I’ve never seen this show, but it is a very strange argument in any case.
Seated at Tami Taylor’s kitchen table, Becky Sproles wrenchingly lays out her dilemma: The only child of an embittered single bartender who gave birth to her when she was a teenager, Becky is faced with the prospect of recycling her mother’s past and she doesn’t know what to do. […]
Is she seeking an abortion simply to counter her mother’s example? What if she were capable, caring and present as a parent? What if, as an emotionally wounded 10th grader without resources living in Dillon, Tex., with its pageant of grim futures, she could defy sociological prediction?
The tortured expression on Becky’s face tells us how profoundly she would like this to be so and yet how clearly she foresees the bleaker reality. “I can’t take care of a baby,” she tearfully tells Tami, matriarch to Dillon’s lost youth. “I can’t.”
With those words Becky decides to have an abortion.
It seems to make the agrument that if Becky had never been born, her mother wouldn’t have ended up an embittered single bartender. The article ends,
Again and again, “Friday Night Lights” seems to remind us, as if in klieg lights, of the consequences of parenthood pursued by accident or default.
by 
How stupid they must think the audience is. Who’s their target?
Note that Becky doesn’t say ‘I can’t carry this child for 9 months’ or ‘I can’t give birth’, but feels that her only ‘choice’ is abortion. With that kind of ignorance, Becky has many reasons for embitterment to look forward to.
@lwestin: Agreed. Given that her choice is entirely based on having the lifestyle she wants, avoiding the *possibility* that she *might* end up unhappy in the future and has nothing to do with health or danger, I would definitely label her choice as selfish in the extreme. Funny thing about extremely selfish people, they very, very rarely end up happy with themselves or the choices they make.
I do find it odd that they never even mentioned adoption, dancing around the topic as if the only 2 choices are black and white.
I find this line the article interesting:
“For years, and especially since Ellen Page’s sardonic young heroine decided to carry her baby to term in the 2007 film “Juno,” television has consistently leaned to the right on the subject of unwanted pregnancy. ”
If it’s true… cool!
It’s too early to judge yet, guys. Let’s see how this character reacts to the aftermath of her abortion before we decide whether or not abortion was fairly portrayed in this show.
If she gets the abortion and doesn’t suffer, pro-lifers will claim it’s propaganda.
If she gets the abortion and does suffer, pro-choicers will claim it’s propaganda.
Actually, both sides are probably making that claim already.
It is just not possible to make any sort of contemporary fiction involving an unwanted pregnancy without taking a position on abortion, because even the character’s inaction would count as an action.
“For years, and especially since Ellen Page’s sardonic young heroine decided to carry her baby to term in the 2007 film “Juno,” television has consistently leaned to the right on the subject of unwanted pregnancy. ”
I suspect this is less an actual political bias and more a desire to avoid controversy, boycotts, protests, angry advertisers and letters of complaint. There’s a rich history of babies on TV, and characters giving birth – noone is going to object to that. But characters getting abortions is still comparatively rare, and will attract the wrong type of attention.