ON TV, MOVING PAST TABOOS
The hot-button topic of abortion continues to evolve as series and a new documentary depict a simple reality
In an episode of “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” that aired days after the election in November, Paula, a middleaged mom played by Donna Lynne Champlin, is lying in bed looking slightly peaked, when the doorbell rings.
Her teenage son hollers from somewhere offscreen: “Mom, I’ll get it, since you just had an abortion.”
This is how viewers of the CW musical dramedy found out that Paula, whose unplanned pregnancy threatened her dream of enrolling in law school, had opted not to have another child — not with a tear-streaked confession or an anguished scene in a clinic waiting room.
It also happened to be the second show on the CW, whose audience skews young and female compared to other broadcasters, to tackle the subject in matter-offact fashion, following a similar story line on the telenovela spoof “Jane the Virgin.” Once prone to portrayals that were wishy-washy or moralizing, TV and its storytellers are increasingly treating abortion as a simple reality for many women. In the last two years alone, shows ranging from ABC’s prime-time soap “Scandal” to the surreal Netflix animated comedy “BoJack Horseman” to the AMC computing drama “Halt and Catch Fire” have shown characters opting to terminate pregnancies with little guilt or equivocation. Perhaps not coincidentally, most of these episodes were written by women.
TV is also diversifying its portrayals. On Monday, “Abortion: Stories Women Tell,” a documentary that takes a sympathetic look at women affected by stringent abortion regulations in
Missouri, will run on HBO. The women range in age, race, marital status and motivation, undermining the idea that abortion is something for carefree twentysomethings or, as Paula jokes on “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” “teenagers the month after winter formal.”
Nearly 45 years after Norman Lear’s controversial sitcom “Maude” first tackled the subject in prime time — sending sponsors and affiliates running for the hills — a creatively vibrant TV industry has grown comfortable with the “A” word. If abortion is still not exactly commonplace on the small screen, particularly when compared to the statistics — there are roughly 1 million abortions performed a year in the United States — it is clearly no longer the taboo it once was.
For Aline Brosh McKenna, cocreator and executive producer of “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” and her female-dominated writing staff, Paula’s decision grew organically out of conversations about character development.
Choosing to put her ambitions first, after subsuming much of her identity to her husband and children, represented a breakthrough for Paula. “We didn’t have any conversations about the politics of it,” says McKenna, who sees these abortion story lines as a natural byproduct of more women like her running shows. “If you’re writing about women’s lives, it’s a pretty hard thing not to write about.”
Unplanned pregnancies are nothing new to “Jane the Virgin,” an emotionally grounded if implausible tale about Jane (Gina Rodriguez), a chaste young Latina accidentally inseminated at her gynecologist’s office. Jane chose to continue with the pregnancy, delighting her devoutly Catholic grandmother, Alba (Ivonne Coll).
But Jane’s fortysomething mother, Xiomara (Andrea Navedo), made a different choice in a plot last fall, opting to terminate an accidental pregnancy of her own. “In the interest of balance, of exploring different women’s relationship to their bodies and their reproductive rights,” says creator and show runner Jennie Snyder Urman, “we owed the other side.”
Snyder Urman, who, like McKenna, received no resistance from the CW about the story line, says: “I wanted to tell a different kind of abortion story.”
To abortion rights advocates, these understated portrayals help destigmatize a misunderstood procedure; to opponents, they downplay the gravity of what should be a monumental decision.
“Even progressives must be willing to acknowledge that abortion is serious — not a momentary annoyance or trivial act,” writes Gracy Olmstead, a blogger at the Federalist, a conservative website.
Like them or not, these portrayals more accurately reflect the demographic reality, says Gretchen Sisson, a sociologist at Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health at UC San Francisco. Paula and Xiomara are already mothers, like 59% of women who have abortions. Xiomara, like 25% of women who have abortions, is Latina.
Historically, Sisson has found that women of color, lower-income women and those who already have children — groups more likely to have abortions in real life — are underrepresented in small-screen portrayals. While this has begun to change, television has catching up to do.
“There’s so much misinformation and social myth about abortion,” Sisson says. “People believe it’s less common and riskier than it really is. They don’t have a good sense of who’s getting it or for what reasons. A lot of what we see on TV reflects those social myths and perpetuates them, and that has political consequences.”
Mega-producer Shonda Rhimes has arguably done more to destigmatize abortion than just about anyone in the modern network TV business, working it into at least three of her prime-time ABC dramas — “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Private Practice” and “Scandal.”
In a groundbreaking 2015 episode of the latter series, protagonist Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington), D.C. fixer and girlfriend to the president, underwent an abortion that was depicted on-screen, rather than merely implied — a rarity for a broadcast network. Meanwhile, her longtime nemesis, Republican Sen. Mellie Grant (Bellamy Young), filibustered on behalf of Planned Parenthood.
What might have caused a boycott a decade or two earlier led to an angry tirade from Rush Limbaugh, but not much more in the way of backlash.
Another major tipping point was a Season 4 story arc on the NBC/DirecTV series “Friday Night Lights” involving a high school student whose abortion becomes a local controversy in her small West Texas town.
Once the domain of soaps or made-for-TV movies, abortion now turns up in sitcoms — albeit nontraditional ones, like “You’re the Worst” on FXX.
It’s even become a trope on period dramas, including “Mad Men,” “Downton Abbey,” “Mercy Street” and “Call the Midwife,” which tend to highlight the danger and desperation faced by women in the era before Roe vs. Wade (or in Great Britain, the Abortion Act of 1967).
Whether television is simply catching up with the American public, 69% of whom oppose overturning Roe vs. Wade, or the rise of cable networks and streaming services being less dependent on advertisers that has enabled riskier storytelling, is unclear.
It also seems possible that TV writers are responding to a growing activist movement to remove the shame of abortion — embodied by the Twitter hashtag #Shout YourAbortion.
Whatever the reason, these narratives have become more commonplace over a period of heightened intensity in the battle over abortion.
“You can’t discount how much the election and what was going on politically was infecting and scaring people in the writers room,” says Snyder Urman, who included a caption reading “#supportplannedparenthood” in a postelection episode of “Jane the Virgin.” “You want to react in whatever corner of the Earth you have some control over.”
But because so many shows have urban, blue-state settings, scripted TV doesn’t necessarily do a great job of illustrating the restrictions faced by an increasing number of women in the nation.
That’s where nonfiction storytelling comes in.
Launched last year, the topical comedy show “Full Frontal With Samantha Bee” has made access to reproductive health a focal point of its coverage. According to a report by Media Matters, a liberal media watchdog group, the TBS comedy series has devoted twice as much time to the subject as any of the network news broadcasts.
Directed by Tracy Droz Tragos, “Abortion: Stories Women Tell” chronicles the experiences of women at an abortion clinic in Illinois, just over the state line from Missouri, in wake of a new law mandating a 72-hour waiting period.
Tragos’ previous film, “Rich Hill,” examined poverty in smalltown America, and she says it made her more aware of “the cycle of poverty perpetuated by not having access to education, birth control and abortion.”
In a bid to “bust the stereotype,” Tragos gathered as many abortion stories as she could. While many women were reluctant to appear on-camera, others were eager to recount their experiences — with poverty, with domestic abuse, with the discovery of a fetal abnormality. “Many of them found some personal solace saying I’m not a bad person,” Tragos says. “It speaks to the power of storytelling.”