Time & Perspective Quote by Annette Bening

Bening’s line has the unshowy force of someone refusing to let a culture war stay abstract. She anchors Roe v. Wade not in court opinions or campaign slogans, but in the fluorescent-lit reality of a high school: “girls were getting pregnant,” and some “getting abortions,” including in “my school too.” That last clause does the real work. It’s a small, almost offhand insistence that abortion wasn’t a distant scandal or a coastal rumor; it was part of ordinary adolescence, threaded through lockers, gossip, and fear.

The intent reads as corrective: a reminder that legalization didn’t invent abortion, it changed the conditions under which it happened. Her phrasing folds sex education, access, secrecy, and class into a single breath. “So that was also happening” suggests a wider social churn - second-wave feminism, shifting sexual norms, the uneven arrival of contraception - without turning it into a lecture. The quote’s power is its plainness: she doesn’t claim abortion was empowering or tragic; she implies it was necessary and present, like a fact adults pretended not to see.

The subtext pushes against today’s tendency to treat Roe as a moral referendum rather than an infrastructure decision. Bening is pointing to the pragmatic layer: when teens get pregnant, institutions respond. Legal abortion meant some girls could choose a future without risking dangerous alternatives or lifelong derailment. By placing herself in the timeline, she’s also defending memory as evidence - lived experience as a counterweight to amnesia and mythmaking.