Actress Alyssa Milano is urging the TV and movie industries to boycott Georgia after the state passed one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country, which she claims would “strip women of their bodily autonomy.”
As The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports, Milano, 46, wrote on Friday that it’s time for the industry to re-think shooting in Georgia, which offers generous tax incentives to bring TV and production crews to the state. The state’s restrictive abortion bill, which was passed last week, will take away women’s reproductive choices, Milano says.
“There are over 20 productions shooting in GA & the state just voted to strip women of their bodily autonomy. Hollywood! We should stop feeding GA economy.”
In fact, that number of productions currently shooting in Georgia is closer to 38, says the Journal-Constitution. And Milano herself works on one of those productions. Her dark comedy Insatiable , which debuted on Netflix last year, is currently filming its second season in the Peach State, and Milano herself was seen on-set in Atlanta as recently as Friday.
Other movie and TV productions currently taking place in Georgia include Zombieland 2 and Jumani 2 , as well as the OWN’s Greenleaf .
The bill to which Milano is referring is the so-called “heartbeat bill,” which bans abortions after a fetal heartbeat can be detected.
An almost word-for-word copy of a similar Kentucky bill that passed recently, opponents say the bill doesn’t take into account the fact that most women don’t know that they’re pregnant until six weeks or later. That means that, since a fetal heartbeat can be detected at six weeks, the bill effectively bans all abortions in Georgia.
The Georgia bill is one of several restrictive abortion bills that has been passed by conservative state legislatures in recent weeks. As previously reported by The Inquisitr , Brigitte Amiri, deputy director of the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project, believes these legislatures are essentially casting a wide net in order to get an abortion case before the Supreme Court. Since Donald Trump’s inauguration, the Court has picked up two conservative justices, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, and conservatives hope that the new SCOTUS will eventually overturn Roe v. Wade , says Amiri.
“This onslaught of bans on abortion that fly in the face of Roe v. Wade are designed specifically for the purposes of trying to get the Supreme Court to reconsider Roe.”
Meanwhile, this is not the first time someone in the TV/movie industry has called for a boycott of Georgia in response to a political move. Back in 2016, Georgia’s legislature passed a controversial “religious freedom” bill which would have allowed business owners and landlords, among others, to discriminate against LGBTQ individuals on the basis of “religious liberty.” The bill did not get signed by the state’s then-governor.
