To quote Gloria Feldt, “Media portrayals, real or fictional, don’t merely inform us — they form us.” In this series, I will be examining five films – classic, mainstream, independent, foreign, and pre-Roe – and five television shows – daytime soap, pre-Roe, drama, critically lauded, and teen-oriented – that address unexpected pregnancy, to examine how past portrayals can influence and reflect society’s view of abortion.
Some television shows will come right up to the edge of abortion, then back away with the Conveniently Timed Miscarriage. My favorite example of this phenomena occurred on the mid-1990s TV show Party of Five, the occasionally-overwrought drama about five siblings orphaned after their parents were killed in a car crash. Residing in a ridiculously pretty house in San Francisco, the Salinger kids – headed by a scruffy Matthew Fox rocking a semi-mullet – dealt with dead parents, alcoholism, infidelity, cancer, business woes, and Jennifer Love Hewitt.
In the show’s second season, the oldest sister, Julia, gets pregnant. The teenager is in a pretty serious relationship with her boyfriend Justin, whom she tells about the pregnancy. Initially set on having an abortion, Julia bolts from the clinic before the appointment and begins to have second thoughts. After her oldest brother Charlie finds the pregnancy test in the trash (shades of 90210 – apparently in TV-Land, the only safe way to dispose of a pregnancy test is to shred it and then eat the scraps), he talks to Julia about her options, eventually revealing that when he was in college, his then-girlfriend had an abortion. Other opinions come courtesy of Julia’s younger sister Claudia, who is horrified that her sister is thinking about abortion; and her older brother’s girlfriend, who is opposed to abortion on the grounds that she was adopted. In the end, Julia decides to have the abortion, but the Conveniently Timed Miscarriage occurs instead.
The episode features more in-depth discussions about abortion than most shows of similar quality and audience, particularly between Julia and Charlie. They talk about all of her options, and while it’s clear that Charlie thinks she should have an abortion, he does say that he will support her no matter what, and that if she chooses to continue the pregnancy, she and the baby can live at home.
At one point in the episode, Julia observes that she’s getting a lot of male opinion on abortion. Her point is that she could use a girl to talk to, and I agree (and it would have been nice if the two other girls in the episode weren’t quite so unwilling to talk about abortion), but it was interesting to see two male viewpoints – Charlie’s and Justin’s – that were different yet equally sensitive and respectful. While Justin indulged in a brief flight of fancy about raising the child, he accepted Julia’s choice to have the abortion and comforted her as best as he could. Charlie’s candor and support of his younger sister is touching, and although his attempts to comfort her are sometimes clumsy, it’s clear that he just wants her to be okay.
After she miscarries, Justin tells Julia that in a way he’s a little bit relieved, because she didn’t have to make a choice. But Julia takes no solace in that, telling Justin that she would have had an abortion – it was the “least worst of a lot of bad options.” While the Powers That Be may have decided that having a main character actually go through with an abortion was too controversial, the subject is discussed in a thoughtful manner, blessedly free of the hysterics and rhetoric that other shows too frequently traffic in.
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When she's not writing, Sarah volunteers at her local animal shelter and reads way too much. |
