(And on Fathers' Day, too!)
Last night, I happened to check out a show called Cold Case that I hadn't seen before but had been curious about since seeing a parody of it on MadTV. (Sure enough, they were dead on with the "This is a flashback from the '60s, as you can tell by our groovy clothes and the classic rock songs we are listening to"...pretty silly.)
The whole case revolved around a couple of young bohemians who were contacts for a doctor who provided safe abortions (contrasted with another guy who used a bicycle spoke and gave women deadly infections in the process) and who got killed for their trouble. Then CBS finished up their prime time lineup with the movie adaptation of John Irving's The Cider House Rules, which I have not seen--though I read the book and liked it.
My first thought was that boy, the fundies must be up in arms about this. But as I watched the Cold Case story unfold, I started to wonder if there wasn't a cleverly subtle conservative (though perhaps not Bible Belt conservative) intent behind the whole thing. Consider:
(spoilers follow)
(1) The "Black Power" group (stand-ins for the Black Panthers) were presented as incredibly unsympathetic and practically psychopathic. (Never mind that the real Panthers provided much-needed social services for kids and families--that was not portrayed at all.) They were suspects because they staunchly opposed abortion for black women as "genocide" (hard to blame them, frankly, if they ever read the racist writings of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger...but hey).
(2) The Abbie Hoffmanesque "movement leader" was portrayed as a sellout (in the present day he wore business suits and sold motivational books) who had secretly been an FBI informant, and who killed the young couple when they found out he was a "snitch".
(3) The primary example shown of someone getting an abortion from this source was a young, middle class white couple. The guy was opposed to abortion and wanted to get married instead. The girl responded that she wanted the abortion because she wanted to "go places" (stewardess school) and a kid would hold her back. Completely vapid, selfish motivations, which were what made me start wondering about the true agenda.
The boyfriend bursts into the abortion provider's office, trying to stop it, and the dude who got killed that day "reasons" with him not by saying that it is his girlfriend's choice or something reasonable like that, but "you want a wife and kid this young, when you got your whole life ahead of you? Come on, man!" This boyfriend, who is in the present day apparently a white collar success and was the primary "red herring" suspect, says that he was swayed by this logic, and that "I was against the abortion at first, but it ended up working out pretty well for me." Hmmm...again, if this wasn't intentionally a conservative-slanted caricature of an abortion couple, it could easily be presented in that light.
[Just FTR, I want to reiterate that I am in favour of safe, legal ("and rare") abortions in the first trimester.]