Chelsea Handler Has the Best Abortion Stories

Chelsea Handler isn’t just a rarely funny comedian. Sometimes the canned laugh track is muted and she wants to seriously talk abortion. In the latest issue of Playboy magazine which used to be for men, Chelsea Handler discusses the two abortions she had in the same year of high school because one is for girls who only thought they were loose. Handler’s sweet sixteen abortion smorgasbord is placed in the context of the current unfettered access to abortion rights cases playing out in more conservative state such as Texas:

We all make mistakes all the time. I happened to fuck up twice at the age of 16. I’m grateful that I came to my senses and was able to get an abortion legally without risking my health or bankrupting myself or my family.

I’m sure there’s an implied ditto on the part of the dudes who fucked you in high school.

Handler follows in the paths of other laudable women such as your random Facebook friend Shelly who openly touts her abortion as a badge of politically correct honor. Wasn’t there a time when abortion rights were surrounded by harrowing tales of rape survivors and destitute and disenfranchised women with abusive disappearing baby daddies?

The memo went out that all the upscale white women who got knocked up at prom after too many Bartles and Jaymes were supposed to stay mum and write the checks. Handler’s confessions of drunken bareback sex in high school seems like an opening to mention how scary and shitty abortions are and a warning to young people to use protection. Rather, these same tales are now proudly bandied about like glory days high school sports stories. Remember that time we crushed it at Planned Parenthood? 

There seems to be some confusion as to crass jokes versus crass behavior. Abortion jokes are funny. Abortion less chuckle-filled. Even for those civil libertarians who support a woman’s right to ride the recreational reproductive rights carousel. Humility has changed, Playboy has changed, drunk girls remain the same.

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