“Mad Men” doublecrosses abortion proponents: Joan didn’t get one
One of the topics woven into the 4th season of AMC’s Mad Men, a cable tv show set in the 1960s, has been abortion. It started in August with a tip of the hat: According to Lauren Bans at Slate:
Joan is sitting in a hospital gown in her doctor’s office, cool and calm as ever, asking her Doc if her two past abortions (“procedures”) will affect her fertility….
Joan seems pretty damn self-possessed and matter-of-fact about the whole matter. Ironically enough, a medical conversation about abortion without overtones of despair and emotional upheaval seems harder to come by now in this day and age when the procedure is actually legal.
This revelation about Joan’s past also brings the abortion-on-TV count this year up to two (… Friday Night Lights…), which is basically bonafide abortion bonanza in entertainment terms. No more terribly convenient miscarriages… No “schmabortion” jokes necessary on the small screen…. Let’s hope the trend extends to movies.
Joan is office manager at a fictional ad agency that is the setting for Mad Men. But Joan is also a newlywed who wants a baby. “Might infertility be in her future?” speculates the New York Post.
Abortion = infertility is a pro-life talking point, but Joan’s doctor assures her the reproductive plumbing is still working, which appeals to pro-abort Amanda Marcotte at RH Reality Check:
In your usual overly dramatic Hollywood fare, this would have been an occasion for raising the stakes by implying that Joan was subject to a mythical back alley butcher who left her infertile for life. But instead, the doctor shrugs and suggests that the odds are that the midwife did a good job, and certainly everything that he could see was in good working order. He points out that she got pregnant after the first abortion, and so he has every reason to believe she’s fine.
Turns out Joan is having an affair with boss Roger while husband Greg is away in Viet Nam. In a later episode Joan indeed finds out her doctor was right, she can still get pregnant. But this baby is the wrong guy’s. “Roger could barely conceal how desperately he wanted Joan to get an abortion,” reported the New York Times. “This is clearly not the first time Roger has dealt with a mistress who requires a ‘rabbit test.’” Of course. Sexual exploitation and coercion, 2 more pro-life talking points.
And it appears Joan does, which again pleases Marcotte, but for a oddly different reason: Joan gets her clandestine abortion at an upstanding doctor’s office, not shady back alley mill. Marcotte is sick of the ruse:
Believe it or not, this was historically accurate. In the sixties, many doctors performed abortions for their regular patients and charted them as something else. If you got an abortion from someone who wasn’t your regular doctor, odds are that it was still a safe abortion.
And, as I’ve written about before, the myth of the back alley butcher is mostly inaccurate. It’s tempting for pro-choicers to invoke it in an attempt to remind people of the high human cost of banning abortion, but in the end, portraying abortion providers as “butchers” mostly helps the anti-choice cause by stigmatizing the compassionate, hard-working people who have helped women in need, whether or not that help was legal.
But this talking point is a pro-abort staple: Get rid of legalized abortion and return to the back alley days where thousands of women die.
Shocker, I agree with Amanda here. This talking point is in large part a ruse, a fear tactic. Amanda’s thoughts reveal distension in the ranks.
But she’ll never get everyone in line here. For instance, the Burn Down Blog couldn’t resist posting the infamous photo of Gerri Santoro, about which I’ve discussed previously, in relation to Joan’s illegal abortions.
But back to Joan’s 3rd abortion. It turns out Mad Men pulls a fast one, as revealed in the October 17 season finale. Joan didn’t get one after all. And this royally ticks off Marcotte, desperate for abortion affirmation:
The main problem with the episode is that it, frankly, sucked. Besides the abortion cop-out*…
[D]espite the abortion fakeout,** I thought the plot developments were solid….
*I can’t even bear to think about it. I can’t believe they whipped out the oldest cliche in the book. On TV, 99% of women who enter abortion clinics have a change of heart and leave. In reality, I’m guessing the numbers are reversed.
**Seriously? Et tu, “Mad Men”? You put so much effort into capturing how people really are and were… and suddenly you get into picking the fan service cliche about abortion? And believe you and me, it was fan service. The folks at the TWOP [Television Without Pity] forums were peeing themselves in delight that Joan gets to have a baby. It was picking the easy over the real, and on a show that’s batting nearly 1000 in the other direction.
So Marcotte is bitterly disappointed that a tv character didn’t kill her baby. Exposure yet again that in reality the other side isn’t “pro-choice” but actually pro-abortion.
And mass media’s lesson here is, once again, for the most part nice girls don’t get abortions. There was no way Mad Men’s writers would let Joan get a 3rd one. I’m surprised Amanda didn’t see this coming. Her ideology clouds her grasp on the reality Mad Men execs understood: Americans innately dislike abortion.
Also, come on, this is a much better story line. Abortion stops story lines.
Jill Stanek is a nurse turned speaker, columnist and blogger, a national figure in the effort to protect both preborn and postborn innocent human life.
Apparently Joan didn’t choose to not have an abortion. Instead she went online, looked at abortion videos on YouTube, read Jill’s blog, and picked up a copy of Celebrate Life magazine. All this anti-choice propaganda coerced her into feeling guilty about abortion, and so it wasn’t really a choice after all.
I’m unsubscribering to Jill’s blog and following Amanda Marcotte. He writes good.
To be fair, a decent amount of people commenting at Pandagon called Amanda Marcotte on her bull.
I don’t think it was concern over the American public’s point of view that kept Mad Men from having Joan get a third abortion. I find Man Men is pretty good at keeping its viewers uncomfortable – Pete is my favorite example of this, but Betty is a good example too, to say nothing of Don Draper, who I legitimately struggle to tolerate sometimes. The show tends to present heavy morality-question situations without narrative commentary or “bias” – but a main theme of it, over four seasons, is consequences, and how actions can play out, how all the ripples never really stop.
Instead, I think that Mad Men saw this as simply a legitimate opportunity to flesh out an interesting development. For all Joan’s composure and all her impressive success, she has attained her current positions by following the rules – by being so perfectly in tune with the demands of the sexist, unfair society she lives in that she has managed to master it. She’s no Peggy, who has a man’s job and who has never really given in to what is wanted of her as a woman, who challenges the status quo. Joan masters the status quo. In this situation, Joan “should” get an abortion – it would be in keeping with the role she fills in this situation. Choosing not to have an abortion is really kind of a remarkable exertion of power on Joan’s part. Everything she has, she has gotten because she has become perfect at being who men want her to be. She catches their eye, smiles pretty, cleans up their messes – she is a pin-up girl and a secretary and a wife and a mom. But in this decision, she is finally Joan. She’s not cleaning up some man’s mess for him. In my opinion, THAT is why Mad Men had her continue the pregnancy. It continues the increasingly volatile frustration the women on the show have been demonstrating throughout this whole season.
That Amanda would rather the show sacrifice that character and thematic development to score a point for abortion on TV is not lost on more than one commenter at Pandagon.
It’s so refreshing to see an abortion supporter admit that the back-alley threat is bogus– and I never in a million years thought that admission would come from Amanda Marcotte!
Yeah, those who could afford to bribe their doctors did so, or their families flew them off to Switzerland. Those less privileged had to fend for themselves. This isn’t news.
This program shows a lot of things.
First, it shows the lack of regard for the law and the lives of human beings that a lot of people had then and have now. Many people killed their unborn children then with a complete disregard for what they were doing.
Second, it shows that we did NOT have real legal protection for unborn children. This woman is a child killer. Why wasn’t she sent to prison for her violent crimes? Because society did not take seriously the killing of human beings in the unborn stage. Kill a human from infancy to old age and spend years behind bars. Kill a human in the unborn stage and it was frequently treated as not that big a deal. Mothers and fathers felt free to kill their unborn children, “doctors” (criminal abortionists, actually) felt free to kill as many as they wished and earn a good living doing it. They were usually not prosecuted unless they killed a mother as well as her child. The many instances I have read of criminal abortionists who killed thousands or tens of thousands of children with minimal resistance from the authorities causes one to realize that the situation then was still very bad for the unborn who were as helpless and defenseless as they are today.
Third, it shows the pathetic lack of human understanding of those who are activists in the anti-unborn human rights (abortionist, pro-abortion, anti-life, whatever) movement. Amanda Marcotte’s reference to criminal abortionists as “compassionate, hardworking” “abortion providers” who “helped women in need” shows, first of all, a complete disregard for the lives of the human beings, unborn men and women, that these criminals were killing. Marcotte herself, born around 1970 I believe, could easily have been a victim of one of these crimes. Yet she, like all good abortionist activists, cannot seem to understand that these “providers” were destroying human beings just like them and just like us.
In the nightmare world created by the abortionist movement, in which we are living now, each generation gets to wage ruthless biological warfare against the next generation and human society comes to represent a real life version of the raptor pit in Jurassic Park.
I’m not a fan of this show because it’s kind of boring, and I don’t like the depiction of black people in it. Yes, at this time the majority of “Negroes” were in low-paying positions, but even back after Reconstruction there were always black professionals — teachers, doctors and post office workers (this may not seem to be a prestigious job, but in the days of segregation it was). There were even “colored” ad agencies. Maybe things will change as the series progresses, but I just can’t get into it.
Meagan, as I mentioned before, there were always physicians in the black community that performed abortions, and the women who got them weren’t always rich.
Wow. As the months go by, the anti-lifers have been taking of their civil masks and revealing what they really are, not pro-choice at all, but proudly pro-abortion.
Women in need? Those are those tiny human pre-born women who just need a little time and care so they can grow up and be amazing adult women.
“Abortion stops story lines.”
At least pleasant, interesting or marketable story lines. I don’t think the MSM is ready to depict the paths of emotional and physical destruction that effect so many moms after they’ve been deceived into terminating their unborn children.
Thank God there is redemption and forgiveness in Christ.
When I get to Heaven, (assuming I make it), I’m going to ask permission to see Moms and Dads reunite with their children that died before them.
Even if I can’t see it live, I’ll bet the DVR’s and HD screens will be out of this world ;-)
Her ideology clouds her grasp on the reality Mad Men execs understood: Americans innately dislike abortion.
A couple of months ago, I was bored in a waiting room and was paging through Seventeen because it was one of the only magazines they had. There was an article about teen pregnancy storylines on TV, and the author of the article thought it was strange that out of all the storylines discussed, none of the characters had abortions. I was like, “Well, duh, of couse they didn’t have abortions! Who wants to make their TV show controversial and depressing at the same time?”
Tragedies on TV shows usually go somewhere plot-wise. A guy’s wife is killed, so he goes out to track down her killers and avenge her. A character dies, so a new character shows up to take over her job. If a character feels happy and relieved after an abortion, it’s probably pointless for the plot. If a character feels depressed after an abortion, the show has to spend a lot of time dealing with those feelings or else it looks like they just glossed it over. TV likes pain and misery, but only when they can advance the plot. Depression over abortion is a personal, contemplative thing, and one that probably hits too close to home for too many people.
It’s so refreshing to see an abortion supporter admit that the back-alley threat is bogus– and I never in a million years thought that admission would come from Amanda Marcotte!
I know, I’m surprised.
Amanda’s disappointment is so crass and self-serving.
Oh, how awful! A woman exercises her “freedom of ‘choice'”, and you’re disappointed because it’s inconvenient for you! I’m just going to keep on weeping tears of grief for you, Amanda, because a TV show didn’t affirm the tragic mistake you made in killing your baby.