Are you up for taking the Taco or Beer Challenge?

The Taco or Beer Challenge

The Taco or Beer Challenge couldn’t be simpler: You eat a taco and/or drink a beer, and you donate to an abortion fund. The only ice you’ll need for this challenge is the ice in your cooler, or maybe the ice in your water if you get a particularly spicy taco.

Everybody stays dry—ideally—and somebody gets help paying for a legal abortion.

I started the Taco or Beer Challenge on Monday as something of a Twitter joke, after hearing about the “ice bucket challenge” that’s been growing in popularity as celebrities and plebes alike film themselves dumping buckets of ice-cold water on themselves, sometimes to hilarious effect, in support of funding ALS research. (Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, sometimes referred to as Lou Gehrig’s Disease, is, according to the ALS Association, “a progressive neurodegenerative disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and the spinal cord.”)

What do ice buckets have to do with ALS? I don’t know. What do tacos and beer have to do with abortion? I don’t know that either.

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What I do know is that eating tacos and drinking beer is more pleasurable than getting doused with ice water, and that lawmakers around the country are passing increasingly restrictive anti-abortion access laws. Which means abortion funds are now more necessary than ever as legal abortion becomes harder than ever to access—especially for those of us who don’t live in major urban centers.

Tacos and beer, of course, remain as vital to our human happiness as they ever were. The solution is clear: Eat tacos, drink beer, and donate to abortion funds.

Because abortion stigma is real, I know it can be hard to make that first abortion fund donation. It’s one thing to support abortion in theory, and a whole other thing to actually help pay for someone else’s—a total stranger’s, most likely—abortion. There’s a strong cultural narrative that tells us people who get abortions are bad, irresponsible, or cruel. That they are undeserving of care and understanding. That they are confused or heartless.

That narrative fucking sucks. Abortion is common. Abortion is normal. And abortion is safest when it is legal and accessible—something abortion funds help to ensure in an increasingly hostile political climate. There’s nothing shameful about having an abortion, and nothing shameful about funding abortion. It’s so not-shameful, in fact, that you can be the kind of regular ol’ human being who eats a taco or drinks a beer and funds abortion.

If you’ve donated to an abortion fund before, you might already have a favorite. If you haven’t, there’s probably one in your state, unless you live in Utah, in which case you can really step up the Taco or Beer Challenge by challenging yourself to start an abortion fund. If you’d rather give outside the United States, you can do that too. When you take the challenge, be sure to take a photo or a video of yourself and mention where you donated, and if you post your challenge on Twitter, be sure to tag it #TacoOrBeerChallenge.

So that’s all you have to do. Eat a taco and/or drink a beer—or a margarita, or a glass of Franzia, or a ginger ale, or a refreshing mineral water, hell, I don’t care what you drink, that’s how easy the Taco or Beer Challenge is. The Taco or Beer Challenge is about doing what’s right for your own taco and beverage needs, just like having an abortion—or not—is about doing what’s right for yourself and your family.

The only way to fail the Taco or Beer Challenge is to not donate to an abortion fund. I believe in tacos, I believe in beer, and I believe in you.