Gilmore Girls Kelly Bishop Opens Up About ‘Very Private’ Abortion, Says She Always Knew She Didn’t Want Kids

> “I was quite young,” Bishop, 80, tells PEOPLE for this week’s print issue. “I remember my mother even reminded me [when I was an adult], ‘You were a little girl when you said … I’m not going to have children.’
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> “I meant it,” Bishop says. “And that was fine. I mean, that’s a choice.”
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> The Tony-winning actress is looking back on her stage and screen career in her new memoir The Third Gilmore Girl, out Sept. 17 from Gallery Books — from her groundbreaking role in the 1975 Broadway musical A Chorus Line, which was based upon tapes that Bishop recorded about her life as a chorus dancer, to her part as Jennifer Grey’s mother in the ‘80s classic Dirty Dancing, to her beloved role as the stern Gilmore matriarch Emily on the 2000-2007 family drama Gilmore Girls.
> But Bishop, who writes that she’s generally a private person, also opens up about her personal life — including a failed first marriage to a compulsive gambler and the abortion she had when she was in her thirties.
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> “It was such a relief just knowing that that option was there,” Bishop says. “Of course, it never had occurred to me that I would accidentally get pregnant. That never even crossed my mind. But the fact that that was available and legal, it was just a relief.”
Bishop says that she wasn’t originally planning on including her abortion story in the memoir, though not for “any feeling of shame and wrongdoing.”

> “That’s something private that I just was not going to put in until the Supreme Court got rid of Roe v. Wade,” Bishop says. “And more and more women — actresses, but other celebrity-type women — were coming out of my generation, saying, ‘I had an abortion. I had an abortion.’”
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Respect. And it’s so nice to do  hear more people being honest about not wanting children. No shame in knowing what you want.

She’s a queen

Love her. Nothing but respect from me for including that in there