Lily Tomlin, Gloria Allred, TV producer Marta Kauffman and others mounted a picket line outside Amazon Studio in Hollywood Friday, demanding that studios put in place stronger abortion protections for film industry employees working in states that have enacted stricter abortion laws.
As the writers strike continues, a group of activists with the group “Showrunners for Abortion Rights” jumped in to use the strike to push their own cause, with Tomlin urging writers to shoehorn abortion topics into their scripts, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
“You, the storytellers, no longer have to imagine a world like Handmaid’s Tale, because we’re pretty close to that right now,” Tomlin yelled to the crowd. “What you do have to do is tell the stories about what women are facing all over the country.”
Tomlin then said she hopes the writers are successful in their fight for new benefits and pay scales, saying, “I hope those guys will get off their asses and let you do that sooner than rather than later, tell those stories.”
For her part, gadfly attorney Gloria Allred urged Hollywood to stop filming in states that have enacted tougher abortion laws in the wake of the end of Roe v Wade.
“I do think that SAG-AFTRA, the Directors Guild, the Producers Guild, the Writers Guild, the technical and craft guilds should not participate in making films in states that ban abortions. I think we should demand that our unions protect our vulnerable wombs,” Allred said.
The unions did enhance their abortion coverage in the aftermath of the overturning of the national abortion ruling, but union officials have taken no public stance on the issue of state laws.
Marta Kauffman, who rose to prominence in the industry as a producer and creator of the hit 90s TV series Friends, said that the protest would prove to the industry that “we’re not going to stand for it…. We’re not gonna stand for the women and the people with wombs, as Gloria [Allred] said, being at risk just because they want to work. This is a discrimination issue,” she insisted.
Others also spoke. Women in Film CEO Kirsten Schaffer, for one, told the crowd, “The work that we do would be impossible without access to abortion and reproductive health care overall. Many, if not most of us, would not be able to do the work that we do without knowing that we have that access.”
The protest came on the heels of a “report card” grading the studios on their compliance with abortion the demands of abortion activists.
“The ‘report card,’ released Thursday,” the Hollywood Reporter wrote, “found that only some studio-provided hotlines can assist their workers in helping access emergency medical care, for instance. No studios covered by the report provided ‘any emergency measures needed to access care’ if an employee is working in a state that outlaws or criminalizes abortion and needs emergency reproductive care.”
The “Showrunners for Abortion Rights” are still pushing for more and more concessions despite the widespread rejoicing in the industry back in Sept. of last year when some of the same people were exultant and publicly thanked the studios for extending access to abortion benefits.
At the end of July, 2022, the group of showrunners had written a letter demanding greater abortion coverage and for the most part they got what they were demanding. The group thanked Amazon, AMCNetworks, Apple TV+, Disney, Lionsgate, NBCUniversal, Netflix, Paramount/CBS, and Warner Bros. Discovery for their action on the issue.
Still, some studios also pointed out that such protections should really be an area of concern for the various unions to which members of the industry belong, not the studios.
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