For the first half hour or so of tonight’s new Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episode, I wasn’t really paying attention as I was trying to do two or three other things at the same time.
The story felt like a story that’s been done on this show before: a young woman sexually abused by a supposedly pious and virtuous man goes to New York to get an abortion. Her parents show up in New York intending to take her back home so that she’ll deliver the baby.
Even if there is no previous episode in all of Law & Order (classic, Criminal Intent, Trial by Jury, Desk Duty, SVU, etc.) matching that plot outline, it felt very familiar, and even a little stale.
Everyone seems to assume Evangeline Miller (Kira McLean) was impregnated by her boyfriend, a young man just old enough to get a tattoo in New York. And she lets the detectives think that.
But in a family court hearing, Evangeline literally points to her stepfather as the biological father of her baby. Okay, this is getting interesting…
Evangeline’s mother, Tammy (Lucy Walters), thinks this is just a lie because Evangeline wants to “murder” the “baby,” which is “a gift from God.” Surely Evangeline would regret it if she goes through with it, which is why she must be taken back home, to Ohio.
But Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) says that New York guarantees reproductive autonomy for all women regardless of age and regardless of what the woman’s parents say. Carisi (Peter Scanavino), who is now an assistant district attorney, says he will do his part to uphold New York law.
At about the half hour mark, a district attorney from Ohio barges into a New York courtroom with arrest warrants for the Special Victims Unit detectives, for Carisi and for the judge, and other New York officers of the court. They are, according to him, accessories to murder before the abortion can even happen. This is really getting interesting now.
I didn’t catch the guest character’s name (the IMDB page for this episode seems to be incomplete) but the actor is definitely Christian Clemenson, who famously played Jerry Espenson, a lawyer afflicted by Asperger’s, on Boston Legal.
But where Espenson was likable and sympathetic, Clemenson’s SVU character is an oily hypocrite who sheds crocodile tears for all the “babies” who have been “murdered” since the Roe v. Wade decision, and then triumphantly panders to a crowd of anti-choice hypocrites.
Clemenson plays the Ohio lawyer with just as much panache as he played Espenson. And also subtlety when this new rôle requires it, such as when it becomes clear that the visiting district attorney doesn’t really care that an Ohio man raped his own stepdaughter.
This SVU episode makes it quite clear that the so-called “pro-life” hypocrites are much more interested in controlling women than they are in the sanctity of life. They don’t really care whether that control is exercised through rape or through diabolical anti-abortion laws.
I’ve often said that SVU is didactic. But given how screwed up our society is regarding women’s rights, SVU needs to be didactic.
The episode is titled “The Burden of Our Choices.” It was written by Julie Martin and Micharne Cloughley, and directed by Martha Mitchell. Presumably it will be rerun on NBC in a few months, and surely rerun in syndication in a year or two. It should be available for streaming now.