Call Her Daddy is one of the most popular podcasts in the world, ranking particularly high with women listeners. But before it was the sole domain of Alex Cooper, it was a shared effort, with co-founder Sofia Franklyn, who left the show after two years, in 2020, over a personal fallout.

Now, just a day after Cooper announced the birth of her baby, Franklyn has published a chapter of her forthcoming memoir, Daddy Issues, in Vanity Fair, and it’s all about her 2023 abortion.

“There’s no right way to talk about this. I share a lot in this book, but this is hard for me to say even now,” she writes in an intro to the piece for VF. “Having an abortion isn’t like having a public scandal, nor is writing about it. I can usually reconcile the dark corners of my past, but my feelings around my abortion are, in many ways, still pending, and, frankly, it still feels very wrong to share publicly. But I hope putting myself out there will free me from the self-imposed exile and shame.”


When you have an abortion, she continues, “the take-home packet gives you explicit instructions on what to do if you bleed through two pads per hour. But nowhere does it include guidance on the emotional clusterfuck that’s to come.”

She took the pills at home, and weeks later says she “couldn’t recognize” herself in the mirror, physically or mentally. “I felt crazy. I later learned that there is a physiological, hormonal, neurological chain reaction that occurs. No one prepares you for that part,” she writes. “At the time, all I had were Reddit threads and an off-handed comment my friend made to check my hormones months after. Getting some answers, no matter how disparate, made it less scary.”

She wrote this chapter, she explains, “because I want women to feel less insane. Less alone. I want women to know that other women are having abortions. They are just not talking about it. We aren’t supposed to.”

The chapter opens with her, at 30, explaining that she’s feeling dejected after leaving Call Her Daddy and starting her own, not-as-successful podcast, Sofia with an F. She worries that anything she says will sound “dumb and empty.”

After she complains of feeling bloated and her boyfriend Aidan suggests she could be pregnant — something she rejects because of having taken “the Chinatown version of Plan B” — a home test confirms it.

“I spend the next three hours scrambling to prove the test wrong,” she writes, “comparing the color of the lines to the pictures on the box, comparing the box to the pamphlet, and googling false positives, which turns out are much rarer than false negatives.”

She makes a beeline for Planned Parenthood, waiting an hour until a nurse takes her blood and confirms the pregnancy.

She asks for an abortion, unsure of “what comes next,” and the nurse says they will discuss the options and schedule the procedure for the next week. But Franklyn wants it ASAP, as she was leaving for in just a couple of days for her “incredible, nonrefundable, family-only trip to the Amalfi Coast for my birthday.” The office squeezed her in the next day.

“I look six months pregnant by the time we get to Positano, which Reddit tells me is ‘post-procedure belly,’ even though I was only pregnant for about five weeks,” she writes, adding that her brother commented that she looked pregnant “out of the blue.”

She feels guilty when she tells her mom — who was 21 when she got pregnant with Franklyn — for being her age and “getting rid of it within 48 hours,” and for wanting to protect her life of partying, “numbing,” and “running.” She wonders,

“How can I bring new life into the world when I don’t live a life worth keeping myself?”

Shortly after the trip, Franklyn learns that Cooper is launching her new media company, Unwell — a phrase Franklyn says she made a staple. When her manager suggests an indirect response, she posts photos of herself from the Italy trip with the caption, “I’m well.”



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