Taco-Abortion Challenge Catches Fire

As Sharon Rosenblatt took the first bite into her still-warm beef taco at a Long Wharf stand, she wasn’t thinking about the fact that 433 abortion restrictions have passed into law since 2011.

Instead, she was looking ahead — trying to help keep abortion available while getting her taco fix in before dusk. 

In late August, Rosenblatt joined a small but mighty team of six New Haveners and New Haven transplants — including this reporter — to take part in the third annual Taco or Beer Challenge, a national effort to support abortion funds that requires eating a taco or drinking a beer (or both), donating to an abortion fund, and documenting the experience on social media.

In turn, the money helps funds — small, grassroots organizations and individuals who subsidize abortion care for women who cannot afford the procedure and accompanying cost — survive as the costs of both surgical and medical abortions rise across the country.

Abortion funds are separate from national organizations like Planned Parenthood, which receives federal funding for its provision of primary care services and also provides access, without federal dollars, to safe and legal abortion. The two work in concert with each other, but serve distinct needs. While Planned Parenthood also provides breast and cervical cancer screenings, testing and treatment for sexually transmitted infections (STIs), birth control, pregnancy testing and counseling, abortion funds are intended to plug the policy hole left by the Hyde and Helms Amendments, which ban the use of Medicaid and USAID dollars for abortion, and by TRAP (Targeted Restriction of Abortion Providers) laws, which specifically target and limit legal abortion providers across the country. The funds aren’t the direct abortion providers; they’re the organizations that are trying to ensure that every woman who needs an abortion can get one, regardless of cost. 

All of that is important to Rosenblatt, a disability rights advocate and taco connoisseur who got to know New Haven after attending college in Maryland and starting work at The Grove. So important that it made her one of the first New Haveners to participate in the challenge, which has been growing slowly and steadily since its conception in 2014.

On Aug. 18 of that year, Texas Observer reporter Andrea Grimes created the challenge in jest, tweeting : ​“I hereby challenge y’all to eat a taco or drink a beer and give money to an abortion fund #tacoorbeerchallenge.” It was the summer of the Ice Bucket Challenge, she was very hot and drinking a beer at one of her favorite bars in Austin, and she didn’t expect her tongue-in-cheek comment to catch on.

But her colleagues and followers from across the state, which has long been ground zero for reproductive justice battles and came into the national spotlight with 2013’s highly restrictive Omnibus Abortion Bill, had other plans.

Within hours, Grimes’ post had been retweeted 88 times, and those retweets had been retweeted to followers across the U.S. The challenge started to raise funds that crept gracefully upwards, ultimately hitting the $30,000 mark before the month was over.

For Grimes, whose own views on abortion had undergone a radical transformation after leaving her strongly anti-choice home in Fort Worth to attend college in New York City, and then testifying on behalf of Planned Parenthood during a serious cervical cancer scare in 2011, that signaled the beginning of a very good thing.

“The community just jumped on it, and who wouldn’t?” she said on a recent episode of WNHH radio’s ​“Kitchen Sync,” skyping in from her home in Austin. ​“Tacos and beers are great. Funding abortion is something that the state doesn’t do in Texas … access to abortion is something the state is actively working against. So it was a cause that was really dear to my heart then, and I thought: why not make that into something fun?” 

The specific choice to focus on abortion funds, she added, concerned the relatively obscurity in which they live—and how intimately they are tied, beneath the ​“reproductive justice umbrella,” to things like federal assistance programs, children’s healthcare and education, health insurance, and family leave.

“These independent abortion providers and these smaller groups that work to make abortion accessible, I feel like often get drowned out in the conversation around Planned Parenthood … these other smaller entities tend to fall by the wayside. It’s certainly not a bad thing when anybody can access legal abortion, but what I was hoping to do when I started the challenge was to draw attention to these smaller groups.”

“Lots of people didn’t know that abortion funds existed. I heard that over and over again during the challenge … people really only thought about Planned Parenthood. So it was kind of educational in that way.”

Two summers later, that educational impulse is what brought Rosenblatt and five others out onto the baking cement of Long Wharf and Sargent Drive, where the Long Wharf taco trucks dot the highway like a bright, beef-and-chili tinged oasis. Sporting a tank top that read ​“Holy Shit/Taco!,” she said that she saw it as a learning opportunity to find out about things like what abortion funds are and how to best support them as an advocate and an ally. 

“When women’s lives are put in danger over false science and political agendas that aim to not just make abortions difficult but illegal, I want to do more than just take a taco selfie,” she said in a discussion after the evening’s tortilla-filled dalliances. She said that she was concerned — 43 years after the U.S. Supreme Court’s passage of Roe v. Wade, and despite its decision to strike down Texas’ 2013 ambulatory care center restrictions with Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, women in several states are still struggling to find safe and legal abortion providers, sometimes driving across state lines to receive proper care.

At 28, Rosenblatt doesn’t rule out the chance of access to safe reproductive care becoming more difficult to obtain in her lifetime. The Taco or Beer Challenge doubled as an opportunity to get a better idea of what she was up against — and fight it in real time.

“This is a great afternoon of indulgence, but when I got past the fun part of advocacy, I realized that the donation is vastly important, and so is the awareness,” she said.

That need for awareness is acute. As Rosenblatt (and this reporter) identified and donated to the National Network of Abortion Funds as part of the challenge, affronts to reproductive choice and responsible family planning seemed to keep popping out of the woodwork. In March 2016, Indiana Governor Mike Pence (yep, the same one who is running for Vice President) signed into law HEA 1337, a bill with some of the most restrictive anti-abortion provisions to date. It’s part of the country’s swelling TRAP legislation, requiring that healthcare facilities cremate or inter miscarried or aborted fetuses, banning abortion on the basis of physical or developmental disability, requiring an ultrasound and 18-hour waiting period thereafter, and making more readily public the names and personal information of abortion providers in the state. 

And that was just the beginning. These kinds of provisions—including 107 passed in the U.S. this year alone — are happening all over the country.

“A lot of times, our state legislatures will push out bills like HEA 1337 … there will be a lot of different provisions, a lot of different ways in which access to reproductive healthcare including abortion are restricted, limited, etcetera,” explained Wanda Savala, Community Engagement Director at Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky, on the same episode of ​“Kitchen Sync.” ​“But it’s very convoluted, and if you don’t know how to read and interpret the bills, if you don’t know how to follow our legislative session, then you don’t know what’s going on until it’s too late.”

That intensified the problem, Savala said, of ​“making sure people can feel their own power.” That stop-and-start around reproductive justice was something that sounded familiar to Rosenblatt, as well as teammates Bianca Ruthven and Karly Greene, a nurse in New Haven who has done work with Planned Parenthood. 

Indeed, the #ToBC16 team discovered that the issue hit close to home too. Connecticut’s blue state status can be deceptive—despite Planned Parenthood of Southern New England​‘s (PPSNE) 17 satellite sites here and in Rhode Island, the state has no dedicated abortion fund, and is constantly working against threats to safe family planning, which extend to healthcare, education, family leave and the fight for higher minimum wage. As a patient, staff member and one of those leading the charge for paid family and medical leave in Connecticut, PPSNE Director of Public Policy, Advocacy, and Strategic Engagement Gretchen Raffa knows about that firsthand. 

“We have to work as hard as possible these days in this political environment to reject attempts to limit safe and legal abortion care, which is part of comprehensive reproductive health care,” she said. ​“We have to remember when we’re thinking about people who access reproductive healthcare that that is one facet of their life … that [these] are also people who are struggling to get affordable jobs, a wage that they can actually live and support their families. So we are thinking about the whole person … about the communities they live in.

“As we celebrated in June, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in a landmark decision which helps protect access to abortion — this is an enormous win for women, but I think what we always have to remember is that that victory was one victory but does not undo the five years of damage that’s been done … we have to be aware that state by state, there are politicians that are really focused on limiting people’s access to abortion services.”

That’s enough for Rosenblatt to keep fighting. Especially if it includes tacos. 

“The hypocrisy of people touting personal freedom by being pro-life while simultaneously preferring a woman jeopardize her health, resources, and occasionally her life to obtain a safe abortion makes me wish the Taco or Beer challenge was all year round,” she said. ​“I’m happy I learned more about efforts across America to increase access to a safe and legal procedure, and will definitely be a lifetime participant.”

To listen to the #ToBC16 Kitchen Sync, click on or download the audio above.