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The abortion debate endlessly rages on, but Chelsea Handler knows where she stands on the issue. As a 16-year-old, the nighttime talk-show host had an abortion, and as she told host Rosie O'Donnell on Wednesday's The Rosie Show, that decision kept her from ruining her life.
"I was so delusional," she said of her desire to have a child at the time. "I was like, 'I'm ready for a baby.'"
Her parents felt otherwise. They didn't think that she would be capable of raising a child when she was still a teen, and said they weren't going to be stuck with that responsibility for her.
"You're throwing your entire life away," Handler recalled her mother and father telling her. "You're supposed to create a life for yourself. We want you to enjoy your life and not be raising a child, and we're certainly not going to raise it for you."
Handler says she has no regrets about the decision because she knows now that she wouldn't have been a good mother to the baby. "You should do whatever you want with your body and you shouldn't let anyone tell you what to do," she said, echoing sentiments of the pro-choice camp. "I have no regret at all."
Though O'Donnell brought up the Roe vs. Wade court case (which legalized abortions) where some women testified that abortions ruined their lives, Handler says that has not been her experience.
"That's not the stuff I've heard from my friends who've had abortions," she said. "Listen, not that it was a casual thing that they never think about again, but it wasn't a life-defining negative thing."
