Josie is the pregnant, aspirational glamour model, sometime escort worker and single mother-of-two who has publicly announced she wants to have an abortion so she can take part in this year’s Big Brother television series.
‘I’m finally on the verge of becoming famous and I am not going to ruin it now,’ she said this week. ‘Channel 5 were keen to shortlist me. Then they found out I was pregnant. They went cold on me. That was when I started considering an abortion.’
Despite Josie recently posting scan photographs of her unborn child at 18 weeks’ gestation on Facebook, the promise of an entree into the Big Brother house prompted a swift reversal of fortune — for her baby, that is.
Fame at any cost: Josie Cunningham, 23, doesn't want her unborn child to ruin her chances of becoming famous
One minute Josie appeared to be looking forward to motherhood once more, to bringing a new life into the world. The next, nappies and bottles were off the menu.
Cunningham wasted no time in booking herself in for the procedure, which is apparently to be paid for by a ‘professional footballer friend’ who may or may not be the father of the baby.
Pause for a moment to wonder if an abortion under such circumstances would even be legal. As I understand it, there is no provision in the Abortion Act that the continuance of the pregnancy would involve serious risk to a pregnant woman’s chances of launching a perfume range in TK Maxx and appearing on Alan Carr’s chat show.
Scan: Josie has posted pictures of her baby online but vows to abort it as she is 'on the verge' of success
Josie first came to our notice last year after her £4,800 taxpayer-funded breast enlargement
Unsurprisingly, Channel 5 have now distanced themselves from Josie Cunningham, who is facing a backlash of real hatred online and elsewhere.
But she is unrepentant and unashamed. Even for those of us who are pro-choice, her nonchalance is depressing, not to mention her belief that appearing on a scuzzy, discredited television show is more important than having a child.
And for every woman who has agonised over an abortion, for those who have lost a baby or know the quiet agony of longing for a pregnancy that never comes, her casual callousness must strike at the heart like a thunderclap.
‘An abortion will further my career. This time next year I won’t have a baby. Instead, I’ll be famous, driving a bright pink Range Rover [Katie Price has one] and buying a big house. Nothing will get in my way,’ she says.
The mother of a six-year-old and a three-year-old, by an unnamed previous boyfriend, she has also had five miscarriages. Having a termination, she claims, is another way of ‘beating the bullies’. She even dodges any personal responsibilities by blaming Twitter trolls for forcing her to make this decision — not her own warped values.
It is shameful that no adult has taken Josie aside to dissuade her. Not everyone can be conventionally pretty or beautiful or famous. To foster such delusion in others is a crime.
Please. Spare me from the self-aggrandising protestations of this perma-victim. I used to feel rather sorry for Josie, when she first hit the news boasting she’d had a breast enhancement on the NHS just over a year ago, believing she might genuinely have endured difficulties and emotional problems.
Now I realise she’s just another fully-paid-up member of the fame-hungry idiocracy; another silly, silly young woman who has been encouraged to believe in her own specialness and suffering — with catastrophic results.
Of course, Josie has been in the news before. Plenty of times. Her desperation to be a celebrity has driven her on and on since she was a teenager.
Possessed of no discernible talent, no spark of charm or wit, she has turned herself into a battering ram of misplaced determination. If Fame was a town, she would be thundering down the A-road towards it right now, applying her white lipstick in the rear-view mirror, at the wheel of a clapped out ten-ton tank.
Josie first came to our notice last year, incurring widespread wrath when she revealed she’d had a £4,800 taxpayer-funded breast enlargement — part of her initial bid to become a glamour model.
She had managed to persuade some sap doctors that she had been bullied at school for being flat-chested. After posing topless to show off her new 36DD breasts, she announced her new chest was ruining her life and that she was going to sue the NHS for clinical negligence and emotional distress.
In the meantime, being unable to make enough money as a model, she turned to prostitution.
The deluded aspiring glamour model, pictured at
16, comes from a good family with an education. But somewhere along the
way she has been encouraged to think that she should be rich and famous
at any cost
We can be thankful she isn't trying to have the abortion on reality TV, as we descend into this celebrity nadir
In that brief moment of time when I felt sorry for Josie, it was her poor, sad boob job that got to me the most.
Determined to ape the shape of her heroine Katie Price, she ended up with a vast shelf of breast; an artificially enhanced prow of flesh that is neither comely nor womanly nor sexy.
Given a bicycle pump, an anaesthetic and a pair of pink party balloons, I think I could have done a better job myself. I certainly could have given her better advice.
Josie comes from a respectable family and has eight GCSEs — yet at no point along this tortured journey to the abortion clinic and a dead-end telly show has she shown one scrap of sense.
Neither has any adult taken her aside and tactfully suggested she might focus on studying instead of plotting to be a pin-up.
Not everyone can be conventionally pretty or beautiful or famous — and to foster such delusion in others is surely a worse crime than being deluded oneself.
Now all that awaits Josie is the opportunity to be shouted at on The Jeremy Kyle Show and become famous as the girl who didn’t even make it on to Big Brother.
Perhaps she should count her blessings. Reality television used to be clever and interesting, but today it has deteriorated into nothing more than a bear pit of vulgar grotesques displaying endless and incalculable stupidity.
Perhaps someone like Josie Cunningham had to happen, as we appear to have drilled to the earth’s very core to reach this celebrity nadir
The vast majority of the fame-hungry wannabes who break its surface every year quickly slide back down into the sump of obscurity.
Josie Cunningham might not even get the chance to make it that far.
However, I see her, ultimately, as someone who is silly and deluded, not someone who is a villainess. In the darker corners of modern society, sad and delusional people like her are encouraged to push themselves forward.
Despite the fact that she is not the sort of woman you would trust with a three-piece jigsaw, somewhere, somehow she has been encouraged to think that she could be rich and famous.
Like millions of others, she has to be protected from this notion, but, most of all, she has to be protected from herself.
Perhaps someone like Josie Cunningham had to happen, now that we appear to have drilled down to the earth’s very core to reach this celebrity nadir.
She wants to have an abortion to get on reality television. Perhaps we should be grateful she is not having one on reality television.
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