A Funny Thing About Abortion on TV

Traditionally, and with few exceptions, scripted TV has tried to stay away from the pro-life/pro-choice abortion divide. But a curious thing happens when pregnancy does enter the equation, especially on comedy shows: The fetus is humanized, and abortion becomes unthinkable.

It’s no secret that television as a whole leans to the left, both news programs and dramas. Television actors, directors, and producers as a group are just as liberal as their infamous counterparts on the big screen. But when the topic turns to pregnancy, and that simple question—“When does life begin?”—at the heart of the abortion debate, even avowed pro-choicers find themselves uttering classic anti-abortion arguments once the cameras start rolling.

Take CBS’ The Big Bang Theory, which in seasons 9 and 10 had a storyline dealing with the pregnancy of one of the main characters, and the various reactions of her husband and the other main characters. Now, creator and showrunner Chuck Lorre is a dedicated liberal across the board. I assume much of the cast and crew feel the same way. But throughout Bernadette’s pregnancy, there were innumerable references to the “person”, in the words of another main character, growing inside her, scenes of friends and family looking at ultrasounds and listening to the baby’s heartbeat, and otherwise treatments of the fetus as exactly what it is, and what real-life experience tells us it is: a human being.

Another example: in its fourth season, ABC’s Modern Family saw the pregnancy of one of its main characters, Gloria. In one episode in particular, she and Claire discussed motherhood and the ramifications of having another person growing inside them. The actress who plays Claire is openly liberal, and in fact has attended fundraisers for Planned Parenthood. Yet in this episode, there was no evidence of that. Claire talked about the strangeness of “having another person inside you” (her words). In another episode, Gloria and Jay, the baby’s father, use a microphone to talk to their unborn child, and worry about him hearing them fight. Would a “blob of cells”, as pro-choicers prefer to think of fetuses, care about its parents fighting, or the quality of its mother’s singing?

There are a multitude of other examples of this phenomenon on TV, in both current and older shows. Conversely, circumstances in which abortion is openly praised, or the unborn child is indeed discussed as a “blob of cells”, are much rarer. Only the cast and crew can say for sure why they are so comfortable with humanizing an organism they are only too happy to exterminate in real life, but it is an interesting trend, given the well-known prevalence of liberal activism on the major networks.