Discussion for article #222837
Whether to have an abortion should be down to either the expectant mother or the woman and man that have ’ produced ’ the child . NOBODY else . ( should NOT be down to a bunch of lawmakers ) .
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The US abortion rate is about 17 per 1,000 women, compared to 8.5 in e.g. Finland. That’s twice as high as in a country with decent sex education and reasonable public health practices. Seems like that would be the obvious, cheapest, and politically easiest, way to lower the abortion rate in the US. But no, it would seem that some politicians daily crusade to promote sexual ignorance and indulge their odd groinal obsessions.
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Thanks for this unusually thoughtful piece on this subject. And thank you for NOT saying “pro-life” when naming the anti-choice people. If I read that disgusting term in one more progressive publication, I will scream.
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The conversations with her husband about what to do, as well as how his desire to have children contributed to their divorce, fulfilled what Rhimes said in an interview at the time that the show was hoping to achieve: “I think for me the point is, it’s a painful choice that a lot of women have made in their lives and we just wanted to portray it honestly and with a really good conversation . . . [a]nd see what happens after.”
Grey’s Anatomy is far from a perfect show, but when it came to Cristina Yang and reproductive rights, it achieved a perfect balance.
I don’t watch Grey’s Anatomy but if the first paragraph is true then I disagree with the second paragraph. Yang chose to terminate the pregnancy and as a result of that decision her marriage falls apart. Part of the problem with the way TV depicts abortion is that the woman who chooses abortion must always suffer some punishment or consequence for making that decision. She has to “lose” something in exchange for exercising her right to have an abortion. I’ll agree that TV is depicting abortion accurately when the woman has an abortion, goes through a brief period of sadness, and then moves on with her life.
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The anti-choice, anti-contraceptive movement is driven by the Sex Nazis: “No sex for YOU!” It’s all about keeping women from having sex not intended to produce children.
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It’s worth pointing out that in Mad Men, Peggy’s result of having a child was not, in fact, really a decision, but the result of ignorance and/or denial about even being pregnant. And then, of course, the state decided that she wasn’t competent to make her own decision thereafter to give the baby up for adoption – just another way that the state overrode women’s choices about their bodies and lives. (She’s able to keep her career only by passing the child over to her sister and more or less having nothing further to do with it.)
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Ok…I will play devil’s advocate on this.
We are talking about TV, mostly drama TV. In drama TV, a child creates many more opportunities for further drama than an abortion does. A writer can go to nearly unlimited places with a child…the only place they can with a past abortion is some form of accusation, or even less likely, some form of consoling the character (and strictly from a writing perspective, having the baby die is going to make the character more sympathetic than having an abortion).
Not saying that outside societal forces don’t have an impact on this, but the internal writing mechanisms are playing a huge part, too.
It’s worth noting, in the same vein, that this was a Finale. So there is no need for any more story plots.
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While I do remember Maude and the uproar around that episode, the abortion episode I remember best is from the little remembered series James at 15(16). That was my world and while they did pussyfoot around a bit with language, we got it.
Both abortion and teen pregnancies are higher in the U.S. than in every other western country, and yet the “puritan-ites” won’t allow sex education, which has been shown to lower both rates.
Reminds me of all the Repubs who still promote “trickle-down” economics. The proof that their theories don’t work is staring them in the face, but still…
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Well, yes and no. Yang’s husband really, really wanted children, but they never discussed this very important fact before they married. Yang decided to put her career first, convinced that she couldn’t have both. And yet, with the combined salaries of 2 specialists, they couldn’t find a decent nanny/housekeeper???
An interesting aspect of abortion sentiment is how it’s been manipulated by politics. In the 70s a friend’s unmarried sister got pregnant as a late teen/early twenties. The two sisters traveled from TX to CA for an abortion and they were both OK with it then and years on. They came from a very devout Church of Christ family, were enthusiastic church goers themselves, and didn’t have moral qualms about the decision. The premarital sex was kind of a problem, but not the abortion. Zip forward 15 or so years and now they and their TX and C of C cohorts are totally opposed. At the time it was morally OK, 15 years on it was a serious moral failing. Why? The “Moral Majority” and “Conservative Christian” Republicans, of course - a political manipulation meant to garner votes became a firm moral belief of their church society.
On the opposite side of things, my daughter went off to college in Boston in the 90s with generalized abortion-isn’t-OK feelings, but no strong stance as it hadn’t really come up in her life. In her sophomore year she lived down the street from a women’s clinic. Every Saturday the “religious” folks would show up banging trash can lids, shouting, and marching, and generally disrupting the sleep of the college crowd. It made her seriously consider the question of abortion. Her conclusion was that the trash can lid bangers were bullies trying to muscle everyone else into doing their will and that the women involved had the right to make their own decisions without the harassment. Politics in action, just not the way the Right to Life movement had in mind. As a grown woman with two little kids my daughter still has strong opinions on the subject and those opinions were forged in the fire of Saturday morning ugliness.
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I’d also add that within the US, places where sex education is most backwards (abstinence-only southern counties) have the highest rates of abortions (legal and illegal since that’s the world those southerners tend to live in). The old Clinton maxim of safe, legal, and rare appears to have fallen on deaf ears.
If you want fewer abortions, try to have fewer unplanned pregnancies; if you want fewer unplanned pregnancies, it is far more productive to make sexual activity less likely to result in an unplanned pregnancy than to change human nature to stop people from fulfilling a basic physiological drive.
But, of course, it isn’t really about abortions, and it isn’t even really about sex. It is about keeping a large portion of the population under toe. And at that, the southern strategy is working perfectly.
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To be fair, dramas require conflict. As boring as “happy family with no problems” is, “happy family with no problems who has an abortion and continues to have no problems” is equally boring. That said, there is a bit of room between “no problems” and “contributes to the marriage falling apart”.
I do agree that we are still missing the “abortion as not-life-destroying event” view. It’s just harder to fit into a TV production, especially when the number of depicted abortions in the medium is so depressingly low. So, definitely not “the perfect balance”, but certainly a high point amongst the crowd, and if we can’t applaud that at least we’ll tend to not see any more of this.
It isn’t about the sex either. It is about subjugating women, plain and simple. Penalize women for their natural desires, AND for those of their male peers, and those women have no time or energy to be all uppity and out of their station in life.
Just want to add to a thoughtful take that abortion isn’t always a decision that has pain and sadness associated with it. Some women feel nothing but relief.