Olivia Rodrigo built the Daisy Chain Fields festival around abortion rights

Olivia Rodrigo built a festival around abortion rights and women's health, and then put a number on it. At a news conference the day before Daisy Chain Fields opened at Great Park in Irvine, she said the event would donate $10 million to its partner organisations and called the occasion "a real honor". The Los Angeles Times reported it on 27 August 2026.

The line runs back to one day in 2022. Just after the US Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade and ended the nationwide right to legal abortion, Rodrigo walked onstage at Glastonbury in England. "I'm heartbroken over what happened in America yesterday," she said, and told the crowd she was devastated and terrified that women and girls would die because of it.

Four years later she told the Times by email that she had been shaken to her core that day while also having the chance to play that stage. She said she wants people to leave the festival feeling hopeful and able to change something, and called that the entire thesis of the event.

Kathleen Hanna, who founded Bikini Kill and played the festival on the Saturday, gave her credit for taking the risk. "She could have played it safe, but she acknowledged that she has the power to make stuff happen," Hanna said. Hanna had been skeptical of the all-women Lilith Fair in the 1990s, and said she respects how Rodrigo learned what that festival was trying to do from a recent documentary and set out to update it for a younger audience.

The money has a history. Fund 4 Good, the nonprofit Rodrigo launched alongside the Guts tour in February 2024 under the fiscal sponsorship of the Entertainment Industry Foundation, had already steered $2.5 million in tour profits and donations to groups including Jhpiego, Women's Shelters Canada, Women Against Violence Europe and the Korea Foundation for Women.

Ten organisations benefit from the festival, and each has a physical presence at the park. They include the Center for Reproductive Rights, the Black Mamas Matter Alliance, the National Domestic Workers Alliance, the National Women's Law Center, Planned Parenthood, Baby2Baby, FreeFrom, the National Institute for Reproductive Health and the Johns Hopkins Center for Indigenous Health. Ai-Jen Poo of the domestic workers' group said her tent would let visitors pay tribute to the caregivers in their own lives through artwork.

The groups brought their numbers with them. Angela Aina, who co-founded the Black Mamas Matter Alliance, said Black women in America die in childbirth at three times the rate of white women and that 87% of those deaths were preventable. Nancy Northup of the Center for Reproductive Rights, which has challenged abortion bans in eleven states, said Rodrigo's support helps the group keep filing lawsuits.

Rodrigo's activism has met resistance before. On the 2024 Guts tour she brought abortion rights groups under the National Network of Abortion Funds to canvass at shows, and some handed out free condoms and emergency contraception, which upset conservatives in states such as Missouri, where a near-total ban was in force and legislators were seeking to ban the morning-after pill. Her management reportedly asked those groups to stop distributing contraceptives while still encouraging them to canvass on site.

We have followed the festival's own logistics: stage times were locked in so no two sets clash, KATSEYE dropped off the bill after an ankle injury, and Karen O of Yeah Yeah Yeahs pulled out over a family emergency. Rodrigo's records are filed under pop here and the event is listed on the festival tracker.

Every act on the bill played unpaid, so the production and staffing costs for an event this size came from somewhere else. Rodrigo's latest single, 'Serena Joy', takes its name from the character in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale who goes along with the theocracy.