June 27, 2022

[Author's Note: This entry was originally written June 27, 2022. I have added updated 2023 information in brackets, where relevant. The first and most important update is this: women have died.]

Saturday is the 1-year anniversary of Dobbs: 68 percent of OBGYNs said Dobbs has made the management of pregnancy-related medical emergencies worse, while 64 percent said the ruling has worsened pregnancy-related mortality. https://t.co/Cfg12TueWs

— Joyce Alene (@JoyceWhiteVance) June 22, 2023

My friends, I assume you have heard that the Supreme Court of the United States has overturned Roe v. Wade, eliminating the federal case law that required states to legalize abortion until fetal viability - a 50-year-old precedent. You probably know that abortion is now fully illegal in 9 states, with at least 12 others poised to follow suit, and the situation is shifting day by day.

[2023 update: abortion is now banned in 14 states, and severely restricted in 6 others. An additional 9 states have attempted to ban abortion but been blocked in the courts. Source]

It is not my place to claim any particular insight into the issues surrounding pregnancy, motherhood, and abortion. I'm a practicing Catholic, and an opponent of the death penalty, and a registered organ donor, and a regular fixture at my local blood bank, so I'm in favor of saving lives whenever possible. But I'm not a person who has ever been pregnant. So you may very well not be interested in what I've got to say, and that's OK. Come back next post when we're back to the funny stuff. I'll be here.

However, it is my hobby and calling to blog about sexism, and if you think that banning a procedure that saves the lives of people who were assigned female at birth isn't sexist, I'm gonna beg you to think again.

Abortion rights are, in fact, about women, and anyone else with a uterus. The entirety of the global debate over legalizing or criminalizing abortion boils down to this question: Under which circumstances can the government require a person to devote her body to the incredibly difficult and active process of carrying a pregnancy and giving birth, at the risk to her own life?

Isn't this a pop culture blog?

Yes! And so I thought it might be interesting to take a look at how abortion is handled in our DFGRR contestant franchises. Not all of them address the issue, possibly because some of them premiered before 1967, when abortion was illegal in all 50 states. However, 3 of them do at least bring it up, and each of the 3 takes a different tack on the issue. So it is to those 3 that I would like to direct your attention.

#1: Star Trek, Odonna: Plague, or Abortions?

In January of 1969, the original series of Star Trek came out with "The Mark of Gideon." I've touched on it for our 2020 pandemic miniseries, but will briefly summarize again: Gideon, a dangerously overpopulated planet, comes up with a plan that will save them from their high birth rate. Unfortunately for both them, Captain Kirk, and the viewers, that plan suffers from the problem of being extraordinarily stupid. It involves taking adult volunteers to be willingly infected with a deadly plague, and die. First up is Odonna, daughter of one Ambassador Hodin, who kidnaps and seduces Captain Kirk in hopes of catching meningitis (which Kirk apparently had once before, even though it would've been years ago. That's how germs and contagiousness work on Star Trek this week.)

The plan falls apart when Captain Kirk catches wise to what is going on. He immediately asks the obvious questions: why this incredibly stupid plan?! And Hodin shrugs it off as "the only way" because everyone on Gideon has too much respect for life from the moment of conception to even dream of lowering the birth rate.

No respect for Odonna's life, though. She's disposable. Yeah, yeah, she's a willing volunteer, but her motivations for volunteering are left extremely vague. And when the plan falls through, and Spock saves her life, she acts extremely grateful to be alive. So it's not at all clear that she was really 100% on board with this stupid plan in the first place, at least not the part where she, personally, had to die a painful death.

How would the story be different if there had been safe, legal abortion?

It wouldn't happen at all. Seriously. Gideon's troubles are specifically stated to be the result of a birth rate that never declined after their people started living longer. The most elegant solution, as Kirk points out, would be to have fewer babies, by introducing contraception or voluntary sterilization. He doesn't specifically mention the A-word, but the audience would likely have inferred it, given that abortion had been legalized in 4 states over the previous 2 years and was a huge topic of national conversation.

It's worth noting that the entire episode is based on a fallacy, a since-disproven assumption that there was a maximum limit to how many people could live on a planet without exhausting its resources. But still, the Trek writers went to the trouble of crafting a super-unrealistic doomsday scenario specifically so that they could ask the audience which would be worse: legalizing birth control and abortion, or being so overpopulated that extras in their pajamas are constantly hovering outside your windows.

The answer, according to this episode, is the latter. And in the years after it aired, the Supreme Court of the US seemed to agree that reducing the birth rate had some value. It handed down Eisenstadt v. Baird, which made it legal for unmarried women to use contraception, in 1972 and then Roe v. Wade came a year later. Dobbs v. Jackson has now undone both of those precedents, though, so...bring on the extras in PJs, I guess?

Now, let's skip ahead a decade to...

#2: MacGyver, Betty Parker: Abortion, or Annihilation?

The 1988 MacGyver Halloween special, "The Secret of Parker House," must be seen to be believed. It's set up as a ghost story, veers off into murder mystery, and ends up being a feminist cautionary tale about gender-based violence, which also might have a ghost in it. MacGyver's platonic girlfriend Penny Parker (Teri Hatcher) inherits an old house that belonged to her "crazy" Aunt Betty, who disappeared on Halloween 1958. The house has some weird things about it, though: it makes odd sounds; it's nowhere near dusty enough for 30 years of vacancy; the closets are full of neatly ironed plus-size clothes; there's an old diary which proves that Betty went from a lucid woman with lovely handwriting to a paranoid person scribbling nearly-illegible paranoia; oh, and Betty's skeleton has been in a shallow grave underneath a gazebo in the yard all along.

The house is alive...I'm alone with the monster...he wants me to see Dr. Sims, he says it's for my own good but I know it's a lie. Dr. Sims is a butcher. He can't make me go to him.

-Selections from the diary of Betty Parker

Weirdly, the local sheriff, Cliff Howels, is dismissive of all this and suggests Penny is probably going crazy.

MacGyver: Whatever's going on around here's got nothing to do with ghosts or goblins or the supernatural. There's a purely logical explanation for everything.

Penny: Really? That would sound a lot more reassuring if you weren't holding a human skull.

So, are the menfolk right? Is Penny too emotional and/or crazy? Well, not quite...it turns out the "ghost" haunting this house is really Aunt Betty's developmentally disabled friend, Virgil Lang. He has been running her noisy old moonshine still and dusting her room. Once MacGyver notices that the moonshine still had lead pipes and deduces that Betty's "crazy" was probably lead poisoning, there's just one more thing to resolve.

MacGyver: Have you ever heard of a Dr. Sims?

Newspaper editor: Oh yes, that scandal was on the front page for months...he was caught performing abortions.

Penny: All those huge dresses...Aunt Betty was pregnant!

MacGyver (to Cliff): You'd just been elected sheriff. An insane woman, carrying your child? You couldn't afford that kind of scandal.

Turns out Betty was murdered by her boyfriend, that blasé sheriff, because she refused to have an abortion. And he's been covering up for his crime for 30 years, first by convincing the Lang family that Virgil was responsible, and later by drugging Penny to make her seem unreliable, and finally by trying to kill all the named characters in this episode. But Betty gets a bit of revenge from beyond the grave when a gazebo beam with her name carved into it flies through Sheriff Howels' car window and kills him.

How would the story be different if there had been safe, legal abortion?

Most likely, Betty could've aborted her pregnancy, dumped Howels, and gone back to moonshining with Virgil. It's hard to say for sure that she would have done that, since the audience never meets Betty. It's unclear what her resistance to Howels's pressuring her to abort was based on - whether it was ethics, a desire to parent, or concerns for her own safety, for example. However, the screenwriter included the line "Dr. Sims is a butcher" for a reason, and I think that reason is so that we can infer Betty would've been open to aborting if it were safe. And since she thought a back-alley abortion could kill her, she didn't have adequate options.

Sadly, keeping the pregnancy also led to her death, as is the case for a heartbreakingly high number of real-world pregnant people in abusive relationships. In fact, homicide is the leading cause of death for pregnant Americans and 8% of people seeking abortions want one so that they can escape an abusive relationship. The good news is that physical abuse from a male partner decreases if the pregnant person is allowed to abort; the bad news is it doesn't decrease if the pregnant person gets turned away.

In short, if Betty could have had a safe & legal abortion, Cliff would've had no motive for murder, and Betty would still be alive.

But that story took place in 1958. How do fictional girlfriends fare in the era of Roe v. Wade? Well...

#3: Supernatural and Kelly Kline: the Devil's Baby-Mama

I've talked about the Supernatural character Kelly Kline before, and the phrase "whoo boy" came up. She is one of a long series of women on the show who got little to no characterization before becoming human sacrifices, which is why it pains me to admit she's the only person in-universe to touch on the issue of pregnancy termination.

Ms. Kline starts out as a girlfriend of the fictional president, Jefferson Rooney. Unbeknownst to her, Rooney is possessed by Lucifer. Thinking she's talking to her human boyfriend, Kelly floats the idea of starting a family. He jumps on the idea (sorry) and soon enough, she's pregnant. But then, the Winchesters - who are really great at showing up just a little too late - tell her about the whole "possessed by Lucifer" thing. With her help, they and their angelic friend Castiel banish the Devil.

Everybody with me so far? Good, because this is where things get interesting. See, Cas immediately takes Kelly away with the intention of helping her obtain an abortion, which she suddenly decides she can't do. Why not? Well, at first it's just because "I'm its mother." (And possibly the fact that she's a Republican political operative.) Later in the season, however, she fleshes out her motivation by insisting "nothing is born evil." Which, to be fair, is true in the real world, although Supernatural appears to go back and forth on the subject. (The writers mostly land on the side of free will, mostly.) So Kelly does have a point, which she makes most eloquently in a video she records for her unborn son:

Don't let anyone tell you who you're supposed to be, because who you're supposed to be isn't fate. It isn't me. It isn't your father. You are who you choose to be. And I know you're gonna be okay. You are gonna be amazing.

- "Patience" (Season 13 Ep. 3)

But wait, why does she need to record a video? Oh right, tiny little detail here: giving birth to a nephilim (angel/human hybrid) has a 100% mortality rate. Kelly will die because she refused that abortion. Making matters worse, she didn't know that at the time, because the person who breaks that news is a demon (Dagon) who takes her hostage in her second trimester. When she finds out, she tries to commit suicide, but by this point in the pregnancy, the unborn nephilim is powerful enough to possess her and force her to stay alive.

In other words, Kelly's decision was not based on informed consent. She got tricked - by the Devil, by demons, and eventually by her unborn son - into thinking that refusing an abortion was the right thing to do. But it turned out to be the right thing for them, and straight-up fatal for her.

On top of that (oh yes, there's more on top of that), after his birth, the child Jack has this exchange with Sam Winchester.

Sam: You're not even a day old. How do you speak English?

Jack: My mother taught me.

Sam: So you talked to her?

Jack: I was her.

- "Lost & Found" (Season 13 Ep. 1)

He was straight up possessing her from in utero. That means we can't trust that anything we saw Kelly do while she was pregnant was actually a decision she made for herself. So, when she refused to let the Winchesters attempt a prenatal surgery that would remove the child's angelic powers because it would "take away the thing that makes him special;" or told Mary Winchester, "[I'm dying but] it's OK. Wouldn't you die for your sons?" It's possible that none of that was her. The Devil's son was literally pulling her metaphorical strings by then.

The show plays this off as a subplot, but taken as an individual's arc, it's a freaking horror story about loss of bodily autonomy.

How would the story be different if she'd had an abortion?

1. She'd be alive, first of all, which would have been a consolation to her parents (who are later shown to be hurt and confused by her disappearance and the lack of closure.)
2. The Devil would've lost about 90% of his motivation for all the tricks he pulls in seasons 12-15.
3. Jack also goes full supervillain for a while in season 14, so that could also have been averted. And yet...
4. There wouldn't be the new God.

Jack - son of the Devil, misguided toddler in a grown man's body with an archangel's powers, adopted son of Sam & Dean Winchester - ends up taking over from God, aka Chuck, in the final episodes. And he does change Supernatural's world for the better. He undoes the Rapture (which Chuck had started prematurely to mess with the Winchesters), he reforms heaven, and he turns out to be a better (or at least, fairer) author of the universe than Chuck was.

So...I think we're meant to think that Kelly's sacrifice was worth it, and Jack really was capable of greatness, and he really wasn't born evil...but to do that, we need to accept that Kelly's life didn't matter. And the show doesn't really make that easy. The result is a somewhat muddled message: Kelly was right, but also wrong, and she mattered, except when she didn't, and she was an adult who could make her own choices, except an unborn baby was actually in charge.

Whoo, boy.

So what do these 3 characters, Odonna, Betty Parker, and Kelly Kline have in common?

In all 3 cases, not aborting=death

I think that's quite telling, actually, because it's a real-world fact that in many cases, an abortion is performed to save the expectant parent's life. Granted, the "planetary overpopulation" and "impregnated by the devil" scenarios might not be as plausible as the "murdered by abusive partner" one. For that matter, murder is a less common real-life threat to the lives of pregnant people than, for example, ectopic pregnancies or incomplete miscarriages. But all 3 of these story arcs introduced threats to the lives of fertile adult women, and then all of them ask us to have empathy for the women, not just for their unborn children (or in Odonna's case, her hypothetical children). None of these shows asks us to write off the unborn - in fact, Supernatural seems to want us to love Jack even more than we love his mother - but neither do they suggest that the unborn are inherently more important than their mothers are. Women's lives matter, so say they all.

I, for one, think that's a message we need to keep in mind as we face this post-Roe world. As we speak, women with lupus and rheumatoid arthritis are being denied medication because it can be used as an abortifacient - even if they aren't currently pregnant. It's a lot like Gideon declaring that Odonna's theoretical children are more important than she is. Last week a 10-year-old child was denied an abortion in Ohio, even though that meant she'd be forced to carry her abuser's child (and even though no fifth grader is capable of safely delivering.) If her family hadn't gotten her across the border to Indiana, she, like Betty Parker, would've faced a future of being trapped in an abusive and potentially fatal situation. Two weeks ago an American woman nearly died because she partially miscarried at a hospital where abortion is banned. She was given even fewer choices than Kelly Kline, even though there was 0 chance of saving her baby and she desperately wanted to live, because the doctors were literally not allowed to save her. She had to be air-ambulanced to a different country - and if you think that was cheap or easy, please, think again.

[2023 Update: Women have died. So have babies. Since the overturning of Roe, both maternal and infant mortality rates have risen sharply in states that ban abortion. Also, more and more counties in the US are now maternity care deserts, leading to a rise in pregnancy-related deaths. This is at least partially because ob/gyns can't (or won't) practice in states where they could face criminal prosecution for following the standards of care, which is driving rural hospitals to close their maternity wards.]

These cases are real, and this is the real world we now live in. Pop culture is going to have to reckon with that reality in the very near future. As we move forward, however, we need to remember that we've already had these debates before, and the answer always was: Life matters.