Editor’s Note: Sean W. Cooper is a sophomore at UNCW majoring in Communication Studies. He is the Assistant Opinion Editor for The Seahawk. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author. Assistant Opinion Editor Sean W. Cooper can be found on Twitter @SWWCoop. All suggestions and inquires may be sent via email to [email protected]. 

Some celebrities like to keep their lives private for fear of what the public may think of them. Others don’t care what anybody thinks of them.  Then there are some people who say things so outlandish that it’s as if they are trying to make the public think badly of them.

Actress Martha Plimpton evidently falls into the latter category. This past Tuesday, a video of her began circulating online from a Planned Parenthood event in Los Angeles this June. Speaking to a majority Latino audience, Plimpton described her first abortion, in Seattle at the age of 19, as her “best one.”

The actress also added that it was “heads and tails above the rest,” according to the New York Daily News, and that “if I could Yelp review it, I totally would.”

Now I’m not about to write a pro-life response to this statement. I don’t consider myself pro-life or pro-choice. I think abortions are morally wrong, but much like other issues like marriage and drug use, it is not the government’s place to regulate them.

However, it doesn’t matter whether you find it moral or immoral or whether you believe life begins at conception, after the first trimester or at birth. We can all agree that abortion is a serious topic that nobody should be joking about.

In realizing this, we must also understand the complexity of an abortion. It’s not as simple as go in, go out, take some medications and you’re free. No one wants to have an abortion. They are painful and scary, physically and emotionally (and, for what it’s worth, financially).

It’s a very personal decision and therefore it should be kept personal. Now, granted, it’s not highly unusual to announce at a Planned Parenthood rally that you have had an abortion in the past, particularly at this event, which was promoted with the hashtag #ShoutYourAbortion. You’re not at the dinner table; you can use it to your advantage, whether to make you seem more credible or to give your audience confidence that there is no shame in having one.

However, to go as far as Plimpton did is sick and twisted.

I bet you’ve spent this entire article wondering who Plimpton is. I’m a big movie buff and I didn’t know who she was until now. Evidently, she played Stef in the classic movie The Goonies, but she has struggled to remain even remotely relevant since then.

What I’m getting at is that there is a definite reason Plimpton said what she said: name recognition. When celebrities become desperate, they regress to the maturity level of middle schoolers and do whatever they have to do to garner attention. Plimpton is the most recent example of this. We also saw Kathy Griffin do it back in May.

However, attention is no reason to do something so revolting. If I had less faith in humanity, I would say there is a special place in Hell for people like Plimpton who think they can say whatever they want and not fear the consequences—but I know that humans are innately good people and they turn around. I hope that if Plimpton aims to appear in the national news again, she does so by apologizing for her remarks and not by spewing more trash for another audience to clean up.