US comedian regrets abortion she once joked about

An American performer has spoken of her regret at aborting her baby to pursue her comedy career.

Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Emma Estrada confessed that although she once joked about the experience on stage, she now mourns the loss of the “potential kid, the aborted future”.

A strong factor in her change of heart was seeing how her then boyfriend Gabe — the child’s father — reacted to the loss.

Comedy

When Gabe told her that his sister had just had a baby, she recalls seeing it “as the perfect segue”. She continued: “I told him I, too, was having a baby except I wasn’t keeping mine. He blinked at me.”

She observed how “Gabe became sick in the following days and didn’t talk much”. Nevertheless, she decided to go through with the abortion at a Planned Parenthood clinic and ‘put her career first’. The baby was five weeks old.

A month later, at a comedy variety show on Sunset Boulevard, around the time Texas outlawed abortions, she joked about the experience.

“I’m really glad I got my abortion in California because if I were in Texas, I couldn’t drive out of state. I have a 1999 Toyota Camry — it just couldn’t handle it.”

Mourning

The couple split up after Gabe heard about this, but a few months later they briefly got back together. She asked him: “Do you ever think about the fact that we almost had a kid?” He replied in an instant: “All the time.”

“‘All the time’ played like a mantra in my head for days”, Emma wrote. “It rang out to me in my sleep, in my waking life. I wanted to replay my 20s, to rewind, to fast-forward, to choose differently.”

She started to reimagine her life: “I would try to see myself with a child. They’d be 4 years old now. Gabe would be there. We’d be living together in North Carolina where he’s from. We’d be happy. I’d be writing. He’d be painting. We’d have big windows and a backyard.”

She explains: “I’ve stopped performing. When I think of forgoing a baby for a comedy career, I think: What career? I work as a copywriter. No awards to my name. Nobody recognizes me. I never made it to 100,000 followers.

“I think of Gabe and think of him thinking about it. The potential kid, the aborted future. I wonder if he mourns it too. He must.”