Abortion in the Eyes of a Girl From Dillon
Source: The New york Times By: Ginia Bellafante Seated at Tami Taylor’s kitchen table, Becky Sproles wrenchingly lays out her dilemma: The only child of an embittered single bartender who gave birth to her when she was a teenager, Becky is faced with the prospect of recycling her mother’s past and she doesn’t know what to do. Initially resolved to end her pregnancy, Becky — played with a bracingly naïve righteousness by Madison Burge on “Friday Night Lights” on NBC — begins to doubt her choice. Is she seeking an abortion simply to counter her mother’s example? What if she were capable, caring and present as a parent? What if, as an emotionally wounded 10th grader without resources living in Dillon, Tex., with its pageant of grim futures, she could defy sociological prediction? The tortured expression on Becky’s face tells us how profoundly she would like this to be so and yet how clearly she foresees the bleaker reality. “I can’t take care of a baby,” she tearfully tells Tami, matriarch to Dillon’s lost youth. “I can’t.” With those words Becky decides to have an abortion. This took place on Friday’s episode of “Friday Night Lights” and was remarkable — abortions have been rare on serial television since the early ’70s. But the effect was particularly resonant this week. On Monday Bristol Palin, America’s most famous teenage mother, briefly appeared as herself on the ABC Family soap opera “The Secret Life of the American Teenager,” bringing greater attention to a popular series that for three seasons has performed didactic and soulless cheerleading for anti-abortion sentiments. (Ms. Palin’s purpose, as it happened, was to inform the show’s heroine, a mediocre French-horn player, that she had been selected for an impressive summer music program in Manhattan because she was a teenage mom. Apparently, there are all kinds of paths to Juilliard.) For years, and especially since Ellen Page’s sardonic young heroine decided to carry her baby to term in the 2007 film “Juno,” television has consistently leaned to the right on the subject of unwanted pregnancy. Often the woman confronting a difficult choice is spared having to exercise her will, thanks to the convenient plot device of a miscarriage, deployed as if to suggest that nature remedies ambivalence. Alternatively, she might forge ahead and have a baby, however unrealistically. This was the case when the driven Harvard-educated lawyer Miranda Hobbes, played by Cynthia Nixon on “Sex and the City,” proceeded to become a single mother, having shown no previous interest in family life. In the most bizarre instance of revisionism on the issue, four years ago “All My Children” reversed Erica Kane’s 1973 abortion, a milestone in television history when it occurred 11 months after the Supreme Court ruled on Roe v. Wade. A character named Josh Madden learned that although Erica had initially conceived him, he had been kidnapped as an embryo and transferred to the womb of another woman by the obviously deranged doctor who had raised him. Fans were outraged, on one level because the story line was ludicrous, even by the measure of daytime television, and on another because the twist had gone a long way toward eradicating the show’s progressive politics, and, in some sense, an entire era. A year before Erica decided to abort her fetus to pursue her career, Bea Arthur’s Westchester firecracker Maude Findlay famously decided on “Maude” to terminate a pregnancy during her fourth marriage. With the support of her husband, she realizes that, at 47, she is too old for night feedings. And while that might have supplied reasonable enough cause in 1972, it is easy to imagine an altogether different scenario unfolding today as legions of women endure hormone injections and huge expense to conceive a child in middle age. It is not merely the rise of evangelical Christianity that accounts for TV’s altered mood, but the dramatic realignment of women’s priorities since the most active days of the feminist movement. What was striking about the exploration of Becky’s circumstance on “Friday Night Lights” was the extent to which the opposing view was depicted as obtuse and out of touch. Two years ago an anonymous young woman ultimately received an abortion on “Private Practice” but not before an hour of television had passed which felt less like drama and more like journalism — sound, balanced and fair — with all relevant moral positions respectfully represented. The writers of “Friday Night Lights” had something altogether different in mind. Becky’s pregnancy had been the result of a one-time sexual encounter with Luke Cafferty, a well-intentioned football star and the son of struggling, religious cattle ranchers who have not always held his best interests at heart. When Luke’s mother learns what has happened, her response is to say that Mary and Joseph thought they were in a tough spot too, at first. Luke bluntly corrects her: “Becky and me are not Mary and Joseph.” “Friday Night Lights” chose to maintain its commitment, above all, to the world it renders — and to its quasi-Marxist understanding that economics dictate everything. Dillon is a difficult place where improperly-cared-for children materialize one after another, week after week. In a subplot to Friday’s episode, Vince, another gridiron prodigy, is forced to scramble around for money to pay for his mother’s rehabilitation in the aftermath of a drug overdose, which leaves him begging her to stop and pay attention to him. Again and again, “Friday Night Lights” seems to remind us, as if in klieg lights, of the consequences of parenthood pursued by accident or default. This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: Correction: July 14, 2010
A television column on Saturday about a decision by a character on “Friday Night Lights” to have an abortion, and how the subject of abortion has been handled on other shows, referred incorrectly to the Roe v. Wade ruling, which established a constitutional right to abortion. The ruling was made by the Supreme Court; it did not involve “passage,” as with legislation. |
