Actress and director Jodie Foster spoke out about reproductive rights at a recent rally in Phoenix, Arizona, remarking that abortion is not a matter just for “young, straight, single women.”
Foster helped kick off the Vote for Abortion campaign and bus tour on Saturday. The event took place outside the Arizona State House at the Wesley Bolin Memorial Plaza.
“It’s not just young, straight, single women who need reproductive rights. It’s queer people, it’s mothers, it’s fertility patients, and trans people, and rape survivors, and all of us,” she said at the rally.
Two-time Oscar winner Jodie Foster headlined an abortion rights rally in Phoenix, AZ Saturday. “It’s not just young, straight, single women who need reproductive rights. It’s queer people, it’s mothers, it’s fertility patients and trans people and rape survivors and all of us.” pic.twitter.com/9EBDc4YhN7
— MSNBC (@MSNBC) June 10, 2024
Foster added, “Women in this country deserve better. We deserve to be making our own decisions quietly or loudly with the people we love and for any reason we want to.”
“So I just want to repeat that. We deserve the right to have an abortion. You know, whether it’s a medical emergency or like Busy [Philipps] and Parris [Wallace] shared, maybe it’s just the right choice for you for reasons that you owe no one an explanation for,” Foster told the crowd.
The rally organizer, Vote for Abortion, states on its website that “abortion is on the ballot.”
“Since the overturning of Roe v. Wade, Donald Trump and extremist Republicans have restricted our freedoms, slowly rolling back access to abortions and other critical reproductive healthcare,” the rally organizer’s website also notes.
In 2018, Foster faced criticism from Planned Parenthood for an inaccurate portrayal of emergency contraceptives when she directed an episode for Netflix’s science fiction show Black Mirror.
In a season four episode of the show, a mother gets Plan B, or “the morning after pill,” at a drugstore for her rebellious, sexually active teenage daughter and secretly puts it in her daughter’s smoothie. The unsuspecting teenage girl later feels sick, and when she sees the school nurse, she is told, “It was the EC pill that made you sick.” The nurse then erroneously added that the emergency contraception pill was terminating her pregnancy.
The episode’s depiction of emergency contraception is incorrect because Plan B is not an abortion pill. Plan B stops the release of an egg from an ovary, prevents egg fertilization, and prevents an egg from attaching to the uterine wall, thus preventing a pregnancy, which is not the same as terminating a pregnancy.
Elizabeth Clark, Planned Parenthood’s director for health media, called out Foster at the time, saying, “Black Mirror let down viewers by conflating Plan B with abortion.”
The attendees of the abortion rally where Foster spoke Saturday received free emergency contraceptives and menstrual products.
“On a personal note, I have two sons who I love and have great hopes for,” Foster said at the abortion rally.
“I want them to be happy. I want them to be successful. I want them to have partners who love them. And more importantly, I want them to decide what to do with their families so that maybe someday, if they do have a child, I hope that she has the rights that I have. And that she has a choice. And that’s what you do when you love somebody,” she added.
Other speakers at the rally were actress Busy Philipps, singer Lauren Jauregui, comedian June Diane Raphael, and Meena Harris, activist and niece of Vice President Kamala Harris.
