If You're Not Saving Abortion All Day Long Tomorrow, What Are You Even Doing?
Wonkette's most badass abortion activist pals are teaming up with all the celebs to save abortion, and they need YOUR HELP.
Here's an issue that might be a bit under your radar during the pandemic, though it's been breaking through the news here and there: abortion! We've seen GOP governors classify it is a non-essential medical procedure and thereby effectively ban it, so that's been totally on-brand. In case you have forgotten the Before Times, abortion rights and access were already severely under attack in Trump's America before COVID-19 crashed onto our shores. Now, as you can imagine, things are even more shaky.
So.
A few of our favorite badass abortion rights organizations have teamed up to do an ALL-DAY ABORTION-A-THON-A-PALOOZA tomorrow, April 30, studded with all the stars! They're hosting the virtual party at the Instagram for the Abortion Access Front (AAF), which was founded and is lovingly led by Wonk pal Lizz Winstead. The event, called Operation Save Abortion, is being thrown jointly by AAF, Shout Your Abortion, and the Abortion Care Network, and hosted by Winstead and Shout Your Abortion co-founder Amelia Bonow. According to the press release, it as an "urgent fundraiser to help Independent Abortion Providers keep their doors open," during coronavirus and beyond.
Winstead explained why this is so important right now in an exclusive email to yr Wonkette:
"LEAVE IT TO THE KNUCKLE-DRAGGING politicians, mad they have to socially distance from their Big Gulp refills, to use a pandemic to push their anti-abortion agenda. If it wasn't so scary it would be laughable, but the truth is, peoples' lives are in the balance here, and removing access to healthcare in a pandemic for your own political agenda is about as shitty as it gets."
Look, a veritable studding of stars, including Elizabeth Banks and Margaret Cho and Busy Philipps and Amanda Palmer, and also many more!
Additionally there will be Sandra Bernhard and Greg Proops and Jenny Slate and Nikki Glaser and Donna Lynne Champlin and Lea DeLaria and W. Kamau Bell and DJ Samantha Ronson and Alysia Reiner, and oh, like 100 other wonderful people you know and love.
Point of personal privilege: They got Kristin Hersh , one of our very favorite musical artists who ever walked planet Earth. You might remember her from her work in Throwing Muses with her stepsister Tanya Donnelly, who also led Belly, and you really ought to be familiar with Hersh's very long solo career if you aren't. Like we said, she is one of our favorites.
Anyway, abortions and the people who love them! Did you know three out of five patients who need abortions get them at independent clinics? Or that according to AAF, your average everyday mom-and-pop roadside abortion clinic needs $50K a month to just survive this pandemic? Indeed, fully 92 percent of independent clinics that are members of the Abortion Care Network say they need financial help right now. And that's not even counting the onslaught they're facing from GOP ASSHOLES .
Meanwhile, it's getting harder for patients too. As KeepOurClinics.org notes, it's not just the governors' executive orders, but also patients having to travel even farther for abortion care, the wait times getting longer, the hotels closed ... just, it's a lot of shit, OK?
The clinics and the patients need your support right now. A lot of people need your support right now, and these are some of them .
You might be wondering what Lizz Winstead and Amelia Bonow are going to do all day with their celebrity pals to raise money. Probably just a buncha ZOOM CHATS, right? You think that's it? No, that's not it! They appear to have planned things ! Things you don't even know about yet!
From the press release:
From their homes, celebrities such as Elizabeth Banks and Sandra Bernhard, comedians Nikki Glaser and Jenny Slate, and musicians Amanda Palmer (Dresden Dolls) and Kristin Hersh will be coming together to rally their fans and followers to help independent abortion providers keep their doors open.Through performance, storytelling, interviews and auctioning off handmade crafts and experiences,these passionate artists will be raising urgent funds to help keep these incredible clinics running so patients can continue to receive the care they need during the pandemic, and beyond.100% of the proceeds go directly into a clinic relief fund that will distribute the cash to these vulnerable clinics.
That's right, there will be performances and there will be crafts and there will be auctions and ... maybe juggling? Fuck it, let's just say there's gonna be a METRIC SHIT LOAD OF JUGGLING.
Allegedly!
Again, the event will be on AAF's Instagram ( @AbortionFront ), and it will happen tomorrow, April 30, from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m., and that is in the "Eastern" kind of time, which is different from the other times. (If you are in "Mountain," check your local listings, just kidding, the "Mountain" time zone is a myth.)
So, like, besides reading Wonkette obviously, what are you doing tomorrow? This, you are doing this. You know, unless you have some big party to attend, haha you do not.
Here is one of our favorite Kristin Hersh songs, out of many:
Kristin Hersh - In Shock (Official Video) www.youtube.com
Kristin Hersh absolutely shreds .
All right, now you have your marching orders and a fun thing to do (and a good way to help!) tomorrow, so you may now have your afternoon OPEN THREAD.
[ Abortion Access Front Instagram ]
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It has its twists and turns
"Maybe if the accused was someone who didn’t have a habit of making women feel uncomfortable with inappropriate touching?"
This is a bad standard, because it clears every man who can maintain a respectable facade, which is probably most of them.
"She could be lying. I really don’t know."
We do know, though. She has contradicted herself in very fundamental ways on her account. If any one of those accounts is true, the others are false.
"I just see us doing to her what conservatives do to pretty much EVERY woman who comes forward with claims of assault. And I hate it."
Well, it's worth taking some time to think about what standards you believe make sense in weighing allegations like this. Bear in mind that we can expect a torrent of false allegations against Biden simply because that's how the GOP and Putin operate, so either we need to come up with some rules of thumb or else we are volunteering to be tools of the GOP and Putin.
For me, here are some rules to start with; feel free to agree or disagree, but most importantly, think about what rules make sense to you:
1) Ignore who the man is. Base none of this on your opinion of the alleged assaulter.
2) Does the woman's story sound like it could have happened?
3) Does the woman contradict herself in fundamental ways? I don't mean in term of "gotchas" like "why did she say it was a strawberry pie one day and a rhubarb pie the next day", I mean is she highly consistent about the assault itself. From what I hear, survivors of sexual assault don't have the luxury of believing different things happened different days; there is only the horrible and unwanted reality of what happened to them.
4) Are there any plausible explanations for why the woman might be lying? This generally isn't a show-stopper of a criterion, but it's one we need to take into account, especially when we're talking about the Democratic presidential candidate. Where Tara Reade is concerned, we really ought to ask why now and not, say, in 2008 when Biden was first being vetted. There might be a reasonable explanation, but thus far I have not heard it.
5) A subtle one: do you get a sense in the woman's account that she's trying to protect other women? A victim of sexual assault is going to be motivated, at least in part, by trying to protect other women. Look for signs. Christine Blasey-Ford stepped up not because it would be fun but because she was worried about putting a monster on the Supreme Court. That matters.
6) If there is corroborating testimony, does it seem to have come up just recently and seemingly out of the void?
Those are my spitball rules for how to process a single woman's allegations. Multiple women will serve to reinforce one another, and even if n-1 of them prove to be frauds, we still need to take the last one seriously.
You said that we're doing what conservatives are doing. What conservatives do is look for excuses to either believe the woman (if she's accusing a Democrat) or discredit women (if she's accusing a Republican). There are some people here who are doing the same thing -- like they did with Al Franken -- but then there are those of us who hear Tara Reade's story, find the differing versions contradictory and implausible, and that's why we don't believe her. Plus the timing is awfully suspicious.