been the girl who gave birth in the bathroom stall.'
Sharon Stone Recalled Her Teenage Abortion
Stone first detailed the experience in her 2021 memoir, 'The Beauty of Living Twice'. According to Hollywood Life, she was 18 when she became pregnant with her first serious boyfriend, and because abortion was difficult to obtain in Pennsylvania at her age, the two travelled to Ohio for the procedure.
Stone later described a difficult recovery, saying she experienced heavy bleeding and kept the abortion secret from those around her. A Planned Parenthood clinic later opened near her hometown, where she received counselling and birth control. 'This, above all else, saved me: that someone, anyone, could talk to me, educate me,' she wrote. 'No one ever had, about anything.'
Stone Imagined a World Where Men Could Get Pregnant
On the podcast, the conversation turned to what reproductive healthcare might look like if men could become pregnant. Obama joked that childbirth would become a spectacle, imagining 'birth-Olympics' in which men would film themselves going into labour and receive trophies for enduring it without an epidural, cheering, 'Well done, dude! Bob, you did that without an epidural!' Stone added that 'maternity leave would be when you got the bonus.' When Robinson tried to change the subject, Obama needled him, saying, 'This is why we don't get help!'
The discussion then turned more serious as Stone turned to women's healthcare. 'Now we don't wanna give women care, OB-GYN care, and we wanna prosecute women for having a miscarriage,' she said. 'What kind of arcane bulls--t is this?' Stone then offered a hypothetical about abortion access if men could become pregnant. 'If men got pregnant, you could get an abortion from a vending machine.'
Sharon Stone Has Spoken About Her Miscarriages Before
Stone has also discussed pregnancy loss publicly. In June 2022, responding to a post about dancer Peta Murgatroyd's miscarriage, Stone said she had 'lost nine children by miscarriage'. She wrote that the experience was 'no small thing, physically nor emotionally' and that women were often made to feel they had to bear it 'alone and secretly' with a sense of failure. Stone added that 'female health and wellness left to the care of the male ideology has become lax at best, ignorant in fact, and violently oppressive in effort.'
The comments were made in response to Murgatroyd's public discussion of her miscarriage, separate from Stone's later remarks about her teenage abortion on the IMO podcast.
