Jennifer Lawrence has strongly defended Planned Parenthood, the reproductive health organisation that has come under sustained attack from anti-abortion campaigners.

In an interview with Glamour magazine, the Oscar-winning actor, 25, referred to the shooting at a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood clinic last November that resulted in three deaths as “so awful” and said: “It isn’t an attack on abortions; it’s an attack on women.”

She went on to stress how the organisation’s services were vital for her as a teenager with a strict home environment. “My mom was really religious with me when I was young … I wouldn’t have been able to get birth control if it weren’t for Planned P. I wouldn’t have been able to get condoms and birth control and all these things I needed as a normal teenager who was growing up in a Jesus house.”

In the same interview, Lawrence also expanded on previous comments she made about the gender pay gap issue in Hollywood, with an essay in Lena Dunham’s Lenny Letter newsletter.

She told of her trepidation in getting so involved in the hot-potato issue: “It’s not smart, businesswise, to be opinionated. But then what’s the point in having a voice at all if I’m not going to use it for what I truly believe in?”

However, she joked about voicing an opinion as a woman. “As women we don’t know we’re at a deficit because we have vaginas. It wasn’t until they had a headline like, ‘Even though she’s a woman!’ And I was like, ‘Oh. I didn’t know to be looking out for that.’ [Baby voice] ‘How did this wittle vagina manage that? I carried a whooole movie.’ [Laughs.] ‘How did I do it, getting a period once a month?’”

Lawrence also suggested that the success of the Hunger Games series had altered old-fashioned Hollywood thinking. “I think there was this studio mentality for a long time that women and girls can relate to a male hero, but boys and men can’t relate to a female hero. But that’s simply not true. And so we’ve fortunately proved that.”