Abortion Isn’t Funny

More than 25 years ago in his 1996 HBO Special, Back in Town, the late-legendary comic, George Carlin became one of the first comedians to try and make abortion “funny.”  It wasn’t. With lame jokes like “How come when it’s us, it’s an ‘abortion,’ and when it’s a chicken, it’s an ‘omelet?'” Carlin asks the audience, “Are we so much better than chickens all of a sudden? When did this happen that we pass chickens in goodness?”

Not funny.

Carlin’s customary schtick in those days was to use abortion as a way to attack pro-life conservatives. Bludgeoning pro-lifers with the worn-out claim that we do not care about women and children, Carlin trotted out the tired trope: Pro-life conservatives are obsessed with the fetus from conception to 9 months. After that, they don’t wanna know about you. They don’t wanna hear from you. No nothing! No neonatal care, no daycare, no head start, no school lunch, no food stamps, no welfare, nothing. If you’re pre-born, you’re fine, if you’re preschool, you’re f***ed.

Normalizing Abortion

In attacking conservatives on abortion, Carlin was simply reflecting the politics of the 1990s. Support for abortion began to soften from the heady days following Roe when the pro-abortion movement was in its ascendancy. It was a time when even Democrat politicians had to find a “workaround” with the abortion issue. When Bill Clinton first uttered the words, “Safe, legal, and rare” in 1992, the slogan became the mantra for millions who wanted to support a “woman’s right to choose” but did not want to be seen as promoting abortion. (READ MORE: Victory or Defeat? The Supreme Court’s Abortion Pill Ruling Is Neither.)

Those days are over and the phrase “Safe, legal, and rare” has been expunged from the pro-abortion rights conversation. It was removed from the plank of the Democratic Party in 2012 as young feminists living in the age of dwindling access to abortion aren’t interested in a mantra that implies that there is something shameful about the procedure, even if it has kept many people in the pro-choice tent.

Socialized to reject any form of appeasement on abortion rights, today’s feminist comedians are “all in” on abortion, and unlike George Carlin, who never acknowledges that a child is killed in an abortion, comedians like Alison Leiby and Lizz Winstead use the death of the unborn child as part of the joke. In fact, in opening her one-woman show, Oh God, A Show About Abortion at the Cherry Lane Theatre in the West Village in New York City, Alison Leiby, who has built her career on making jokes about her own abortion, told the audience: “My mom told me to kill it tonight…I already did.”

Just as Carlin equated abortion with breaking an egg for an omelet, Leiby attempted to relate aborting the unwanted unborn child to killing a cockroach that invaded her apartment: “Being pregnant and knowing that you want an abortion is a little bit like catching ‘a cockroach under a Tupperware in your apartment. And you’re like uggghhh, I know it’s there and I do have to kill it, but I need, like, a minute to deal with this.’”

The DNC Is Shaping Up to be an Abortion Fest

Again, not funny — but the fact that Leiby uses the word “kill” so often throughout her pro-abortion standup routine reveals a willingness to acknowledge that a human being is indeed being killed during an abortion. And even though Leiby makes light of the procedure, she cannot minimize the gravity of an act in which an unborn child is killed. Despite all of this, Leiby brought her show to the Kennedy Center last June to rave reviews describing “nonstop laughs” in a show about abortion. The Kennedy Center was an interesting choice to bring a pro-abortion show because at one time the Catholic Kennedy family was staunchly pro-life. Of course, by now, it appears that most of the Kennedys support the Democratic Party platform of abortion on demand — no matter how late in the pregnancy. (READ MORE: A Brazilian Bill Criminalizing Abortion After 22 Weeks Ignites Political Firestorm)

To be sure, the laughs keep coming from the pro-abortion crowd. On June 24th, Lizz Winstead, one of the creators of The Daily Show, began screening for No One Asked You – a pro-abortion documentary that Vanity Fair has called “hilarious.” June 24th was chosen for the screening because it was the date in 2022 when the Dobbs decision came down. The show was intended to mark the two-year “Overturniversary” of Roe. A long-time abortion advocate who, like Leiby, has had an abortion that she does not regret, Winstead founded the Lady Parts Justice League (now known as Abortion Access Front) in 2015 to train advocates and expand access to abortion. In comments to a reporter for Vanity Fair, Winstead sarcastically said that “becoming the abortion comedian is a great career move. Super lucrative, your phone never stops ringing with job offers, and you’re going to make millions of friends.”

The truth is that becoming an abortion comedian has indeed been a good career move for Winstead. The subject of a puff profile in Vanity Fair, Winstead recounted her own abortion and spoke about the ways in which she has been “urging Democrats to fight back more bluntly—and creatively” on abortion: “One crucial element of Winstead’s work, chronicled in the film, has been traveling to dozens of abortion clinics—everywhere from Little Rock, Fort Worth, and Atlanta to Louisville, Tuscaloosa, and Detroit—to lift the spirits of beleaguered staffers. Sometimes that involves staging a happy hour comedy show; other times it means planting trees that brighten up a clinic’s grounds and block the view of antiabortion protesters.”  (READ MORE: The Man Behind the Hyde Amendment)

And now Winstead is taking her abortion comedy act to this year’s Democratic National Convention. In what promises to be a full abortion-fest in Chicago, Winstead will be entertaining Democratic Party politicians and their supporters with a variety revue called “A Cavalcade of Cooch” with singers dressed as giant mifepristone pills.” It is likely that many at the Democratic Convention will find her abortion comedy hilarious because they still see abortion as their ticket to success in November. But these are not serious people. Truly thoughtful people know that abortion is no joke. 

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