- Deborah Norville spoke about her own miscarriage amid the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.
- The 63-year-old former Inside Edition anchor said she fears for pregnant women who may not be able to receive necessary medical care if they experience a miscarriage.
- She said she “loved” doing the Today show in the 1990s, but wished her career “didn’t end the way I would’ve wished it to”.
Deborah Norville spoke about suffering a miscarriage years ago amid the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade on Friday.
The Inside Edition anchor, 63, spoke with PEOPLE on the red carpet of the 49th annual Daytime Emmy Awards on Friday night on the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. Norville explained how she now concerns about pregnant women who would have challenges should they experience a miscarriage as well, given limitations that could be implemented in some jurisdictions as a result of the landmark decision.
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“Well, the reality is at this moment, depending on where you are in America, if you have a miscarriage, you may not be able to receive the medical treatment you need to avoid death,” she said. “I lost a child, [but] I live in New York and I was able to go to the hospital and do what needed to be done.”
“On a personal level, I realized I could have died 24 years ago when I needed to have that medical procedure. I didn’t choose to have it. I didn’t choose to have my child die in utero, but that’s what happened. And many women have miscarriages in this country,” Norville continued. “And unfortunately, when you have the miscarriage, you generally have to have the D&C, [the Dilation and Curettage surgical procedure], and the [Supreme Court ruling] would not make that possible for a lot of people.”
Noting that her miscarriage is something that she has “never talked about,” the television journalist said, “It just hit me today when [the Roe v. Wade decision] happened,” adding, “I happily was able to become pregnant later. And I’d never really thought that was something that anybody would ever not be able to avail themselves of.”
The 1973 Supreme Court precedent Roe v. Wade, which gave women nationwide access to abortions, was overruled by the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday.
By granting individual states the authority to determine whether to permit the operation, the 6-to-3 decision overturns nearly 50 years of legal tradition and dramatically alters the landscape of women’s reproductive rights. In the upcoming months, it is predicted that close to half of the nation would enact near-total restrictions.
In her subsequent remarks, Norville—a mother of three grown children—discussed her work as a journalist and how she manages to write news accurately without expressing her own views on the subjects she covers.
“We are just the facts,” she said. “We come at it with the idea that everything we say, you have to be able to prove.”
“I think that’s generally a good way to go through life. It’s an excellent way to go through producing a television program if you want to stay on the air,” continued Norville
“And when my career ended then, nobody thought I’d be back. So the fact that I’m back that you’re talking to me and you want to talk to me is I consider that maybe my greatest achievement,” she continued.
Norville also said that she “loved the show because I love the variety. I didn’t mind the hours.”
“I love the fact that my very first interview I ever did on the Today show was with the Soviet nuclear arms control negotiator, and it was a live hookup from Geneva, and I thought, ‘Oh my God, if I mess this up, I actually could start a war. This is serious stuff,’ ” she added. “And then the next minute, you’d be interviewing somebody who’d written a cookbook.”
Deborah Norville also recalled a moment “three days in” her position when she told executive producer Steve Friedman on the morning television program, “‘I can’t do this anymore. You have to have somebody to do the rest of the week.’
“Nobody ever says, I don’t want to do the Today show,” she continued, before noting that Friedman had asked her: “Have you gone mad? What’s wrong with you?”
“I said, ‘Steve, I’m exhausted. I’m staying up all night long, reading everything about all these interviews I have to do,’ ” she continued. “I said, ‘You send a limousine with a packet of information to my house at nine o’clock. I figure if it’s important enough to get a chauffeured limousine, it’s important enough for me to read.’ ”
Read more: Kim Kardashian considers Supreme Court’s abortion decision as “scary and heartbreaking”
But Friedman instructed her to choose one of the available topics “that you’re not really comfortable with, that you don’t have a good feel for” and “study that one,” according to Norville.
Deborah Norville described the letter from Friedman as a “game-changer” and said she would do her stint on Today again in a heartbeat.
