No One Asked You, directed by Ruth Leitman, is a fantastic new documentary now playing the festival circuit. It follows comedian Lizz Winstead and her band of activist-comedians in their adventures speaking out for abortion access. Winstead, who co-created Comedy Central’s The Daily Show and Air America Radio, takes center stage, telling her story of how she went from stand-up to standing up for her beliefs.
In the documentary, Winstead says “I felt like I was a political fluffer”—getting people outraged with her comedy but not being able to get people to do anything about it. That’s why she started Abortion Access Front, a group of comedians, writers, and researchers that use humor to get people informed and involved with helping their local clinics. Lizz takes her crew on a cross country bus ride playing shows, raising money for independent clinics, and even doing landscaping work for abortion providers.
No One Asked You is a call to action for audiences that think they already know how imperiled abortion access is in the United States, but actually only know the half of it. Winstead spoke with The Progressive about the film, her career as an activist and comedian, and the state of reproductive rights.
Q: You really started this whole political comedy show genre that has exploded with Last Week Tonight, The Problem with John Stewart, and so many others.
Lizz Winstead: It’s pretty wild to watch the evolution because when we launched [The Daily Show], it was literally said to me numerous times by network executives, “You can talk about politics, but you have to be funny. You’re not an activist.” And I’m like, “But I am an activist.” But they were constantly trying to push the show in a direction that was more like a snarky Entertainment Tonight. We pushed back hard. And had it just become another sort of snark fest shitting on celebrities, people would never have learned in a way that they [know] now how powerful comedy is as a tool for engagement.
I mean, people knew from [George] Carlin and [Richard] Pryor and Lenny Bruce, and certain [other] people, that it was, but not as relentlessly as we did it at The Daily Show.
Q: One thing that the film showcases is people with weird hobbies—like hanging out in front of clinics and screaming at people trying to get healthcare. What does that look like?
Winstead: Dear God, do they have hobbies? I think when your hobby is doing this thing of unsolicited screaming “whore” at people outside of clinics when they walk in to get abortions, and calling it counseling, and thinking it’s changed anyone’s mind.
Courtesy of Lizz Winstead
My favorite ones are the ones that scream “whore, whore, whore,” and then they’ll have their kids with them and then they’ll have signs that say, “We’ll adopt your babies.” So I’m like, okay, if I get this right here, [this] is you screaming “whore” with your children at people, saying I’d love to take your baby so that in three years I can bring your baby back here and teach her to scream “whore” at people getting abortions?
No, sir. No, I don’t think so. Hard pass.
Q: It is fascinating to watch people with kids waving these vile signs at people trying to get healthcare and then also screaming about drag queens being “groomers.”
Winstead: The thing that we have observed so profoundly—and especially because, we’ve been doing this now for almost eight years (the film has followed us for seven)—and watching some of these children who are now fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, young boys who have been empowered by this patriarchal Christian set of rules, and really, I’m going to say groomed to harm women, to really shame women and to threaten women with permission. That is really profound.
We have seen an escalation of violence from them. We were in Greenville, South Carolina, earlier this year in February trying to defend a clinic, and they were setting up ladders to look over the fence to scream at patients with a megaphone. We decided that we would counter their narrative by taking up that space so they couldn’t set up their ladders and they were grabbing, elbowing, shoving the ladders into our people in a way that was a taught entitlement. That felt really scary.
Q: How do you bring comedy to that sort of scene with Abortion Action Front?
Winstead: Bringing comedy is sometimes exposing that entitled bullshit. Wherever [anti-abortion protestors] go, they’ve got those massive fetus porn signs. And for years, everybody would show up with their little eighteen by twenty-four signs that they’d hold up. But you couldn’t combat [the fetus posters] with “I’m pro-choice and I vote.”
For a long time we were told 'Ignore them and they’ll go away.' And by ignoring them, they didn’t go away. They actually got elected in state legislatures and on school boards.
So we decided to make our signs as big as theirs. And what we do is tell the story of who [the far right groups] are with QR codes so that when people drive by, they can see a video of what they preach in their churches, of them at January 6 [riots], of them preaching that women are shitty.
For a long time we were told “Ignore them and they’ll go away.” And by ignoring them, they didn’t go away. They actually got elected in state legislatures and on school boards. And they’ve been empowered and started churches. And they got Roe v. Wade overturned because of all this ignoring.
There’s a big difference between showcasing or amplifying and exposing. And so people are like, “You’re amplifying them.” I’m like, “No, I’m letting you know who they are.” How do you fight a battle if you don’t know what the enemy is doing, bringing, planning and strategizing? You don’t.
Q: Abortion Access Front isn’t just making funny videos on the Internet, you go to the clinics and actually do things.
Winstead: That’s the biggest misconception about us is that we’re, like, jokers and flame throwers. [But] we also spend a lot of time out on the road—not in Portland, Oregon, but in Little Rock, Arkansas; Huntsville, Alabama; and Oklahoma City. And every godforsaken place that, pre-Roe, there maybe was one clinic left trying to survive.
We did this massive tour where we would do a comedy music show and we would incorporate the local activists and the abortion providers in that town so that it was almost like a talk show, with music and comedy and conversation. People who came to the show could learn about what’s going on there locally, what’s going on in their state, and then they could sign up right in the room [to support] the clinics in those communities.
Zach Roberts
For a lot of folks, it was the first time they’d ever even seen an abortion provider. And for a lot of abortion providers on that stage, it was the first time they’d ever heard an audience cheer for them or tell them that they appreciated what they do. If you provide abortion care, a lot of times you can’t get people to mow your lawn or paint your exam rooms or fix your fences because you provide abortions.
And sometimes, if people decide to actually provide the service, anti-abortion people will follow them home, picket their work, and go to their church and scream at them. We tell people in the audience that these folks need a landscape person, and we’ll connect them.
That is the most rewarding thing, to be able to connect the community with these places so that we can create lasting relationships because I don’t want to be anybody’s white savior. We called all of these communities and said, hey, we know you’re doing good work. How can we help bring more people to learn about you?
Sometimes doing a comedy music show can bring more people than trying to pass out fliers and get people to come to the basement of a Unitarian church or something.
Q: No One Asked You follows you going exclusively to independent clinics.
Winstead: Planned Parenthood is synonymous with all the care, and [in reality] independent clinics provide over 60 percent of all abortion care in the country. And I’m talking about clinics that are just a mom and pop clinic, or these really cool holistic feminist centers that opened up when it comes to needed abortions that happen later in pregnancy. It’s independent providers that do almost 90 percent of those. Those are the first clinics to go because they aren’t Planned Parenthood that has all this funding and brand recognition. And so for them to get support is gigantic because they are providing the lion’s share of the later abortion care.
Q: It’s controversial to say the word abortion, people will say anything but that word.
Winstead: It’s important because if we don’t say it, we can’t defend it. For me, it’s been talked about as this dirty secret.
There was a five year study done that followed people who had abortions, thousands of people. This is a very comprehensive study called the Turnaway study.
We need people who will not only beat back laws, but have proactive legislation to expand access.
And what they found was even people who felt all of those emotions, the number one thing they felt was relief. The number two thing they said was that they knew it was the right choice for them to make. With the reframing of it for years, we elected politicians who would beat back anti-abortion laws.
But now we need people who will not only beat back laws, but have proactive legislation to expand access. One of the most exciting things that we’re seeing with these ballot initiatives [is that] it’s regular citizens who are leading the charge and saying, “I’m ready to tell my story, it is nobody’s business. My life is better because of my access to reproductive care.”
Q: The mainstream talking point was always “They’ll never overturn Roe, it’s too useful as a scare tactic” which is why Democrats never really pushed for any other protections. The film starts with a quote from you saying “Our movement has watched abortion erode since 1973.” Do you think that people understand now how bad it is?
Winstead: I don’t. And that’s part of where we’re at. The right knows everything that’s going on. They say abortion four times more than our side. Our side can have hubris about things. They talk about abortion in the horse race. They talk about abortion in political terms, how it will affect parties.
They never talk to human beings. They never talk to people that provide it. They never talk to people who have them. And we don’t talk about abortion.
People sort of started finally understanding that state legislatures are the ones that are really making abortion policy. We don’t have Roe because some fuckwit in Mississippi decided that they wanted to have a fifteen week ban that turned into a whole upending and took it through the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which is the most conservative one in the nation. Why do so many abortion laws go through Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas? It’s because it goes through that circuit. It’s a pipeline to the Supreme Court, right? So now people are learning that more. But part of the bummer in all of it is that the media only reports when it’s sexy and tragic.
Courtesy of Lizz Winstead
They don’t even know how to talk about it. So they’re using the language handed to them by the right. And people like me who have a lot of historical knowledge on a lot of different stuff could be really helpful. But they don’t ask us things.
Q: Is there a reason for hope?
Winstead: Yes. There is a reason for hope. And why I say that is we ourselves have watched Kansas, Kentucky, Ohio, all these people passing citizen initiatives on their own. We have seen time and time again that now people won’t be fooled. Thirty years ago people would say, “Don’t tell your abortion story. You’ll never get work again. Don’t be political. You’ll never get work again.” Guess what? I’m here every single day. I’m on TV, I’m on shows.
My hope is that people are really understanding and seeing that you get the government you fight for. You can’t just sit back anymore. And one of the things I’m most proud of in Abortion Access Front, is, as we’ve watched time and time again, people [are] just marching and then feeling like “I want to march and do something else.”
We decided to create an entire program called Operation Save Abortion that has so many ways that we can connect people with their local people and meet them where they are. We don’t expect everyone to be us, but you can identify what your skill set is, how much time you have, what your capacities are. We can hook you up to make real change at the place that you are at and we’ll meet you there. And that feels really exciting to me.