Pop star Lily Allen can’t remember how many abortions she’s had. “Maybe four or five,” she laughed on her podcast, adding that one guy offering to pay for it “felt romantic.” Somewhere, a Planned Parenthood intern probably fist-pumped. The rest of us? We’re just trying to figure out when we started treating life—and death—as just another throwaway joke in the latest celebrity confessional.
This isn’t about slut-shaming or moral crusading. This is about how far our culture has drifted when a public figure can casually shrug off multiple abortions like they’re botched brunch orders. It’s about how detached the elite have become from the emotional and ethical weight that real people who have an unplanned pregnancy carry.
Allen isn’t some random TikTok influencer. She’s a high-profile voice in the abortion debate. Remember her stunt at Glastonbury in 2022, flipping off the Supreme Court during a performance of “F--- You” after Roe v. Wade was overturned? Back then, she was lauded as a feminist icon—raw, honest, and unapologetic. But now? Now she’s laughing about her uterus being a “disaster area” and can’t even count the number of lives she’s ended.
This isn’t empowerment. It’s erasure. And it’s grotesque.
For millions of women—and, yes, men too—abortion isn’t a punchline. It’s trauma. It’s regret. It's sadness. It’s a decision that haunts, not one that trends, as our Managing Editor Jennifer Van Laar wrote when sharing the story of how abortion affected people in her family.
READ MORE: Telling the Story of How Abortion Affected My Family
But celebrity culture, in all its performative wokeness, has sanitized it. Made it chic. Something to brag about on a podcast between ad reads for detox teas.
There’s a dangerous shift happening. We’ve gone from "safe, legal, and rare" to "loud, proud, and forgettable." And when high-profile figures like Allen treat abortion like it’s no bigger deal than getting a bad tattoo, they don’t just cheapen their own humanity—they warp the conversation for everyone else.
We all know that if a male celebrity had joked about losing track of how many kids he abandoned, the internet would be on fire. But when Lily Allen cracks a smile over ending “four or five” pregnancies, we’re supposed to nod along? Celebrate her “bravery”?
No. We should call it what it is: moral nihilism dressed in designer sneakers.
Despite wins at the Supreme Court, we've still got to loudly push back against a cultural elite that treats human life like an inconvenience—then expects a standing ovation for the punchline.
So no, Lily, we’re not laughing with you. We’re mourning the fact that something so solemn has become so flippant. And we’re wondering how many more lives will be lost before someone in your circle stops clapping and starts asking what’s really going on.
Tell your joke to my late mom. When she was having me, she was told by doctors to get a abortion because to have me would hurt her health and was told that up to my birth. Yet I'm here today because a doctor made sure my mom and me were going to be ok.
So to you, Lily, from the rest of us out here in the real world, we will keep treating life and the unborn with the seriousness it deserves.