When Television Wouldn’t Touch Abortion with a 4 Foot Coat Hanger

This will be the very last time I ever cover the topic of abortion in this blog of mine about TV. While there are plenty of other topics relating to abortion to blog about, I have created a blog about covering the topic of abortion and don’t want to cover it anymore here after this post is published.

 

https://fadamsecretaryblog.blogspot.com/

 

You can see how hard television leaned into the pro-choice topic nowadays even if you don’t watch the news at all. But this wasn’t always the case. At one point, television wouldn’t touch the abortion topic as it was too controversial. And it never would have covered it in a positive light.

 

One of the first shows to cover abortion was The Defenders. Don’t confuse this with the show starring Jerry O’Conner from more recently. There were no advertisers for this episode. But that wasn’t the end of it by a long shot.

 

It wasn’t until much later that Law & Order covered abortion in one of their earlier episodes. This show was nearly cancelled as a result. But the showrunner, Dick Wolf, was able to fix the issues elsewhere with the show by adding two major main female characters which helped make the show run for 20 seasons until its run was eventually surpassed by its spin-off.

 

Eventually, normalizing abortion became normal for TV shows. A topic that was once considered taboo became a topic that “had to be covered” for whatever dumb reason society will give you. And it didn’t even used to be that characters even got abortions. They were okay living with the consequences of their poor decisions. But now it is so normal that people don’t even question it. They depict scenes of it onscreen, such as in Scandal. And this is after a Family Guy episode wasn’t allowed to air because the network saw it as too controversial.

 

Sometimes television can change for the better. And sometimes it changes for the worst. I wish that this was never something accepted as right or covered so much by television. After the Dobbs decision put a wise end to this, television became even more outspoken in favor of abortion. It is sad that this is the world that we live in. And for more thoughts on abortion, they will be covered in the above mentioned blog and never again in this one.