The Empire Strikes Back:
Pro-Abortionists Hit Panic Button Over "Law & Order's" Program on Abortion
Part One of Two

By Dave Andrusko

Part Two is an important update from the Robert Powell Center for Medical Ethics. Please send your comments on either part to daveandrusko@gmail.com. If you'd like, follow me at www.twitter.com/daveha

A request tucked in the deluge of e-mails I've received about last Friday's Law & Order episode was that I revisit the program and fill in more details. I had quite deliberately not gone deeply into the plot of "Dignity" because I didn't want to spoil the show for readers. But not everyone subsequently saw the program, and NBC does not offer a second chance to view online. So…

A prime-time drama about abortion that did not consider making pro-lifers look like loons to be its first objective predictably set off a chain-reaction of pro-abortion fury and angst. "The Law and Order Abortion Disaster and The Wasteland of TV" (Sarah Seltzer at RH Reality Check) was one headline. "Law and Order's Anti-Choice Propaganda" was another (Kate Harding at Salon.com). We can address the most salient points of "Dignity" by culling these two posts for what worked the writers into a lather. If you didn't see the program, let me offer a brief rehash of what I wrote Friday.

The show obviously was pegged to the killing last summer of abortionist George Tiller whose death NRLC unequivocally denounced as both morally wrong and contrary to every principle we espouse.

"But what makes the Law & Order episode so riveting," I suggested, "is that virtually every pro-life argument you knew you would never hear on a network program is a part of "Dignity." More important, it occurred to me as I listened in utter astonishment that each of these observations could have been presented in a way that was artificial, forced, or (as so often is the case with network portraits of pro-lifers) something that you would expect from an idiot. None of that was the case. These were real flesh-and-blood people, not caricatures."

Seltzer leaves it to other members of the sisterhood to critique "each offensive moment" (of which there were countless) and the overall "tone." In her view, the writers had decided to troll in waters not usually fished by Law & Order, perhaps because they did not worry about incurring the wrath of feminists.

But if this egregiously flawed program is "buried in TV wasteland" [Friday night], and has "slipped down to somewhere between a punch line and obscurity," why go nuclear?

Not merely because "Dignity" was not "balanced" and was "rife with bias and medical inaccuracy," according to Seltzer, but because it also reflects and contributes to "the absolute erasure of women's real life experiences with abortion from the pop-cultural landscape." Seltzer, like many pro-abortion feminists, is seething because when there is an unplanned pregnancy on TV, "[o]ften, there's cursory to zero explanation as to why abortion is not on the table." More dead babies=better TV. Amazing that television executives haven't figured that out for themselves.

(By the way, one wonders--when Law & Order twice previously dealt with the issue with a heavy-handed pro-abortion tilt--whether the organized pro-abortion community rushed in looking for pro-life rebuttals to establish "balance." Just guessing, probably not.)

Having begun by trashing "the legions of 'keep smut off my TV screen' reactionaries," (who are "buddies" to the "organized anti-choice movement"), Seltzer ends by making an abrupt right turn.

"It's hard for us non-censorious, free-speech loving feminists to jump on that kind of bandwagon, but in this case, a complaint to NBC warranted," she confides. However since "The coverage of abortion on TV is already heading down a slippery slope," Seltzer writes, likeminded souls "need to stand up now or the next Prime-Time travesty will be even worse."

Kate Harding, writing at Salon.com, is incensed that pro-life arguments were not corrected with a barrage of withering pro-choice ripostes which would dispatch them to the intellectual garbage heap from whence they were plucked. Allowing pro-lifers to speak truth to the purveyors of ugliness--where will it all end?

To mention just three examples that drove Harding to distraction, "Dignity" flatly stated the undeniable fact that (no matter how the numbers are parsed) public opinion is swinging in the pro-life direction; that when a woman who is leaning toward having an abortion sees an ultrasound of her unborn child, it can change her mind instantly; and that when a child is likely going to die soon after birth, prenatal hospice provides a loving alternative to the violence of abortion, a decision that often only heightens the guilt of parents who may already be blaming themselves for producing an "imperfect" child.

But the program's worse offense, come to think of it, was not making the case that there is--and must be--a better response to a crisis pregnancy than whacking off tiny arms and legs. Rather what unnerved the anti-life set most was that the case was made by member of the cast of Law & Order.

The pro-life characters? Who cares what these dolts say. But when the executive assistant district attorney (and later the female assistant district attorney), one of the police Detectives, even the daughter of the unsympathetic District Attorney Jack McCoy are espousing the case for life, well that is too, too much.

Enough is never enough for pro-abortionists. They can have the entire media, excepting Fox and talk radio, in their hip pocket and they are constantly on the prowl for ways to silence the few dissenting voices.

And whether the blood of unborn babies flows in sufficient quantities on television for pro-abortion taste, clearly pro-lifers are habitually portrayed as hypocritical, Bible-thumbing fools, so unhip as to laughable. It is no accident that Law & Order's prior programs on abortion drew no criticism from the usual pro-abortion suspects.

One time--ONE TIME--the pro-life case is made with passion and power and persuasiveness and (according to Seltzer) several letters are already circulating to offer guidance to those who wish "to express your displeasure over this episode" to the network.

You know, it's not just their mutual love affair with abortion that binds pro-abortion feminists and President Obama so tightly together.

It is an overweening arrogance that decrees that dissent ought never to be allowed.

Please send your thoughts and comments to daveandrusko@gmail.com.

Part Two