Updated on June 21 at 11:10 a.m. EDT to include comments from Matt Philbin..
AUSTIN, TEXAS, June 20, 2012, (LifeSiteNews.com) – Lizz Winstead, the co-creator of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” said she felt ashamed after her encounter in a crisis pregnancy center at age 17. She chose to have an abortion before going on to a career in stand-up comedy, radio, and television. Now she is hosting a series of one-woman fundraisers for Planned Parenthood and taking aim at her old enemies.
Pro-lifers use “terrorist tactics,” Winstead told an Austin-area reporter while promoting her act “Planned Parenthood, I am Here for You,” which she is performing in town tomorrow night.
“We need to shut the f—k up about” abstinence, she said. She says her solution is, “More people need to come out and say, I go to Planned Parenthood, I had an abortion, I use birth control, I am a sexual being.”
These shows are a continuation of the tour she began last year.
“There should be a Planned Parenthood in every mall. Just like Cinnabon and Chico’s. To me, that would be the utopian society to live in,” she told The Progressive magazine.
Winstead has had one of the largest footprints in entertainment after co-creating “The Daily Show” with Madeleine Smithberg in 1996.
“I suppose we should find it troubling that, as creator of ‘The Daily Show’ Winstead still can use it as a megaphone—a powerful one, given how many young people cite it as their only source of news,” Matt Philbin,managing editor of the Media Research Center’s Culture and Media Institute told LifeSiteNews.com. “And ‘The Daily Show’s’ bias isn’t exactly subtle.”
After quitting as head writer on the news parody program, she helped found Air America Radio, the unsuccessful left-wing talk radio network whose hosts repeatedly threatened to assassinate President George W. Bush. Winstead co-hosted its program “Unfiltered,” with current MSNBC talk show host Rachel Maddow. (She was later fired and replaced by Jerry Springer.) She then acted as executive producer for the short-lived Weekends with Maury and Connie.
Thirty-four years after her own abortion, her choice continues to loom over her professional life. She told Mother Jones magazine crisis pregnancy centers are “these awful places.”
Winstead writes of about her experience as a pregnant 17-year-old at a crisis pregnancy center in her book, Lizz Free or Die. She often repeats the story onstage.
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She said in 1978 she entered Minneapolis’ Southside Life Care Health Center, now Tapestry Pregnancy and Family Resource Center, which would have been newly founded. “Here before me was a woman who chose to impersonate the two types of people teenagers choose most: a person of God and a doctor,” she said.
Winstead was outraged when the counselor only suggested carrying her unborn child to term or giving it up for adoption. “This woman saw no worth in my growth. She was invested only in keeping me inexperienced, vulnerable, and insecure,” she wrote. “And the hailstorm of fear she rained down upon me was to insure I remained ‘manageable.’ Manageable. Because in order to keep the world going the way she and her ilk liked it, I needed to become not what I wanted, but what they needed me to be…Her tactics preyed upon my fear.”
“How could she be pro-life when she wasn’t pro-my-life? That is not pro-life, that is profane,” she concluded.
The comedienne said she was driven to begin her one-woman fundraisers for the billion-dollar abortion industry, because “Every day I’m being driven crazy by” the “assault on women’s health.”
She has told women supporting Planned Parenthood “needs to be part of your routine” in daily life, “like going to yoga.”
She is keenly interested in reaching young people, rather than those beyond their child-bearing years. “How about people who are f—king?” she asked. “You know, people who can still get pregnant?”
A major part of her message is, “Having sex is OK. And using birth control to have sex is OK.”
However, Philadelphia Weekly noted at her local show, “disappointingly few young people were there.”
Polls continue to show young people trending more pro-life as science proves life begins at conception.
Yet Lizz continues to introduce abortion into her act. Earlier this month she tweeted from the left-wing bloggers’ conference Netroots Nation that the hotel was “bullsh-t. They have banned abortion in the rooms!” In February, Winstead tweeted, “Im [sic] gonna get this years mammogram at Planned Parenthood and photograph it.”
To date, no such photo has been posted, because Planned Parenthood does not perform mammograms.
The Palm Beach Post described Winstead as “a lapsed Catholic” and reported that Winstead joked stigmata were responsible for the invention of the round Band-Aid. She recently referred to the Catholic Church and the comedy industry as two “big behemoths that are not particularly friendly to women or to building women’s careers.”
Her stand-up routine regularly takes aim at pro-life Republican women like Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, bouts of vulgarity.
On the political Left, Winstead has stated that President Barack Obama “is a centrist” and “never claimed to be a progressive.” However, “He’s not an idiot like [George W.] Bush.” She now regularly appears on MSNBC, when she is not touring the country supporting Planned Parenthood.
Cultural conservatives say it’s the growing body of pro-life young people who are no longer being played for fools.
“It’s encouraging and unsurprising that her live show drew ‘disappointingly few young people,’” Philbin told LifeSiteNews. “Outside her Hollywood and reactionary hard Left echo chamber, most people understand the seriousness of abortion. I suspect most reasonable people—even some pro-choice people—would be repulsed by her narcissism and self-absorption.”
“Maybe kids deserve more credit,” he said.