She smiles peacefully as alleluia is joyfully crooned in the background: if you tuned in to Scandal’s abortion scene a few seconds too late Thursday night, you would undoubtedly be confused to learn that the Christian music choice (Silent Night, to be exact) and protagonist’s comfortable smile were the show’s homage to an abortion. The dissonance was deafening. Scandal, which boasts nearly 12 million viewers, was reduced to a sounding board for opinionated writers as over-the-top Planned Parenthood cheerleading drove the winter finale’s storyline. Indeed, ABC took abortion advocacy to an unprecedented low with the primetime episode, managing to spout mistruths about Planned Parenthood (the notorious “3%” myth); conjure the filibustering ghost of Wendy Davis past; and portray a dreamlike abortion experience – all in under an hour.
The episode’s abortion scene has been characterized as “unremarkable” because of the scene’s brevity and the lack of storyline surrounding the elective abortion. Indeed, writers appear to have pulled Pope’s pregnancy– of which viewers were theretofore unaware – out of thin air specifically to portray an abortion. Watch the brief scene below:
One abortion-advocating commentator opined: “It’s so important that Olivia is shown handling it alone. It’s so important that she doesn’t fall apart. It’s so important that she pulls herself together and gets on with life. It’s so important that this ground-breaking moment of the show was merely a subplot — over in seconds.” Pope’s steely composure during the ordeal in which her child died was “so important,” according to this commentator, because “a woman’s ability to make medical decisions for her body need not be the focus of her life… something we would not even blink at.”
How could abortion ever be such a non-issue for women, when women are the ones insisting that abortion is earth-shattering and life-altering? In reality, women are not the primary concern of these abortion cheerleaders. How could they be? No. This is about a political agenda to prop up Planned Parenthood, the most anti-Life organization in America, which is finally coming under public and political scrutiny after being left to prey on women, unchecked, for decades.