Stranger Things’ Maya Hawke says she ‘wouldn’t exist’ if mother Uma Thurman hadn’t had abortion
Stranger Things star Maya Hawke has shared that she wouldn’t exist if her mom had not had an abortion. (Credit: Stephane Cardinale – Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images)
Maya Hawke said she wouldn’t be in this world if her mum Uma Thurman had not gotten an abortion as a teenager.
The 23-year-old Stranger Things star said her mother’s life would have been “derailed” had she been blocked from accessing abortion in her youth.
In 2021, Thurman wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post disclosing that she had an abortion as a teenager after sex with a much older man resulted in pregnancy.
Thurman said that the “hard” decision gave her the opportunity to “grow up and become the mother she is today”.
Hawke, whose father is Ethan Hawke, told The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon on Tuesday (28 June): “Both of my parents’ lives would’ve been totally derailed if she hadn’t had access to safe and legal health care — fundamental health care.”
She told the host that she called her mum shortly before appearing on the show, and that they had discussed the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v Wade, the 1973 ruling that made abortion a federal right.
“We just got into talking about the Supreme Court ruling and this essay that my mom wrote a couple months ago when they were putting these further restrictions on abortion access, sort of preceding this whole thing,” Maya Hawke said.
“My mum wrote this really beautiful essay about her abortion that she got when she was really young and about how if she hadn’t had it, she wouldn’t have become the person that she had become, and I wouldn’t exist.”
Hawke said that “wealthy people will always be able to get abortions”, but people who do not have the resources will suffer and “will not only not be able to pursue their dreams, but actually lose their lives”.
She finished with a powerful message, saying: “So I just wanted to say, f**k the Supreme Court. But we’re going to keep fighting it, and we’re going to win, like our grandmothers did.”
On 24 June, the US Supreme Court made the decision to take away people’s constitutional right to an abortion. This means that individual states will decide whether they will permit abortions or not, with many abortion clinics already closing their doors in states including Arkansas, Louisiana, Idaho and Tennessee, according to the BBC.
Uma Thurman’s “beautiful” and poignant op-ed that Hawke referenced was written in opposition to Texas’s Heartbeat Act, which banned abortion after the six-week mark when cardiac activity begins.
The act went into effect in September 2021, dealing a major blow to Roe v Wade. A Mississippi ban on abortion past the 15-week mark led to the lawsuit which ultimately overturned Roe.
