More On 'Friday Night Lights'

By Dave Andrusko

Some stories are more resistant to the erosion of time than others. In our case, I'm referring to the "Friday Night Lights" episode which resulted in a young girl having an abortion. I've written about this a couple of times because the program brings together a number of themes.

Former PPFA President Gloria Feldt

Pro-abortionists were praying (so to speak) that the young girl would abort. That would bring a note of "realism" to television, which lacked (to their minds) a sufficient number of abortions. Pro-abortionists have lamented that young girls and women rarely aborted of late, either on television or in the movies.

So I wasn't surprised when I got back in town to read that Gloria Feldt, former PPFA President, had written a piece celebrating the abortion of "Becky Sproles," a tenth-grader in the fictitious town of Dillon, Texas. No need to rehearse all that I had written before ( http://www.nrlc.org/News_and_Views/July10/nv070910.html and http://www.nrlc.org/News_and_Views/July10/nv071210.html), so let me address something else Feldt brings up.

There is a pro-abortion narrative that I suspect we don't see written for public consumption as bluntly as Feldt did Sunday in the Washington Post. It's composed of three inter-related parts.

The Glory days (aka the famous "Maude" episode where the character played by Bea Arthur had an abortion at age 47); the dark ages [pretty much the last decade or two] where "abortion all but disappeared from TV, movies and media reports, except as the subject of shouting matches"; the hoped-for revival, led by episodes such as the recent "Friday Night Lights" episode.

Feldt's narrative linchpin is "just when reproductive rights seemed won and settled, antiabortion forces fueled a vicious backlash. And as the emerging political right was turning abortion into a wedge issue, our common reference point was changing." Meaning not enough stories about abortion before it was legal (which means not enough "first hand" knowledge) and a concomitant depletion of pro-abortion lack of energy and purpose.

Just two points. First, pro-abortion forces used the courts to foist a new abortion-on-demand regime on the entire nation.

That is one reason why "reproductive rights" can never be "won and settled": they did not reflect where the American people were--or are--on abortion. Abortion on demand was shoved down the throats of the American public.

Moreover, when people go to the ballot boxes and cast their votes based on whether a candidate believes in protecting unborn life, that is neither a "vicious backlash" or a "wedge issue." It is a reflection of what they care about deeply.

Second, Feldt is at right in the first sentence of her final paragraph, but has it exactly backwards in the second sentence. "This isn't just a television show," she writes. "Media portrayals, real or fictional, don't merely inform us -- they form us."

The program was not merely the next-to-the-last episode of a program which may not be renewed. One of the reasons "Becky" aborted, I suspect, was that it would be the subplot of a series of subsequent episodes. (The aftermath of the abortion was part of the last show of the season.)

But the reason most girls and women choose life over abortion in media portrayals of unintended pregnancy is that popular opinion in moving consistently in a pro-life direction. Thus, far from ignoring reality--Feldt's argument--life-affirming decisions are in touch with people's opinions.

Put another way, media portrays of abortion don't form us, they are formed BY us.

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