SNL’s Cecily Strong as ‘Tammy the Trucker’: ‘We All Love Someone Who’s Had an Abortion’

Cecily Strong played a character named “Tammy the Trucker” on Saturday Night Live this weekend—a woman who wants to “talk about gas prices and definitely not abortion.”

“All I’m here to talk about is gas, even though the Supreme Court said Roe v. Wade did that big pit stop in the sky,” Strong jokes in the sketch, beeping her prop horn. “Yea, 50 years of precedent, beep beep!”

“Cecily, are you ok?” responds Colin Jost. “It seems like maybe you do wanna talk about abortion.”

Strong’s character retorts, “Calm your cooter down,” before launching into an increasingly serious-sounding speech about abortion rights.

“I don’t know, Colin, I’m just trying to get through this moment, ok?” she says. “Gas prices are up and families are really hurting, but that’s not gonna magically disappear no matter who you vote for.

“But what will keep disappearing is safe access to abortion,” she continues, “and it’s not really magic, ‘cause they told us that’s exactly what they’re gonna do, and they been doing it.”

Strong eventually breaks out of the “Tammy” character to add that these are “scary times” and pleads with viewers to get to the polls this week:

The truth is, I have felt pretty helpless over the past year, and it’s hard to know what to say to make other truckers feel better, even though Ihave this big giant radio. So here’s a thing I can say: There’s one mothertruckin thing we can do to fight for mothertruckin freedom to make our own health care decisions, and that’s vote.

“Because remember,” she powerfully concludes the segment, “we all love someone who’s had an abortion.”

SNL has long sprinkled progressive politics into its sketches, but I can’t remember ever seeing the show do such a direct appeal to voters to protect abortion rights. Props to the writers and to Strong for using their platform this way.

You can watch the whole sketch here: