EXIT LINES

Katharine Hepburn, who will turn 80 on Nov. 9, believes women are better off today than when she was growing up, but she worries that the Supreme Court will turn back the clock, especially on abortion rights. “I was brought up in an era when you were not alive until you were born and got a name,” Hepburn says in an interview granted specifically to discuss the issue in the November McCall’s magazine. “Now you are alive before you are born. But what is going to happen to these babies after they are born? Are the people who oppose abortion going to support these babies and fix it so their lives will be worth living?” Hepburn says she doesn’t regret not having a family. “I never wanted to marry -- because I was ambitious and wanted to be my own person and didn’t want to bumble along with someone else. I had no passion to produce my own family because I knew what a responsibility it was -- and I knew I couldn’t do both.”