Earlier this month, Zara Larsson replied to a fan TikTok video of her performing, which was overlaid with the text: “I didn’t know I was pregnant here, but at least my baby got to hear midnight sun before I aborted it.” In the comments, Zara wrote, “I killed the performance, and then you killed it after the performance purrrrrr.”
Following the tongue-in-cheek comment, the singer posted videos explaining her stance and the subsequent backlash she’s received, “Lately with the abortion joke, which was very funny by the way, I lost a three million dollar deal, and I was like okay, wtf.”
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“If you don’t agree with my thinking that women should have access to abortion or that we could have a joking conversation about it, we are just not meant to be partners,” she continued.
“And I don’t give a f**k about it. You can give me a million DMs, you can send me a million comments about ‘boo, boo, boo, you are a bad person, you wicked witch’. I don’t give a rat’s ass because I am so sure of my stance in that.”
Zara elaborated on her view, saying, “I am so pro-choice. I am as pro-choice as the next person, but abortion is a very serious topic, and I just want to know why that is. Why do you feel like abortion is only okay when it’s a very hard decision, when it’s something that women have to struggle with going through, when it’s emotionally or physically painful? Why is it only morally OK when women have to suffer? Now riddle me that.” Addressing how taboo the topic still is, she argued that “I feel like by joking about stuff like that, which is a ‘serious topic’, it also makes it something that we can just talk about. It doesn’t have to be taboo. It doesn’t have to be this bad thing that women do.”
The backlash Zara has faced is typical of this topic and is demonstrative of how great a culture shift there still needs to be in society to create a safe environment for people who get abortions. Whilst our reproductive rights are precarious and unequal across the globe, with feminist networks fighting to protect and enshrine them, the stigma and social environment around them also remain similarly precarious. We have a long way to go legally, but also culturally.