Tag Archive for 'abortion'

So Friday Night Lights ended its fourth (and I think best) season this week and they closed the loop on the abortion storyline that has been a focus of the last several episodes.

When we last left it, Principal Tammy Tami Taylor (Connie Britton) was being forced to make a public apology for her actions (which was written by the school board.)  Now, Tammy Tami loves her job, is a great principal and also quite frankly needs the money so she was put in a very difficult position. She got up to make the apology under duress, opened her folder and began to read and then stopped.  She stopped.  She did not apologize for what she did.  She said she did what was in the best interest of the student and that’s her job and that’s always what she will do.  And then she walked off the stage to screams of disbelief from the crowd.

She stood up for her convictions and did not apologize for giving a young girl in distress the LEGAL options available to her.

But Tammy Tami knew that by not apologizing she was probably going to get fired.  The head of the school board called her to a meeting on the Saturday (of Thanksgiving weekend) and told her she had been put on paid administrative leave.  It looked like that was going to settle it but the writers gave her a way out and she told the head of the school board that she was willing to relinquish her position as principal at West Dillon High to head up the counseling program at East Dillon (the upstart school on the “wrong side” of the tracks where her husband is now the football coach.)

This is about the classiest show on TV I think since My So Called Life.  I know that next season will be the last, but it is going down as one of the best and not just because of how it handled the abortion storyline.  This show is so full of what can best be described as “heart,” and because that is missing from most of TV nowadays when you see it and feel it, it kind of takes your breath away.

Nixon is speaking out about the anti-choice restrictions in the health care bill.

“It’s a very basic female right that we need to protect,” Nixon said. “What’s so frightening about this Stupak ban is that he’s found a backdoor way to basically not cover abortion for the vast majority of American women.”

No one wants to encourage anyone to have an abortion. One wants to encourage that if you have to make this very difficult decision, that the difficulty of the decision isn’t compounded by having to hide it from people, and having to find a way to pay for it and having to go across state lines to get it.

It’s hard enough. It’s a hard enough decision and we don’t need to make it harder.

Way to go Cynthia.  She is out there on gay marriage, public school issues and now abortion.  Other women should follow her lead.

Cynthia Nixon: Abortion debate’s new voice (CNN)

Prior to the airing of last Friday night’s Law & Order episode entitled “Dignity”, newsday.com presented it as providing an “intelligent hearing” on the late-term abortion debate.  What can be determined after watching it however, is that the episode is rife with medical inaccuracies and anti-abortion propaganda.  And the true experiences of women who face complex decisions of whether or not to continue pregnancies with serious abnormalities are severely undermined.

The episode began with the point blank shooting of Dr. Benning, a doctor that performed third trimester abortions, while he was praying with his wife in church.  Regardless of Law & Order’s disclaimers to the contrary, this is a direct reference to the murder of Dr. George Tiller, who was shot and killed while ushering in his church on May 31 of this year.

The dialogue of the officers who investigate the murder initially appears to reflect stereotypical pro-choice vs. anti-choice rhetoric, which seems to be the writers’ attempt at presenting a “balanced” viewpoint.   But the recurring messages throughout the program are clearly anti-abortion biased.

More often these days when (it’s usually more like if) a female character in primetime contemplates abortion, she is portrayed as contemplating her own moral failure.  And ultimately, she usually either continues her pregnancy or has a miscarriage – she will almost never have an abortion.  More importantly, if she does cross that forbidden media barrier, she will never feel good about doing so.  This is what we see here – in the character of a young woman who is denied her abortion because her father confided in a protester who ultimately murdered her doctor.  In this young woman’s case, her fetus was diagnosed with a rare skin condition that is potentially fatal and requiring constant medical care.   She is presented as a helpless and selfish woman for not wanting to care for a sick baby on her own, while her father is portrayed as a hero – willing to work 3 jobs and find the money to provide the round-the-clock medical care his daughter’s child would need.

The writers created an even less balanced plot by throwing in an unrealistic and medically inaccurate story of a doomed baby born alive in the process of an attempted abortion, who was then (according to the assistant D.A. on the show) murdered by the doctor.  Thus the plot shifts away from blaming the anti-abortionist who murdered the doctor to placing blame on the doctor who was murdered, and suggesting that he deserved it.  This throws the female assistant D.A. into confusion about her belief in the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion.  The fact that the jury ended up convicting the man accused of murdering the doctor was completely lost in this extremely dark “Law and Order twist”.

So we are left with a message that the woman who decides to continue her pregnancy, go through labor, give birth and watch her baby die is noble and good, but the woman who ends her pregnancy when she realizes it will not have a viable life outside the womb is immoral and selfish.

There were so many opportunities for the writers to present the humane side of women faced with complicated pregnancies.  But instead we see respected characters on a beloved TV series cast aspersions on women.  This is deeply stigmatizing, even worse than how anti-abortion protesters shame women in front of clinics every day in this country.  This show did nothing to enhance the complexity of depth of women’s true experiences and only added to the sensationalism and stigma that already exists for women facing these decisions.

NBC should be ashamed for dishonoring the memory of Dr. George Tiller, a man who embodied principles of goodness, kindness, respect, and faith; and for dishonoring the women he helped, whose values told them that the best way to honor themselves and to spare suffering to the doomed life they carried in pregnancy was to end that life.   There was no dignity for either of them in this program.

Jennifer Boulanger, M.Ed., the Executive Director of the Allentown Women’s Center, an independent abortion and reproductive health care center in Pennsylvania and member of the Abortion Care Network.

If you want to make a complaint here is a place where you can lodge one.

Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane is clearly trying to gin up some talk to get his show some heat as the Emmys approach (the show is nominated for best comedy) so he held a public table read for the now infamous abortion episode. The episode will not air on FOX, but will be included in the DVD of the season.

Here are some clips from the table read which took place at the Academy of Arts and Sciences with an audience and an orchestra.  Very different from a normal table read.  For what it’s worth they actually use the word abortion in the script which doesn’t EVER get said on TV.

The premise of the episode is the Lois agrees to be a surrogate for a friend and her husband and then the couple dies in a car crash.  She then has to decide what to do about the fetus.

‘Family Guy’ Channels Controversy Onstage (Washington Post)

If you know me, you know I really don’t do animation on TV or films.  Just not my thing.  So I’ve never seen an episode of Family Guy.  I hear good things about it but I already watch too much TV so I can’t make any more commitments.  Seth McFarlane, the creator of the show, is hugely successful and just signed a new deal at FOX for $100 million.

I was intrigued to read a piece in the Hollywood Reporter saying that Family Guy is going to do an episode on abortion.  Films hardly ever deal with the issue and TV also pretty much avoids it, but last week at Comic-Con, McFarlane said that he was doing an episode about the topic but pretty much already knew that it would never air.

Here’s what he said:

“20th Century Fox, as always, allowed us to produce the episode and then said, ‘You know what? We’re scared to f–king death of this,’” MacFarlane said.

This is the second time an episode of Family Guy didn’t air.  I give McFarlane serious props for taking on this issue.  It’s not that Family Guy is known as a politically correct show so who knows what angle the show which is entitled “Partial Terms of Endearment” would take, but FOX has already made the decision not to air the show.

The show is produced by 20th Century Fox (sister to the FOX network).  While the network supports his right to produce the show, it won’t air it.   What does that mean?  Why produce a show that will never air? I’m sure it has to do with them not believing that they could sell it to advertisers. I guess the content of the episode doesn’t matter at all.  The topic is taboo.

McFarlane is as powerful as Norman Lear was back in the day of Maude.  His talking about this as an issue takes a lot of guts considering the amount of money he has at risk.

Shouldn’t the network wait to see the episode before censoring it?

‘Family Guy’ abortion episode unlikely to air on Fox (HR)

Judy Blume can do not wrong by me.  Her books made my adolescence as bareable as it could be.  I loved every single one of them, and now that my niece is at the “Judy age” I am trying to get her to read all her books too.

Judy caused a bit of a stir last week when she sent out an email on behalf of Planned Parenthood encouraging people to give donations for Mother’s Day to Planned Parenthood.  Smart idea.  Women’s organizations, like all organizations, are hurting these days and need to be really creative.  And let’s remember that Planned Parenthood doesn’t just do abortions, they provide many women across the country with their health care.

The right to lifers went nuts (as usual) and took it to an extreme level with death threats against Judy Blume.  I want to ask them how many of their kids read Are You There God It’s Me Margaret.  I also want to ask them how many of them have taken their daughters to the clinics when they got pregnant.  But the threats hopefully have backfired and made more people contribute.

And honestly, isn’t Mother’s Day is a time to celebrate women who want to be mothers, AND to be thankful we still have the right in this country for women who can’t mother, or who don’t want to mother not to.

The Judy Blume Abortion War (Daily Beast)

Last week I moderated a panel on abortion and popular culture at the National Abortion Federation annual meeting.  It was amazing and humbling to be in a place with people who put themselves on the line each and every day when they go to work because they believe in preserving a woman’s right to her own autonomy.

Some people had to leave early and couldn’t attend the panel and asked me to post my remarks.  Keep in mind that we showed a bunch of clips from TV shows and movies that deal with the issue.  (I’m not posting them due to permissions issues.)

Here is my introduction to the panel:

The objective of this panel is to leave you with some thoughts about popular culture because popular culture is the way that most people outside of this room are exposed to abortion.  Those images reflect choices that are made and values that are formed whether we want to believe it or not.

One of the big questions I wrestle with about pop culture is whether it affects the cultural conversation or reflects it.  As a person who spends a lot of time absorbing pop culture, particularly TV and film, I would venture to say the answer is both.  There are times when pop culture – particularly TV- effects behavior, values and sets an agenda.  Examples I like to use are the 1984 film There’s Something About Amelia that dealt with incest, An Early Frost from 1985 that dealt with AIDS or the 1992’s Doing Time on Maple Drive about a gay teen who tried to commit suicide.  Keep in mind that these examples are from a time when network TV movies were more dominant.  Also think about the cultural conversation that the film Thelma and Louise started several months before the Anita Hill hearing.  It touched a raw nerve and helped create a potent conversation.

The culture has softened and shifted on issues that were taboo only a short time ago and the best example is sexuality.  Until recently gay people were pretty much invisible, and if they were seen they were alone and silent.  But things have shifted on this issue as more people – particularly young people, a much desired demographic in the entertainment business – have grown more comfortable.  While there are very few – if any- shows with gay leads, gay people are interwoven into many shows.  A great example of that is Brothers and Sisters which I call the gayest show on TV.  The gay rights movement has been very smart in how they have used the culture and the pro-choice movement could learn from them.

But abortion is different.  And as you can tell from the clips you just saw (with film clips to come later in our discussion) we started at the top of the mountain with Maude.  I just want to acknowledge Bea Arthur as Maude and Dorothy from the Golden Girls who died this past weekend for her groundbreaking characters.  Maude aired on November 14, 1972 several months before the passage of Roe v Wade.  CBS was not happy at all that it was taking on abortion in its first season, but Norman Lear threatened to pull the show and the network was forced to air the episodes.  65 million people watched it.  (Remember that there was no cable then and very few channels)

Here’s a recent homage to the show from Entertainment Weekly on the occasion of the DVD release:

“On those rare occasions when TV dares to deal with the volatile issue of abortion, it would be unthinkable to play the subject for laughs. But then, to paraphrase the All in the Family spin-off’s theme song, there was Maude. In its second month on the air, Maude grabbed headlines as the first sitcom that dared to deal with the subject, setting a caustic, politically charged tone for the CBS series that would endure throughout its six-year run.  Creator Norman Lear denies his motivation was political. ”We weren’t trying to make a statement,” he insists today. ”(At first) we asked, what’s a good, funny story and pregnancy was a great comedic idea.…”

When the show was rerun in the summer of 73, 39 of CBS’ 198 affiliates refused to air it and it ran with no ads.  I can pretty much guarantee that Maude as it was written in 1972 would not make it on the air today.

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