Sofia Franklyn Writes Candidly About Her Abortion: “This Is Hard for Me to Say Even Now”

There’s no right way to talk about this. I share a lot in this book, but this is hard for me to say even now. Having an abortion isn’t like having a public scandal, nor is writing about it. I can usually reconcile the dark corners of my past, but my feelings around my abortion are, in many ways, still pending, and, frankly, it still feels very wrong to share publicly. But I hope putting myself out there will free me from the self-imposed exile and shame.

When you have an abortion, the take-home packet gives you explicit instructions on what to do if you bleed through two pads per hour. But nowhere does it include guidance on the emotional clusterfuck that’s to come.

I took the pills at home, and weeks later I couldn’t recognize myself in the mirror, physically or mentally, and I couldn’t figure out why. I felt crazy. I later learned that there is a physiological, hormonal, neurological chain reaction that occurs. No one prepares you for that part. At the time, all I had were Reddit threads and an off-handed comment my friend made to check my hormones months after. Getting some answers, no matter how disparate, made it less scary.

Daddy Issues is fundamentally a story about being a girl in the world, and I wrote this chapter because I want women to feel less insane. Less alone. I want women to know that other women are having abortions. They are just not talking about it. We aren’t supposed to.

The first episode of my new show, Sofia with an F, goes number one on all the charts October 2020, but with every following week, the episodes lose their newness, I lose my virality, and we trend down from number one, an impossible standard to maintain for everyone but Alex Cooper’s new Call Her Daddy.

Alex follows her “The Truth About Call Her Daddy” video with an episode called “The Funeral”—a fifty-minute-plus monologue on all the reasons I’m the greedy, lazy, male-centered puppet she’s made me out to be.

Any creative muscle I still have is paralyzed by the unshakable notion that everyone hates me. I’m starting to hate myself just as much. I don’t want to create; I don’t want to do anything at all. Sometimes I’m able to craft a skeleton of a segment on my Notes app, but as soon as it’s time to press record and speak it out loud, anything I thought was interesting or worthwhile now sounds dumb and empty.

Up in the literal clouds on the fifty-seventh floor in my apartment, I get a ping that a comment I made on a podcast made it to Fox News.

“I’ve asked the last three dudes I’ve dated for their bank account info on the first date . . . I think I have every fucking right to be like, ‘Hi, are we on the same level, or am I wasting my time?’ ”

This is how I sound now. Cold and bitter, yet still provocative, or at least trying to be. There is a disconnect happening. Disconnect from my life. Disconnect from my show. Disconnect from myself.

I’m so used to being misunderstood that I let it rock. But I won’t accept defeat, so I dissociate. That’s the playbook now.

I interview guests I don’t care about, say things for clickbait, flirt with A–Z list personalities to score a collab. I hire a talent booking agency (the same one Alex uses) that charges $60,000 for a six-month retainer to get “celebrities” on my podcast.

Living dissociated is like walking through the world half asleep.

I let my boyfriend Aidan baby me. He holds my hand through this half-life, a boy to keep my physical self company without making me confront my past, my direction, or really anything at all.

I take a work trip to LA to guest-star on an episode of Selling Sunset, but when I get there I’m so bloated that I, my cousin, and the celebrity stylist I hired spend all our off-camera time gua sha–ing my stomach so I can actually fit into the looks she pulled for me.

When I’m back in New York, Aidan suggests I might be pregnant, which I reassure him isn’t possible because I took the Chinatown version of Plan B.

I pee on a stick to prove it.

“I’m not pregnant!” I yell out from the bathroom.

Aidan comes in to verify.

“Let me see,” he says, silly and relieved. “Wait, you are pregnant, though.” He points to the stick.

“No, I’m not, look at the line,” I snap.

“Yeah, two of them means you are.”

I spend the next three hours scrambling to prove the test wrong, comparing the color of the lines to the pictures on the box, comparing the box to the pamphlet, and googling false positives, which turns out are much rarer than false negatives.

I get to Planned Parenthood five minutes before they open and say bye to Aidan. No visitors allowed. After an hour in the initial waiting room, a nurse takes me to a room where she draws my blood and hands me a cup for my urine sample, which confirms the pregnancy.

“Okay . . . Can I get an abortion?” I ask, genuinely not knowing what comes next.

“Yes, we will talk about all your options and schedule it. Probably sometime next week.”

“I have to get it now,” I say. “I’m leaving for Europe in two days.”

They’re able to squeeze me in the following morning at 10:00 a.m. while my mom and brother are on a flight to New York, the first stop in an incredible, nonrefundable, family-only trip to the Amalfi Coast for my birthday.

I look six months pregnant by the time we get to Positano, which Reddit tells me is “post-procedure belly,” even though I was only pregnant for about five weeks. I know I’m not making it up when my brother says, “You look pregnant,” out of the blue.

When I finally tell my mom, once a twenty-one-year-old pregnant with me, I feel guilty for being thirty and getting rid of it within forty-eight hours. I think about the so-called life I’m protecting by not having a baby—the partying, the numbing, the running. How can I bring new life into the world when I don’t live a life worth keeping myself?