Since I don't watch a lot of TV, and when I do it's often ball games, I'm not an expert on the abortion theme in television dramas. I would have guessed that it's not a theme at all. But I know it came up in Sunday's episode of Downton Abbey, when Lady Edith, having been abandoned by her lover, who she thinks is quite possibly dead, pays a visit to a London practitioner, where she has a waiting-room change of heart. This reminded me that in Mad Men, another show to which I am thanks to my wife addicted, the same thing happens to Joan--Joan!--in New York City about 35 years later when she thought she had determined to end the pregnancy resulting from her relapse with Roger Sterling. I think that maybe President Clinton's formulation about how abortion should be safe, legal, and rare has been adopted in the television arts.
Meanwhile, in the real world, the abortion rate in America is as low as it's been since the Supreme Court decided the Roe case in 1973. You'd think the foes of legal abortion would be happy about this but they are a hard group to please. And possibly they are right not to be happy, for on the evidence it doesn't appear that the decline is wholly on account of their occasionally successful efforts to impose restrictions that make access to abortion services difficult. It's true that fewer women are having abortions in places like Kansas and Oklahoma, where state legislatures have adopted such restrictions. But it's also true that states like California and New Jersey, which have no such restrictions, have seen some of the steepest declines. Margaret Talbot is therefore tempted to advance the unremarkable hypothesis that, as unwanted pregnancies are the leading cause of abortion, the decline may be attributable to widely available information about contraception, including in schools, and access to reliable and long-acting contraceptive methods--IUDs, implants--that do not require attention to detail, especially when the mind is distracted and not receiving its usual supply of blood.
But for those in the pro-life movement this is not a pleasing interpretation. It is almost as if unwanted pregnancies excite them, because then the prospect of punishing bad girls comes into view. Maybe it is sex more than abortion that appalls them. There has to be some way to make sense of the opposition to both abortion and reliable means of preventing unwanted pregnancies.
