Brett Cooper on making peace with the father who wanted her aborted

Commentator Brett Cooper was on the Shawn Ryan Show podcast last week, where she discussed finding out as a teen that her father had wanted her mother to abort Brett.

“Your father wanted you aborted? Correct?” Ryan asked.

“Yes,” Cooper admitted, explaining she was 16 when she found out.

Brett Cooper on Finding Out Her Father Wanted to Abort Her

At the time, she was living and working in Los Angeles as a child actor and she didn’t understand the pro-abortion and pro-life position. Cooper asked her mother for clarity, saying that her mother never shied away from hard questions. As they talked about what it means to be pro-life, Cooper’s mother revealed that her mind was made up after her then-husband pressured her to abort Brett.

“What really changed her mind permanently about abortion was when my Dad came to her and was like, ‘I don’t want a child,'” Cooper said. Her mother and father had a difficult marriage, and Cooper’s father believed that he was unable to handle another baby.

The event, Cooper explained, caused her mother to “reanalyze the whole issue from a much more personal perspective.”

Her mother told her father, “If you want this so badly, you go make the appointment,” but, Cooper added, “he couldn’t bring himself to do it.”

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Cooper said that she wasn’t exactly surprised by the news when she found out, because as a child she did not have a great relationship with her dad. Though their relationship is better today, she said she has never asked her father about his feelings at that time.

READ: Fear, not choice, drives women to aborted ‘wanted’ babies

“I have a lot more empathy for him as I’ve gotten older, and I understand him more,” she said, noting that as a child she blamed him for many of the problems that her parents experienced in their marriage. Now, she realizes that he was a “broken man.”

“One of the greatest parts of growing up is seeing your own parents as humans, with their own childhood, their own baggage,” she said. “It’s really helped our relationship.”

She explained that marrying her husband, Alex, has helped her see her father in a new light.

“Bringing somebody into my life who didn’t carry the baggage and the weight of growing up in this environment and didn’t experience the heartbreaks and didn’t experience feeling let down… he was just able to look at my dad as just a human and was able to find him so endearing and funny and kind. Being able to see him through my husband’s lens… that’s made me so much better.”