Teens In Trouble

In last night's Parenthood, high school seniors Amy (Skyler Day) and Drew (Miles Heizer) faced a crisis in their burgeoning relationship: her accidental pregnancy. It's been established that they're both in the midst of applying to college, so presumably parenthood (er, despite the series title) is not something either of them wishes to pursue at this juncture. So when Amy follows up her drugstore pregnancy test with a visit to Planned Parenthood to confirm her previous positive result, she and Drew pay heed to all the options laid out by PP's medical professional.

"'If you decide not to continue the pregnancy' what now? Sorry, it's weird, when you started to talk about that third path, your voice kind of trailed off and I couldn't hear! Are you talking about my seeking an abortion, or about my trying to induce a miscarriage by getting thrown from a horse or slipping on a bar of soap beside my bathtub and landing on my embryo?"

I realize that between this rant and my post about Underage & Pregnant yesterday, I risk coming across as a rabid pro-abortion weirdo, and I'm not. The policy of my administration has always been abortions for some, miniature American flags for others. And I know that abortion is the third rail of TV drama, and that I should be glad that Parenthood producers actually let Amy go through with it, when most of scripted TV's unplanned pregnancies lead to anguished discussions about maybe having abortions right up to the point where the character conveniently has a miscarriage without having to make a decision either way; this puts Amy in an elite group of self-determining TV characters that includes Maude (Bea Arthur) of Maude and Becky (Madison Burge) of Friday Night Lights and virtually no one else.

And yet, the decision was made, by someone, not to let the audience hear whatever Planned Parenthood's nurse or doctor was telling Drew and Amy about what would have to happen if they "decide[d] not to continue the pregnancy," presumably so that no anti-choice viewers could protest NBC for promulgating information about abortion via its fictional TV series. But other than revealing the fact that a woman can legally pay Planned Parenthood to make her...not be pregnant anymore, last night's episode did not inform anyone of anything. Never mind the fact that we didn't find out how much it cost, or what the room looks like where it's performed: no one in the episode even said "abortion."

But: she did do it. (At least, we assume she did; Parenthood isn't the kind of show where Amy's likely to go away for a while and then come back to surprise Drew with the fact that she's still pregnant after all, SCRUBS.) Despite the elisions in the script, and Drew's hesitancy, the show's producers did take the stand that abortion is a practical option for teenagers wishing to embark upon young adulthood without encumbrances -- and the fact that it's so unusual for TV to dramatize this path shows how actually risky it still is. I just wish that, having gone as far as they did, Parenthood's producers went slightly farther by giving the option to "decide not to continue the pregnancy" equal time.