Spoiler alert: This post discusses the most recent episodes of Scandal and Please Like Me, the new Netflix/Marvel series Jessica Jones and previous season’s plot points of Grey’s Anatomy.
The lead character in a major prime time network drama had an abortion.
Scandal’s white-hatted-gladiator, Olivia Pope, skipped an official White House dinner to terminate an unwanted pregnancy and we didn’t even know that she was pregnant until it happened.
There was no soul searching and no miscarriage to save the character from being a Woman Who Had an Abortion.
All in all, the procedure took up about a minute in a montage set to Silent Night during the hugely popular show’s mid-season finale.
This is a huge step forward in the representation of abortion on screen, and one we probably should have known would come from Shonda Rhimes, Scandal’s showrunner.
Rhimes previously wrote an abortion into the life of Grey’s Anatomy’s Christina Yang, a woman who was determined not to have children.
It has frustrated me for years that abortions are rarely the road taken on television and in film, and to finally see it presented as something a woman does without fanfare is simply excellent.
Lots of women have had abortions. In the United States and Australia almost one in three women will have an abortion. Half of all pregnancies are unplanned, and half of those unplanned pregnancies end in termination.
And yet, I can count on one hand the number of female characters I’ve seen chose an abortion for non-medical reasons. (Erica on Degrassi High and Christina Yang were it.)
But this week was different.
I saw three abortions in the space of three days, and each one was represented differently, but in a wonderfully real way.
Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington) helped save American women’s health organisation Planned Parenthood from potential defunding before securing her abortion.
On Please Like Me, the Australian series which also airs on US youth cable network Pivot, Claire’s (Caitlin Stacey) abortion was a major plot point, but the plot wasn’t a “will she have one?” scenario, it actually took us through the days in which the procedure took place.
And finally, on Netflix’s newest Marvel collaboration Jessica Jones, Jessica (Krysten Ritter) procures abortion drugs for a client in prison who is pregnant to her tormentor.
These are three women with very different lives and circumstances.
The first is the live-in girlfriend of the President of the United States: she’s mature, wealthy and stable.
The second is a young, unemployed, single woman who isn’t in a relationship. The man in the scenario is somewhere in Europe, while she is in Melbourne.
The third is in prison, terrified and alone, and pregnant to a man who controlled her — she couldn’t have consented to sex with him.
While all these women are fictional, their situations are not entirely unreal (some aspects, like being the President’s girlfriend or the victim of supernatural mind control are a bit outside the norm, sure). That’s what makes these moments important.
Women need to see other women choosing to have an abortion and not agonising over it, or behaving like it’s going to ruin their lives forever. Yes, having an abortion can cause sadness, and in some cases regret, but it’s not a certainty that it will.
Some women are just going to be relieved.
And that’s ok.
This week, something shifted in TV-land, and it seems that women are now permitted to have control of their bodies and not apologise for it.
It’s about time.
Top Comments
Listen up, anti-choicers - it's time to educate yourselves with peer-reviewed literature.
Myths and facts about abortion from SA Health: http://www.sahealth.sa.gov....
Abortion myths: http://www.womenshealthspec...
Top 10 Anti-abortion myths (including whether foetuses feel pain): http://civilliberty.about.c...
Happy reading!
Was that supposed to be information that everyone doesn't know?
Can't see how any of those points affects the anti-abortion commenters at all.
Their arguments are based on misinformation and lies. The anti-choicers either don't know it, or they deliberately choose to ignore well-known information.
Says YOU.
Most people's comments don't have anything to do with the stuff in those articles.
I haven't seen anyone mention that abortions give you breast cancer.
The pro choicers arguments include the following points:
-foetuses don't exist (???)
-by not explicitly rejecting abortion, Christianity endorses it
-an unborn foetus has been referred to as an alien, a danger and a "user" of its mothers body.
-unborn people don't have a right to be born, decreed by those who already have been born
-children might be abused (baby p used as example) so it's better they not be born at all
-when men 'jack off' it's the same as abortion
-how dare religious people use religion in their arguments, it's only ok for me to use it to try and discredit them.
-pro lifers are advocating for the murder of women
-comparing human pregnancy to a tomato seed, and saying neither exist
But please, by all means, continue to lecture me on your use of ~science and logic~
The religion thing is fair, the bible is often used against abortion being legal so why cry foul when pro choice side found a way to use it for our side
Can bring a knife to a fight and not expect that the other side wont use it given a chance
Pregnancy is a health risk, not every woman sees pregnancy as a blessing but a curse or burdan and a fetus feeds of its host, sometimes to the hosts detriment, like a parasite
Remove abortion rights, leave women with no choice, it is as good as murdering them
Yeah, when you look at it like that it is all a bit ridiculous isn't it.
How embarrassing, all seems so desperate.
Absolutely, calling a HUMAN child/foetus/baby (however u refer to them) a *parasite* is an awful thing to say. Shame on them.
'Mel', no one is lecturing you under your various guises. The sad thing is all your arguments, are used back against you such as your side using religion to control women then getting upset when finally, finally, it is turned back on you. I couldn't care less what the bible, a book of 340 contradictions, has to say so I won't address anything of that nature. However:
1. Foetuses exist. No one has said they don't. They simply don't exist *as* a human.
2. SCIENTIFICALLY, it is indeed a FACT that a foetus ('unborn' foetus is redundant, as you don't have a 'born foetus' - again with the desperate emotional manipulation) needs the body of the mother, to survive. If you want to argue than an embryo/foetus doesn't, go right ahead, but you will be laughed at even by anti-choicers.
3. It is strange how you feel the need to talk of 'unborn people' even though there is no such thing and that concept is ridiculous, 'unborn babies' and now, an 'unborn foetus' yet get up in arms when people on the other side use their terms, and SCIENTIFIC terms, at that? Can you not see the hypocrisy?
4. This is quite obvious if you use logic, and not emotion. Would you prefer to have more 'baby P's? Or do you think they are better off not being born at all, than going through that? Your response will say a good deal about your logic and ability for compassion.
5. Any person knows that an ejaculate that doesn't result in conception results in a waste of sperm. Catholics, among others, even say this. Why is it anti-choicers will argue about all POTENTIAL life is precious, but don't see that it is the same POTENTIAL life, as anything else? I think that *fact* is uncomfortable and that is why you avoid it.
6. How dare we use the tactic that YOU have been using for decades, against YOU? Don't we know that *only* Christians are allowed to use their religion to silence, manipulate and control us? Well excuse us for turning it around on you - finally - and exposing your hypocrisy. How uncomfortable for you? Tough.
7. By suggesting a woman should give up her rights to her health, welfare and well-being and forcing her to endure a pregnancy, which could very well end up in her either dying in a backyard abortion OR, throwing herself off a cliff/any other method of suicide which would end TWO lives, anti-choicers most definitely are advocating for murder. If it is an uncomfortable fact for you, again, tough. Facts are facts.
8. Not able to understand that a tomato seed does NOT exist yet as a plant, the same as an acorn is not an oak tree, yet lecturing *US* on Science, of all irony and hypocrisy. If you don't understand the difference between a potential life and an actual life, if you don't understand that a tomato seed exists purely as a tomato seed, and not as a tomato *plant*, if you don't understand that an acorn is not an oak tree, then you fail basic science and logic and until you can discern the difference between POTENTIAL and *ACTUAL* you have no right lecturing anyone on SCIENCE.
PS I think we need IP logged addresses listed under people's posts, like other sites do. It would weed out the one person posting under 9 multi-'guest' accounts and proclaiming a 'majority'. Like as if it isn't obvious ;)