Justice

'Crazy Ex-Girlfriend' Just Confronted an Abortion Myth

November 15th 2016

This week's episode of "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend" combated a stereotype about abortion and many fans are commending the show's treatment of the important topic.

Friday's installment of the hit CW musical comedy series featured a married mother of two with plans on pursuing law school who decided to abort her unplanned pregnancy. She made the choice because she felt it would be challenging for her to achieve her dream of working in law with a new baby. 

“We’re sort of in a golden age of female characters, and depicting them in their complexity,” Aline Brosh McKenna, the co-creator of "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend," told Variety of the new episode. “Shows that are dealing with women and how they live their lives — the inflection points in their lives — how they make decisions. These are the types of decisions that women make in their lives frequently.”

"Jane the Virgin" had the titular character's mother in an October episode undergo a "medical abortion" following an unplanned pregnancy.

"Jane the Virgin" and "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend" both highlighted that many women who have abortions already have children.

Genevieve Edwards, U.K. communications director for women's health organization Marie Stopes International, told The Huffington Post in March that many people assume that the women who have abortions are "reckless" and young.

A study published in The Lancet journal in July found that married women made up roughly 73 percent of abortion patients globally between 2010 and 2014. By contrast, less than 30 percent of abortion patients around the world were unmarried women from 2010 to 2014, according to the study.

Writer Lauren Slater, a mother of one who had an abortion after having her first child, wrote a powerful 2003 essay for Elle about the difficult decision of terminating her pregnancy:

"[W]ould my marriage and my mind have survived the strain of a second? Would I be writing fiction as well as magazine articles? Would Clara know how to read and write, skills she acquired early because of the attention she's gotten? I don't say these things to make it all sound okay. It's not okay. Something serious was lost. Something serious would have been gained. An opportunity was missed, but a space kept reasonable safe. We are a family that works the way we are."

The latest episode of the CW show revealed something that many women probably already know: women with children, married women, single women and beyond exercise their right to an abortion. With "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend," "Jane the Virgin," and shows on other networks in recent years tackling abortion, the issue is finally getting normalized treatment on television.

[H/T Jezebel]

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