Meet Carol Leifer

Stand-up comedian, actor, writer, and producer … Carol Leifer has done it all, and, along the way, has been responsible for countless hours of laughter and insight.  Most notably, the Emmy-nominated Leifer served as co-producer and writer on Seinfeld and supervising producer and writer for HBO's The Larry Sanders Show.  She has written for the Academy Awards five times.  Her forthcoming book of humorous essays, When You Lie About Your Age, the Terrorists Win, published by Random House, is due in 2008.  She is also joining the CBS sitcom Rules of Engagement, starring David Spade, as co-executive producer this fall.

Off the stage and screen, Leifer is also a strong, valuable friend to Planned Parenthood and the reproductive rights community at large.
plannedparenthood.org talks to Leifer about her support for Planned Parenthood and the connection between reproductive rights and LGBTQ rights.

You have been a longtime supporter of Planned Parenthood.  What does Planned Parenthood mean to you?

I’ve always been very involved with the organization because choice is so important.  So many younger women take for granted the rights that my mother and her generation worked so hard for. It's important to be vigilant about protecting those rights.  I was going to say it’s because bad things could happen — but they’re already happening.

There are people that I know who voted for Bush, whether it was because of his stance on Israel or economic issues.  I remember trying to convince them to vote otherwise if they wanted to protect choice.  Their take was, “Nothing will ever happen to Roe v. Wade.”  You can just look at what happened at the Supreme Court this year and see that these things do happen and nothing is ever set in stone.

You can count on this to occur when people take a basic human right for women for granted and don’t keep working to ensure that freedom. I am so concerned about how we are going backwards today.  Personally, I need to do everything I can to help. 

Planned Parenthood isn’t necessarily the first place people think of when they think about LGBT health care, even though many Planned Parenthood health centers do a lot for the LGBT community.  Why do you think that is?

I think it’s because our opponents are a very intelligent bunch — although we don’t always think of them that way.  They have been very successful in spreading propaganda about what it means to be pro-choice and about their depiction of Planned Parenthood.  They disperse these mistruths and it seeps into the collective consciousness.  So, then, Planned Parenthood is seen as just a place where you get an abortion, which doesn’t honor all the incredible work that Planned Parenthood does to prevent abortion, its work with birth control and sex education, and the overall awareness [about sexual and reproductive health and rights] that Planned Parenthood tries to put out there in the community.

How do reproductive rights and LGBT rights intersect, in your opinion?

It’s really interesting.  My partner Lori and I had a NARAL Pro-Choice America Los Angeles reception last year.  We held it at our home.  I invited a lot of my gay friends — I have a whole network of gay male friends and they came to support this issue like I go to support the issues near and dear to them.  I’m sure some of them were thinking, “Oh, I’ll just go for an hour and then leave.”  But they left there with their eyes open, seeing how reproductive freedom and the rights that go along with it affect everybody.  It’s all about personal privacy, the lines around our personal lives that the government should not be crossing.

Everyone who is a free-thinking person knows that we need to make our own reproductive decisions — privately, in conjunction with our doctors, and not with the government telling us what they think is best.

So many people left the event that night with a new sense of how we’re all in this together.

Final thoughts?

Being so involved with Planned Parenthood, I know how frustrating it is dealing with the anti-choice side — they are so vehemently opposed to everything that we fight so hard for.  But when Planned Parenthood or other pro-choice groups introduce preventive  birth control initiatives or sex education programs, they block those, too.  It makes you ask, “What, really, is your agenda?”  We’re trying to provide solutions, to prevent abortions.  But they refuse to help in that effort.  That’s what's so insidious.  It’s not just anti-choice, it’s anti-solution to the problem of unwanted pregnancy that cannot be ignored.

Whom you choose to love, the decisions you make about your own body — these rights are cut from the same cloth.  It's about personal freedom and being who you are.  The government needs to protect those rights — not deny them and be the judge and jury for who we are.

And I really want to encourage more young women to get politically active about choice, because reproductive rights is truly their issue.  I mean, let's be honest here — I'm of a certain age and I'm happy to report that my ovaries just bought a lovely condo in Boca.  It's their future and their lives.