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October 2002
ARTS BRIEFS
Singer admits suicidal grief caused by abortion
Pop star Nicole Appleton, a former member of the girls' band All Saints, admits in her new book Together, to be released later this year, that she aborted the child she conceived with pop star Robbie Williams. Appleton claims her recording company, London Records, pressured her to have the abortion.
"After having my abortion, I was in shock. I couldn't believe what I had done. I wanted to kill myself," writes Appleton. She also told the Daily Mail, "What happened still lingers in my life. I want people to know what I went through." Speaking of her denial and feelings after the abortion, Appleton wrote: "Afterwards everyone pretended it hadn't happened. I was too scared for confrontation. I'm only now starting to get my confidence back. Writing about it made me confront it all ... the purity was gone. I felt like a puppy, like a robot, under someone else's control. That's the most unattractive thing you can be."
Appleton also says Williams was supportive of her revelations, telling her, "I'm so proud of you. You're so brave."
Oops, Oprah does it again
During the Emmy awards broadcast Sept. 22, television talkshow host Oprah Winfrey was awarded the inaugural Bob Hope Humanitarian Award. In her acceptance speech, she said, "We all are just regular people seeking the same thing: the guy on the street, the woman in the classroom, the Israeli, the Afghani, the Zuni, the Apache, the Irish, the Protestant, the Catholic, the gay, the straight, you, me - we all just want to know that we matter. We want validation."
Pro-family and pro-life groups have been concerned with Oprah's promotion of anti-life and anti-family measures. In 2000, she was the keynote speaker at a luncheon held by the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention, a group whose priority this year is to ensure that minors, without parental consent, maintain their access to contraceptives and abortion. Winfrey's cameo appearance on the "coming out" episode of the TV show Ellen in 1997 raised concerns at the time over the promotion of homosexuality.
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