So, it’s time for me to introduce me. My name is Liz Winstead. I have been your host for this fantastic event. I’m a comedian and a producer, a writer and an activist. My background is political satire. And if you don’t know what you might not, I was the co-creator of The Daily Show and I launched EroMirrorCore Radio. And I’ve kind of spent my career using humor to sort of speak truth to power. The problem was as I got into spaces that proclaimed they wanted to really do some change work, network TV. OK. They kept reminding me that they were entertainment first and they weren’t activists. And so what would happen a lot of times is you’d write a story or a piece that was getting people riled up without any call to action. And so I was increasingly becoming this professional anger fluffer, which I didn’t want to be because I was also an activist. And when they would squelch stories, a lot of times it would be because the people who were in charge were almost always cis male white dudes. And the politics they wanted to hear about were the politics they wanted to hear about. As somebody who deeply cares about abortion rights, it was often sideline, a wedge issue. Does anybody really care? And I was like, a lot of people really care because half of our population suffers from oppression of laws. So in 2020, I decided to switch everything up and decided that if I wanted to combine my activism and my comedy, I was going to have to forge a path. And I didn’t want to forge a path replicating work. I wanted to make sure the work that I was doing was centering the people who were suffering the most from all the lost around abortion. And so I was writing a book and I finished the book. And I was driving from Minnesota where I live half the time back to Brooklyn where I live the other half of the time with two dogs and a van. And I decided to do fundraisers for clinics on my own. And through the course of visiting the clinics, I met the local activists on the ground and I met the clinics and I was able to ask them what they need. But before I could even get to that question, everyone said the same thing to me. They said, how come you’re here? Like, no one ever comes. And there was this heart-sinking feeling that the people who are providing this care and these incredible small activist grassroots groups on the ground were being ignored and their work and the money they could be raising was being gobbled up by big national organizations that didn’t even know these folks existed. So I decided to form abortion access front. And what we basically do is we travel around the country and we do big fundraising shows in towns where independent clinics live, local activists are, and we incorporate them into our shows. So we basically have a big bet talk show where then the audience that came for the comedy and sometimes the music can hear exactly what’s happening on the ground, can hear from the folks doing the work, and then we can partner up our audience with those folks. And it works out really great. And the one thing that I really love about doing this work is keeping yourself open to the opportunities that come that you had no idea that would be expected. So we have developed this incredible coalition that we call the Scrappy Coalition of 75, small organizations. And we work together. And if there’s somebody in Toledo, Ohio that’s got a fundraiser and they need amplification or they might need some graphics, somebody from our coalition will help them so that we can really help them complete what they do. We like to be pack mules for everybody else’s work when we can. But to the course of this travel, the people on the ground, the escorts and the activists were very, very intimately familiar with the anti-abortion extremists in their towns. They knew their names. They knew about them. And as we went from town to town, we started collecting the information and the stories about these anti-abortion activists. And some folks who thought they were locals, we realized, no, they were actually hate tourists who were traveling around. So we started forming a database of all of these people. And several of us got started Facebook accounts that were fake online to join their churches, radicalize ourselves in this thing, follow their doings. What we found through just collaborating with all these folks on the ground was that the intersections between the white nationalist organizations that we have seen be dominant were in line, as you can imagine, with the anti-abortion movement. As we started going to their church meetings online, and COVID was kind of great for this, we discovered they were doing calls to arms for Christian citizens to get together and protect themselves, forming militia camps for kids. And as we started seeing this happen, January 6 started coming around. And we saw some of these folks say, we’re going to be gathering in Washington. And around January 4, we identified a lot of folks from the anti-abortion movement were planning to go. When January 6 actually happened, and these folks were there, and their videos were up, and they were proclaiming that they were going to stop the steal, and they were in the Capitol, we had so much information in place, and so much data in place, that we identified 30 of these people and reported them to the FBI. And it really got us thinking, like, A, we need to be talking more with folks who are doing, trying to talk about white supremacy, and working in a real way, because all of these things are connected. But the one thing we also really realized that within our movement is as these people show up, and everyone thinks of these people as showing up by clinics, which they do. But they also show up in public parks and in squares. And one thing we wanted our movement to do, now that we’ve identified these people, is challenge them in the space as they go, where they think they can gather and have their messaging out there with counter-messaging. Because so often in the movement, you’ll just see swaths and swaths and swaths of anti-abortion signage and people, and you never see a narrative that’s countering them, right them in there. So we decided that part of our movement was, and for lack of a better way of putting it, it’s part of what we wanted to do at abortion access. But it’s really embrace that sort of active quality and that counter-protest quality, so that they don’t get to have the last word. So in New York City, for example, every month, there was a church, so this down the street from the Planned Parenthood, that has a special service for the unborn, and what they do is have their service, and then they try to march down to Planned Parenthood to then harass the clinics. What we do is show up at their service and have a dance party that slows their role. So a six minute walk becomes a 45 minute walk, and by the time they get to the clinic, all of the patients have gone in. We really, really believe that just doing the work of helping folks know what the clinics need, what the activists need in their community is huge, but also the narrative around abortion is something that has been critically harmful from the anti-abortion movement, and also from folks who haven’t really done a deep dive into what it means to talk about abortion. I think so often when we talk about it, we place tragedy narratives on abortion like we do and have heard about so much. I just wanna say and leave you with this, abortion is a personal decision. The person having their abortion gets to decide what emotion they place on their abortion. We should not be the people that are placing tragedy narratives as blanket narratives for abortion. In fact, I would offer that the tragedy of abortion are the horrifying laws being created that allow for access to be delayed or denied. Because of these laws, like so many of the societal structures that we have talked about this week, they most profoundly affect poor folks and people of color. So just remember, as we are looking at this insane time that we are in around abortion and abortion access, and I know you all have seen it, when we talk about abortion, we need to always be centering it in its moral place. It’s justifiable place as the procedure somebody might need in their reproductive lives because I just wanna reiterate, there are no good abortions, there are no bad abortions. There’s only the abortion that you need. So let’s frame it that way, let’s normalize it together. Thanks, if you wanna learn anything more about our work is AAfront.org. I love being part of this community. Thank you for giving me this time. Thank you.