TV and pushing the envelope
Source: New York Times
Television's Most Persistent Taboo
By KATE AURTHUR
Published: July 18, 2004
TWO 14-year-old girls are talking. One, named Manny, says to the other: "I'm just trying to do the right thing here. For me. For everyone, I guess."
The speaker is a character on "Degrassi: The Next Generation," a popular Canadian soap opera for kids, who is telling her best friend why she's decided to have an abortion. The two-part episode was shown on CTV in Canada in January. But the N, the Viacom-owned cable channel that shows "Degrassi" in the United States, has decided not to schedule the episodes.
Unlike such once-taboo issues as date rape, gay relationships and teenage sex, abortion on television remains an aberration. Manny is the very rare character who actually has one; what's even more rare is that she doesn't regret it afterward.
Pregnancy as a consequence of casual sex has been a favorite TV plot predicament since "Peyton Place" in the 60's. But now young, unwed mothers, once the subjects of afterschool specials, are portrayed as stylish thirtysomething moms who can relate especially well to their teenage children ("Gilmore Girls," "One Tree Hill"). The premise of a new ABC series, "The Days," which has its premiere tonight at 10, is that an upper-middle-class high schooler and her mother find out they are pregnant on the same day.
On TV, most women and girls who contemplate an abortion make up their minds, often at the last minute, that they're keeping their babies ("Beverly Hills, 90210," "Dawson's Creek," "The O.C."), even if they happen to get as far as a clinic or doctor's office ("Felicity," "Sex and the City"). It was this trend that inspired Greg Berlanti, the creator of "Everwood," to depict someone who goes through with an abortion — it was one of the stories he pitched to WB before it bought the show. The episode, broadcast in May 2003, made "Everwood" one of the few shows on network television to portray a character's decision to have an abortion since "Maude" in 1972 (abortion was legal in New York state, where "Maude" took place, before Roe v. Wade was decided in January 1973). "I just thought, `Why aren't people talking about this on TV?' — pretending like it doesn't exist until, frankly, the rights are taken away again?" Mr. Berlanti said in a recent interview. "Let's get families and young girls and boys to see what it's like to go through this. Let's put some kind of human face on this issue."
The episode ended with the doctor who performed the abortion going to church: "Bless me, Father, for I have sinned," he confesses to a priest. About his choice to end the episode that way, Mr. Berlanti said, "For me it wasn't the punctuation mark of the show." And "Everwood" might revisit the topic soon — the past season's finale revolved around another unwanted pregnancy.
"Six Feet Under" has also featured an abortion — and like "Everwood," it did so in a highly ambivalent context. In the show's third season, Claire (Lauren Ambrose) realized she was pregnant by her most-likely-gay ex-boyfriend. A freshman at an art college, she was matter-of-fact about her decision: "Do you think you could give me a ride?" she asked Brenda (Rachel Griffiths). "I have to get an abortion."
But in the next episode, Claire hallucinated that she saw her father and other dead characters — one of whom was her fetus, who appeared as an apple-cheeked infant. That was the show's second aborted-fetus-as-person reverie; in the previous season, the promiscuous Nate (Peter Krause) was faced with the children he might have had, including a 7-year-old girl who said to him: "Hi. You killed me." And then: "I don't harbor any bad feelings or anything. I'm pro-choice. Well, at least I would be, if I were alive."
Josh Schwartz, creator of "The O.C.," is pro-choice, too, he said recently...
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