The View’s Joy Behar has revealed she didn’t have sex before she married her first husband because she feared getting pregnant when abortion was still illegal – but it didn’t stop the young lovers ‘making out like crazy’.
Joy, 81, said she was a ‘technical virgin’ when she wed Joseph Behar, aged 23, in 1965 – eight years before the landmark Roe v. Wade decision in January 1973, which saw the U.S. Supreme Court rule in favor of a protected right to have an abortion.
It was later overruled in 2022, leaving one in three women living in states where abortion is not accessible.
Asked if she thought she would ‘see this on the ballot again’ in her lifetime, Joy told the View’s Behind the Table podcast: ‘Well one of the reasons I was a technical virgin when I got married was there was no Roe v. Wade in the sixties, you had to wait for the seventies for that.
The View ‘s Joy Behar has revealed she didn’t have sex before she got married to her first husband in 1965 for fear that she might fall pregnant
Joy was just 23 years old when she married college professor Joe Behar in 1965
The comedian married her second husband Steve Janowitz in 2011 after being together for 29 years
‘Not that it would have made that much of a difference coz I was a very good little Catholic girl!’
She continued: ‘Even though I had a boyfriend, and we were making out like crazy, but we never went to third base really until we got married.’
‘I was very young,’ Joy said of her time with Joseph, whom she was married to until 1981. The couple had one child together, a daughter named Eve.
‘Kids have sex now at 17, to me that was very young,’ Joy continued, as Brian replied: ‘Ahhhhh I think 17… that’s giving them a lot of credit, I think it’s younger than that.’
Referring to the overruling of Roe V. Wade, Joy said: ‘It’s ridiculous, we’re going backwards!’
Joy’s discussion comes as abortion right advocates won major victories in Ohio, Kentucky and Virginia this week.
Asked if it makes her feel ‘hopeful’ that red states are voting for abortion rights, she replied: ‘I can’t believe it’s even an issue! It was established, it was said, it was done, leave it alone!
‘And stay out of my uterus! It’s like why do these men have to get involved with women’s bodies? Nobody’s telling you what to do with your genitalia!’
Joy, who married her second husband Steve Janowitz in 2011, previously opened up about how she could have died from an ectopic pregnancy in 1979 had she not been afforded the right to terminate the pregnancy.
The 81-year-old spoke to executive producer Brian Teta about her first marriage during the latest episode of The View podcast
Joy is no stranger to talking about her first marriage and her personal life on The View
‘In 1979, I had an ectopic pregnancy … and I almost died,’ she told The View last August. ‘The doctor the next day said “we almost lost you”.’
Joy continued: ‘The fetus is growing in the fallopian tube, and there is nowhere to go from that. You can’t give birth from your fallopian tube, and the fetus will not grow.
‘It just grows, but not to full term. So it will grow just enough to make the tube burst, which what happens then is that you bleed internally and then you die.
‘They rushed me to the hospital. The doctor the next day said we almost lost you. I was in a situation where I could go to the hospital and they took care of it there.’
An ectopic pregnancy is a serious medical emergency that can be life-threatening and occurs when a fertilized egg implants and grows outside the main cavity of the uterus. It is the leading cause of death in the first trimester of pregnancy.