Video: Pop Star Halsey Endorses Bernie Sanders, Says She Needed Abortion to ‘Stay Alive’

Pop star Ashley Nicolette Frangipane, better known by her music moniker Halsey, formally endorsed Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) in a video announcement released on Tuesday, praising him for fighting for her — “a queer woman in a multi-racial family who was raised poor in an American suburb” — before she was alive and proclaiming that she once needed an abortion to “stay alive.”

The Without Me singer formally endorsed Sanders on Tuesday — the same day voters in six states head to the polls to cast their ballots in the Democrat presidential primary.

Halsey champions Sanders in the endorsement video for “fighting for me since before I was alive” and describes herself as a person who has “repeatedly needed access to medical assistance, using assistance, financial assistance, [and] abortion.”

“Bernie has been fighting for me since before I was alive — a queer woman in a multi-racial family who was raised poor in an American suburb. A woman who got into the college of her dreams and couldn’t afford to go. A person physically tormented by a reproductive health disorder that I couldn’t afford to treat,” she says.

“A person who has repeatedly needed access to medical assistance, using assistance, financial assistance, abortion, all before 21 years old, just so I could stay alive. Now I’m considered fortunate, lucky even then, comparatively to the rest of the working class of America,” she continued, adding that her “financial privilege” now protects her from the “effects of marginalization that would have previously been fatal” for her.

“We deserve a president like him,” Halsey said of Sanders.

While Sanders’ opponent Joe Biden (D) has appeared to receive a flurry of establishment endorsements in the past week, Sanders gained the formal backing of actress Jane Fonda last week, who referred to him as the “climate candidate.”