Did Lady Gaga have an abortion? New video stirs speculation in pop world
However, even a fairly uninformed Gaga fan can see that the video more specifically tells the story of her being dropped from her original record label Island Def Jam and her subsequent signing at Interscope. The real topic that has everybody talking goes beyond the pop superstar’s battles in the musical arena. Many are now wondering if the songstress had an abortion.
Marry the Night shows the star in a women’s clinic being wheeled into a common room for patients…. [T]he attending nurse then tells her “no intimacy for two weeks.” As the woman continues to fret over Gaga she reveals she will be a star before a surreal ballet starts.
Afterwards, the same brunette version of Lady Gaga is an apartment, naked save for a pair of underwear that actually resemble bandages…
The intimacy comment, the bandages, and the fact that Gaga has highlighted in interviews that this was a women’s clinic have fans speculating that the star had an abortion before being dropped by Def Jam.
~ Ashley Mott of Gather wondering if Lady Gaga may have had an abortion based on her latest video, December 4
[Screenshots are from video]
Jill Stanek is a nurse turned speaker, columnist and blogger, a national figure in the effort to protect both preborn and postborn innocent human life.
No. There are other reasons a woman could be told “no intimacy for two weeks” after an operation. There are other “women’s” health issues.
However, if Lady Gaga is trying to coyly hint about an abortion, that is distasteful. Whatever your opinion on legalization, abortion is extremely serious. People shouldn’t play games about it.
i read the article twice. was this a video or was this actually seen? shes a liberal so anything goes. i know many people have said that she looks like a man. im one who agrees. sometimes i go “yikes”…..but she knows this and jokes about it. shes a madonna copycat. who knows about an abortion. she will probably reveal in a bio down the line one day. maybe multiples. just as i was shocked to read madonna had 11 abortions at least when i read her bio. they feel they have to keep the money flowing and to heck with children.
as denise noe once stated these hollywood women usually do have abortions. id read that britney spears had 3 and cried ” i killed my babies.” i think it was around the time shed attempted suicide. i remember a lot of people felt that her back to back pregnancies with her boys ruined her career and her shape at such a young age.
went web surfing. many people.saying ” no way would she do that. she respects life.” she is an artist. i thought “papa dont preach” was pro life but as someone said ” im keeping my baby” could mean the baby OR the boyfriend. either way madonna is not pro life. she just did things for shock value for most of the 90s.
i can’t convince myself to listen to ANY Gaga songs, simply because she is pro-abortion and gives her money to abortion clinics. While it’s great that she is standing up against bullying in schools, it’s horrible that she encourages promiscuousness and abortion. Of course, anyone in the Top 10 usually has bad morals. i don’t know if Britney, Gaga or any other pop stars have had abortions, but it just seems like they’re willing to do anything for money.
(Another thought: Jill Stanek should allow me to reply to comments! See LiveAction.org for examples. i’d want to reply to Heather, rather than making it seem like i’m writing an individual, separate comment.)
Alex, we’ve toyed with that idea. Will check LiveAction. Thanks.
Everyone always wrings their hands wondering why oh why these stars self-destruct and act so insane…now we know. It’s just the heart under the floorboards driving them mad.
ive read chers bio and she had an abortion. she was devestated when chastity told her she was a lesbian. now cher is okay with chaz transgendering. i call it self mutilating. my heart goes out to chaz because he is no happier now then he was before. god made us the sex he did for a reason. chaz is confused and it isnt helping matters that his clueless mother is condoning this. the fact that chaz is almost 300 pounds again just proves his secret misery. but liberals just have the answers to everything. dont want a baby? kill it. dont like the gender you are? change it.
I have no idea whether or not Lady Gaga has had an abortion, but I don’t think this video has anything to do with it. Lady Gaga has a history of using the grotesque, emotionally as well as visually, to make a point; and she has a history of focusing on the objectification of women or on the externally-infliced and self-inflicted pain that women experience, frequently at the hands of a culture that objectifies them.
And of course she goes for shock value. Her music is just okay and her hijinks are not generally interesting to me, but I was really impressed with her first appearance at the VMA’s, where she extended her bleak message from the Paparazzi video – about how our culture hungers for and finds a stark, lurid beauty in stories of hurt or fallen people, especially women – and staged her own gory death. I think that was a pretty ballsy move for your first major awards show – you can hear the crowd go momentarily silent when she starts “bleeding,” in shock, and then they just applaud louder – she turned her whole performance into an accusation of the people in the audience, and the people watching at home, and everyone else cheering wildly as she hung in the air. That’s the sort of stuff you save for once you’re established and famous, if you ever do it at all. So anyway my point is – she goes for shock value, obviously. And whatever the politics, abortion is still a shocking topic even today.
I also believe that she has used sex/birth analogies more than once to describe creative and artistic processes. ie she said in a previous interview, ”I have this weird thing that if I sleep with someone they’re going to take my creativity from me through my vagina.” And in the beginning of this video she says that when she looks back she doesn’t remember things exactly as they happened, but the lie is more honest than the truth.
So basically I wouldn’t assume that any video of hers is autobiographical; even a video she says has autobiographical elements. She could very well have felt that her previous label made her “kill” her artistic offspring (I believe that Def Jam’s initial plan was to have her album ready in nine months) in the name of being more mainstream, more palatable; only to leave her in the lurch anyway, like so many abandoned women. ie, she gave up everything for them and they still dumped her – dumped her, maybe, specifically because they didn’t want anyone weak enough and bland enough to give up everything for them. And, as she says in the video, she responded by doing what any woman would do – she did it all over again.
Or she could have meant any other number of things. I only just watched the video right now for the first time so I am just pulling stuff out of the air.
But can I just say that this video has quite possibly the most amazing line ever? “You may say I lost everything, but I still had my bedazzler. And I had a lot of patches, shiny ones, from M&J Trimmings.” I lol’d.
heather says:
December 5, 2011 at 8:58 am
went web surfing. many people.saying ” no way would she do that. she respects life.” she is an artist. i thought “papa dont preach” was pro life but as someone said ” im keeping my baby” could mean the baby OR the boyfriend. either way madonna is not pro life. she just did things for shock value for most of the 90s.
(Denise) Although Madonna has had abortions, the song “Papa Don’t Preach” is about a teenaged girl who is refusing to follow her father’s advice to have an abortion. The girl in the story is very young but she intends to marry her boyfriend and to “keep,” that is, allow the pregnancy to continue naturally until the birth of a baby. While the narrator is under pressure from her father to abort, she apparently has a boyfriend who doesn’t need a shotgun at his back to want to marry her.
I’ve heard that some Crisis Pregnancy Centers liked to play that song when it was popular.
Don’t know if she’s had one or not…but she is a supporter of PP and sells her own brand of condoms, which denote money to PP.
Alexandra, GREAT ASSESSMENT! That’s pretty much what I was thinking. I mean anyone willing to make a video saying they’re in love with Judas, or wear raw meat suits, and all the other things she has done for artistic expression, can not take her expression literally. She creates these expressions for their symbolic value. People misunderstand that about her. (Her music is ok, her artistry is pretty decent, even if Madonna did it first). But whatever, this video isn’t about abortion, because just about anything literally shown in her videos, isn’t literally representing it, it’s symobolic of something else. BUT, Jill, she’s usually pretty good about answering questions about her artwork, so maybe you should ask her for yourself.
i wouldnt buy lady gagas music. i dont like her that much.
Lady Gaga: There is a fine line between artistically creative and batsh!t crazy. And that’s all I have to say about that.
Helena,
YES, YES, YES!!! Thank you for putting it so colorfully and yet so succinctly!! :)
hi carla….helena that was well put!
For once, I agree with Alexandra and Duck. Maybe she did have an abortion, maybe she didn’t. The fact that one of her music videos references abortion is not any sort of indication one way or the other. In this case, the scene may refer to an actual abortion or to the figurative abortion of that portion of her career. Or to something else entirely. Or maybe it’s just there for the shock value. Lady Gaga is not someone to be taken at face value. Ever. (Especially since face value rarely even makes sense. She has an alter-ego as a mermaid named Yuki. Seriously. She really does.)
For once, I agree with Alexandra and Duck.
Hey! :P I didn’t think I was that objectionable! Oh well. ;)
yeah i agree that gaga should never be joking about abortion…..nobody should. thats why i really believed “papa dont preach” was pl and it still could be but people commenting made me see that she may have meant the boyfriend. she never said when they would start a family but she makes it clear that even though papa youre going to be upset……im keeping my baby. coulda meant boyfriend in the picture.
heather says:
December 5, 2011 at 2:12 pm
yeah i agree that gaga should never be joking about abortion…..nobody should. thats why i really believed “papa dont preach” was pl and it still could be but people commenting made me see that she may have meant the boyfriend. she never said when they would start a family but she makes it clear that even though papa youre going to be upset……im keeping my baby. coulda meant boyfriend in the picture.
(Denise) The narrator speaks of herself as being “in trouble deep.” I think the most obvious interpretation is that she is refusing her father’s advice to have an abortion.
Here’s another fan’s theory as to Lady Gaga’s meaning behind the lyrics of the song & her video, which seems to be more in step:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oY46uoJ5nOc&feature=youtube_gdata_player
I supposed it is also possible that the father in “Papa Don’t Preach” is urging the teen girl to place the baby for adoption and she is insistent that she will raise the baby.
I don’t know. I just think somebody as outspoken as Lady Gaga is about everything else wouldn’t be afraid to ADMIT that she’d had an abortion/abortions. She doesn’t seem to care about anybody’s opinion of her, or she wouldn’t do/say some of the things she has (said/done).
She’s probably “ok” with abortion, I would imagine.
@Alexandra: “Objectionable” is a much stronger word than I’d use. I just don’t agree with you very often, is all.
Well I took a stroll around google and read much stuff about this clip from the lady herself and numerous other people, some who may have an idea of her intent, some who wouldn’t.
All the talk seems to be about avoiding extreme fashion by using extreme..er…clothing, her label dumping and a few other things which probably only have meaning for her. Apparently the medical bit was referring to a mental institution.
I found not the slightest hint, clue or inuendo in regards to actual abortion. Possibly some analogous references as others above have said.
I guess it’s just the usual grasping at any imagery with the potential to be abortion related that we see so often here.
OK, sorry Alice – I was just kidding around. I don’t feel like I comment much here and when I read things you say I often agree, which is just why it struck me as funny.
None of this surprises me, but it sure does disgust me. Nothing is sacred now it seems, especially life.
One thing I don’t get, is why Madonna would have all those abortions and then adopt? Kill your own children, but take others in…doesn’t make sense.
No, I knew you weren’t trying to be mean or anything. I think my comment (either one) may have come off a bit harsher than I meant it to. I offer you my tastiest apologetic e-cookies.
@ kim to you and i its upsetting. to madonna it was totally logical. it would have ruined her career. it would have gotten in the way of her busy schedule. now shes older and shes got time and nannies. @ denise…trouble deep could also mean i know you dont want me to be with this troublemaker but i have decided we are getting married.
but @ denise i will just make one last comment. i do think its a pl video..papa dont preach..but some of the comments just said madonna was a great artist and wants people to guess. like while shes dancing she touches her tummy. that could indicate pregnancy but if you listen to all of the lyrics it could simply mean she is in a struggle between boyfriend and dad. perhaps they are getting married?
and @ kim….i dont condone madonnas abortions at all. she has never made any bones about saying how selfish she was. she even rubbed it in her sisters face ” im the star.” shes done very little for her family. she even aborted sean penns baby when they were married. meanwhile she was having an affair with sandra bernhard. she had videos to shoot and money to make and concerts and award shows to attend. condoms? why bother? she could afford abortions. however she almost bled to death delivering rocco and required c sections with both lourdes and rocco.
On November 20th, Gaga went on Alan Carr: Chatty Man and explained the meaning behind the video.
“I know how rejection feels in the business. I got signed, I got dropped, I got signed again. That’s actually what the ‘Marry the Night’ video is about. It’s about one of the most horrible days of my life when I got dropped from my first record label and it’s the story of what happened that day.”
In the opening scene, it looks as if she is on a psych unit, the back wound symbolically representing being stabbed in the back by the record company, the scene in the apartment is of the events leading up to the first scene, when she received the call and mentally “lost it” in anguish. Then it seems the song is about her being strong and making her comeback as a musical artist. The whole theme seems to be about rising above challenges, and loosely based on her story in an artistic way.
xalisae,
It’s about time someone made a Poe reference here! With all these macabre topics, it’s long overdue. Brava!
@ Heather: Since we’ve discussed pregnant women’s suicides in the past, I believe it’s only fair to mention that the suicide RATE of pregnant women is low. Some authorities believe that suicidal women actually wait until AFTER the birth to commit suicide because they want to live as long as they need to for the birth to take place.
@ Heather: You can see hear that the author of “Papa Don’t Preach” and Madonna herself agree that the song is about a teen girl refusing her father’s advice to abort: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papa_Don’t_Preach
In this case, the obvious interpretation is the right interpretation. Of course, many people are uncomfortable with the song because they think it encourages teen girls to get pregnant. However, the narrator is ALREADY pregnant. She is refusing her father’s advice to abort.
@ denise. okay i get it now. thanks;)