Kerry Washington broke her silence about the abortion scene on Scandal after having the procedure done when she was in her 20s. The episode was the season 5 mid-season finale, “Baby It’s Cold Outside.”
Appearing on Call Her Daddy, Washington was asked by host Alex Cooper if filming the scene was “triggering.”
“I don’t think it was triggering to film it, ” Washington said. “But I do think it was cathartic.”
While she didn’t go public with her experience until several years later, Washington said that scene left her “a little bit healed” following the airing of the episode.
“I got to say this is something that happened to me,” she said. “This is something that I chose. This is something that I’ve lived through, and I’m not going to hide it anymore. Even though I was hiding it like on some deeper emotional level, I was able to say, “I’m going to step into the truth of this moment and share it with all of you.”
After being an advocate for reproductive rights, Washington shared her abortion story in her 2023 memoir Thicker Than Water.
“Having some distance from it, rereading it, I thought, I want to share this,” she said. “I do want to share this because a lot of what my abortion story is about is my personal loss of privacy. And it is our right to privacy that has been taken away from us. That is how Roe v. Wade got reversed. I just think I’m not a bad person because I’ve had an abortion, and you get to disagree.”
Washington admitted that she felt shame over getting pregnant at the time.
“It really invited me to figure out how to stand up for myself,” she said. “And my boundaries more, how to be more honest with myself in the moment, and how to stay in my body.”
Shonda Rhimes, the creator of Scandal, shared that although ABC had some concerns over the episode, all reactions weren’t negative.
“When that episode came out, I thought the reaction was going to be so much stronger… which is always awesome when it’s not,” Rhimes said in 2016. “Because the fans are always much more enlightened than, you know, the studio lawyers are.”