| Regina Mahone: Why was it so important to center our humanity, our need for joy, our need for community and for pleasure in the film?
Lizz Winstead: The majority of abortions people have are simply because it’s not the right time to be pregnant, and they have other things to do in their lives. And the only way abortion was ever depicted was mostly in films, and mostly it wasn’t even an abortion. It was somebody who was pregnant, and it was traumatic, and they fell downstairs, right? But I think what happens is, when you have only the narrative of the wanted pregnancy that people were denied, or that kind of thing, you start creating [a binary that] there’s these good abortions and then there’s these really bad abortions that these sluts are having. And I feel like we had so much ground to cover… [But if you start from the place that] abortion is a moral good, you get to tell the story of your abortion any way you want. And if you don’t actually believe abortion is murdering a baby, then guess what? You can laugh about it, and you can laugh about the assholes that are trying to oppress us. But we have had such a road, and we’re not even really there yet, but we’ve had such a road to get there that I think it’s crucial that we do, so that we aren’t mired in holding onto what society tells us, because that’s just another tool to block us from being our full selves.
Ruth Leitman: I personally needed a lifeline after Trump was elected. You know, I had an abortion too as a teenager, right around the same time that Lizz did—
LW: Different guy… actually, I don’t know that. [Everyone laughing]
RL: We lived to tell the tale, and we lived to be advocates for all the people who can’t—who need to be able to have abortions. I lived with the story that my great grandmother died from complications of a self-induced abortion, leaving her already three children motherless. That was passed on through the women in my family, and I knew that I was really fortunate. But that’s terrible. I shouldn’t have to say I’m fortunate. It should just be a given. And in terms of making this film, it was really a lifeline, because I knew we were going to need humor after Trump was elected. I knew that things were going to get a lot worse in every area, and especially around abortion access. And there was Lizz on television talking about the world ending for all people who were going to need abortion care.
LW: I think I was yelling at people who were like, “I’m going to move.” And I was like, “What kind of privilege bullshit is that?”
RM: How did the film come together? Ruth, did you just call Lizz and say, “Hey, so I want to follow you for six years”? How did that happen?
RL: It was going to be a year, and then a lot of things happened.
LW: Patriarchy, it turns out, does not take a vacation. They just keep going.
RL: I had met Lizz a few years before that [call] at Netroots, and always loved her work. And then it was that sort of epiphany of like, Oh, this is how we’re going to tell this story. Abortion is going to get worse, and we’re going to hitch our wagon to [Abortion Access Front], and we’re going to tell the story. And so I reached out to Lizz and Nicole Moore, who was the communications director at the time, and we convinced them to do it. It was going to be a year. It became, make a film for the people who think that they know everything that’s going on, and make it for the people who don’t know anything that’s going on, and not shame anyone in that. And make it to use what AAF does as tools for what they can do in their everyday life. It needed to be a call to action. And the worse things got, the more there needed to be humor, and the more there needed to be, let’s check back in with the Pink House [Mississippi’s only abortion clinic that was at the center of the case that overturned Roe v. Wade]. Lizz and her team become the entrée to meet all these different people that we revisited because we knew it was going to be one of those places—Missouri, Ohio, or Mississippi—that won the race to the bottom.
RM: What is it like seeing the film now, a few years after you wrapped up recording the film?
LW: So for me, [when I started this work] I realized that it’s never going to be done. Elections can really smack you upside the head and do some terrible things, but people still need abortions through all of it all the time. The hardest part is to strategize what’s next until the election happens. And that’s always been the case. You’re always like, what new fuckery is going to happen on the Supreme Court? And honestly, until we have an Equal Rights Amendment, that is honestly the only way I feel like we’re going to be able to be emancipated.
So I look at it as, we’re trying to strategize around what we see coming. And what we see coming is [the right] trying to destroy medication abortion through the mail. That’s a really big thing. We’re working on a Repealing the Comstock Act [campaign] with a whole bunch of people. It’s just constantly being fluid.
But I honestly think that in looking at where we are, no matter who wins the election, I think we all have to finally understand that half of this nation are pure to the core, sexist, racist monsters. They weren’t fooled [by Donald Trump]. They weren’t tricked. They just are. They have a racist guru now and are just so happy. Finally, they have their Pied Piper or Pied Viper, I guess.
RL: Hopefully everyone is going to wake up and finally understand that that’s really where we are. You can’t wake up the morning after the election and feel like everything’s going to be fine, because it’s not—definitely not around this issue.
LW: The conversation, for so long, was that it was a wedge issue. The conversation around abortion, and what it means—speaking of it in our own terms—is fairly new and needs to keep happening. Like saying abortion—we saw Biden, he didn’t want to say it. He personally isn’t pro-choice and doesn’t believe in abortion at all, and so it’s really hard to have a champion that’s kind of like tolerating it.
[We all have to be clear in our advocacy that the] politicians aren’t going to save us. We’re going to save us. I firmly believe that the more that we stand firm in our skin around all of these things, and reproductive justice as a whole—politicians only do what we demand of them. [We must] really hold them accountable and say that this is the set of values that we want you to legislate on, and if you don’t, then we’re gonna get a new person. That [must be] a commitment from all of us.
You can catch a screening of No One Asked You in select cities through November 4, or you can stream the film on Jolt Film on October 25. Preorder now at on.jolt.film/4dXVWtd. |
