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Whoopi Goldberg Defends Right to Decide Whether to Have an Abortion

“This is not a religious issue, this is a human issue,” she said on ‘The View’ during the ‘Hot Topics’ segment on May 3.

Whoopi Goldberg is speaking her piece on abortion just days after a leaked draft opinion from the Supreme Court revealed that a vast majority of justices were leaning to overturn Roe v. Wade.

The leaked initial draft written by conservative Justice Samuel Alito was a hot topic during an episode of The View on Tuesday (May 3).

Goldberg, who has previously spoken about getting an abortion at the age of 14, expressed that she believes that abortion is a “human issue” and not a “religious issue.”

“The reason abortion came about: Women in this country lived forever with it being illegal. Women, when they decide something is not right for them, they’re going to take it into their own hands,” she said.

Adding, “Well, we got tired of tripping over women in bathrooms, public bathrooms, who were giving themselves abortions because there was nowhere safe, nowhere clean, nowhere to go. This law came about because people wanted people to have somewhere safe and somewhere clean. This is not a religious issue, this is a human issue.”

RELATED: Supreme Court Abortion Ruling Draft: Here’s What You Should Know

Listen to her response below:

RELATED: ​​President Barack Obama And Michelle Obama Release Statement On Leaked Roe v. Wade Opinion

Goldberg also explained the importance of having the choice and how difficult it can be to decide to have an abortion.

“If you care about me as human being, you should know three things: Getting an abortion is not easy, making that decision is not easy. It’s not something people do lightly! It’s not something you can just do! It is a hard, awful decision that people make. And if you don’t have the wherewithal to understand that, to start this conversation with, ‘I know how hard this must be for you,’ if you’re starting it by telling me I’m going to burn in hell, then you’re not looking out for me as a human being, whether I subscribe to your religion or not. And that is not OK.”

BET previously reported that on Monday (May 2), the draft opinion published by Politico contains a 98-page majority stating, “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start.” The draft also addressed the 1992 case Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which backed the Roe decision. “We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled,” he continues. “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”

This means that the right to terminate pregnancies would be determined by individual states and would not be guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.

Citing an unnamed source, POLITICO said that conservative Supreme Court justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett voted along with Alito after oral arguments were made in Dec. 2021. Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan, the three more liberal judges on the court, are said to be working on dissenting opinions.

Texas and Florida, among several other states, have passed restrictive abortion laws in recent months.

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