Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. You're listening to The Takeaway. All right, y'all, let's go on back to the year 1972.

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CBS had a hit show, Maude. Now featuring Bea Arthur as a title of character, Maude is an outspoken 40 something woman living spouse-free in Westchester, New York. Maude, the show, was groundbreaking for its unapologetic century of a complex woman of a certain age. Some of the important ground of broke was being the first primetime TV show to air an episode with abortion as the primary plotline.

Maude: It's not just that I'm scared, it's like deep down inside me there's a teeny part of me that feels guilty for even thinking about it.

Walter: Well, I tell you this, Maude, whatever you decide is going to be all right with me.

Maude: Thank you.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Maude does in fact get that abortion and then the decades since abortion has made so many regular appearances on primetime TV, as in this 2011 episode of Grey's Anatomy.

Dr. Cristina Yang: I wish I wanted a kid. I wish I wanted one so bad because then this would be easy. I would be happy. I'd have Owen and my life wouldn't be a mess, but I don't. I need you to be there at six o'clock tonight to hold my hand because I am scared, Mer.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Another Shonda Rhimes property, Scandal, addressed abortion in 2015.

Fitz: I support your choice, Liv. Not that you needed it.

Olivia Pope: Thank you.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Tanya Melendez recently wrote about the evolution of abortion on primetime television for Vox. She's a doctoral student in Rhetoric at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She and I discussed how abortion initially was portrayed on television.

Tanya Melendez: Initially, it wasn't from the creation of television. Until about 1980, there's only one abortion by a main character on all of primetime television, and that was, of course, the legendary episode of Maude, the two-parter. That episode came out when abortion was legal in New York, where the show took place, but not legal nationwide. It's a pre-road show. This was a very big deal, and about 65 million people watched that. Maude did have her abortion, which was again, another very big deal as we don't see that on television again for a long while.

From 1980, until about 2010, and these are rough numbers, we see an increase of abortion on TV, but that portrayal becomes really problematic when you look back upon it. It sorta treats abortion as if it is a moral debate. We're talking hyper dramatization of the decision-making process. In the article, I go into some of the major tropes surrounding this abortion narrative.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Maybe you don't have these numbers at your fingertips, but help me to, in terms of thinking about that early period, that pre-1980s period, or maybe even the 1980s well into the 2000s, early 2000s. What does pregnancy and childbirth look like as television depictions versus abortion? I'm wondering, is it just that in general, primetime TV is pretending as though a stork shows up and brings babies, or do we have an increased representation of pregnancy and childbirth while a silence around abortion.

Tanya Melendez: Yes, that's pretty close. It's interesting because in the 1980s television explodes with more realistic storylines. This was a time in which social mores were changing and the feminist movement was largely accepted. Which means that portrayals of women start to deal with more real issues, such as pregnancy, motherhood, marriage, work-life balance, sexual assault, domestic violence, et cetera, and with those issues shows in general, took a strong position.

For example, when a woman went through sexual harassment at work as a plotline, it was pretty clear the show said that's not acceptable, but when it comes to motherhood and when it comes specifically to abortion choice, these plot lines get a lot murkier. Motherhood is sanctified as a natural process that every woman wants. In fact, that takes priority over everything else in her life. Whereas abortion only becomes a point of pain and struggle and debate. Debate with not only herself and maybe a confidant, but with all the other characters on the show as well.

A woman's choice becomes extremely negotiable on TV.

Melissa Harris-Perry: We've been having some conversations recently here on The Takeaway where we've been trying to go inside the writer's room a bit and understand what it means to actually produce television and what the experiences are like for people who are writing these characters and these plot lines. What do you know about inside the writer's room aspect of abortion stories? Who was writing these narratives where a woman's decision around abortion was so morally negotiable?

Tanya Melendez: What we know for certain is that writers' rooms were overwhelmingly male and overwhelmingly white, and that's a problem when it comes to telling accurate stories about choice. We know that over 90% of writers were white. We know that over 85% of writers were male and that's from 1980 to about 2000.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Help us to understand maybe with an example especially for folks who maybe we've seen them, but we can't always remember. Give us an example of when primetime TV depicted a storyline around abortion but did so in this way that you talk about relative to moral negotiation.

Tanya Melendez: I think classic example and one that I keep going back to is the show Party of Five, which was a television show in the early '90s on Fox, this was a family drama. It was centered around five kids who lost their parents and are being raised together, and the teenage daughter, Julia gets pregnant. She's 16 years old. She gets pregnant even though she was using protection, and she pretty early on decides that she wants an abortion. However, she has a scene with every single other main character to get their input on her choice.

We're talking everyone from her father figure, who is her older brother, but also someone like her middle school-aged younger sister. Throughout these conversations, she's told what to do in general, by all of these other characters. Then they fall pretty equally both sides. There's pretty much a group of people in her life who are for the procedure, and a group of people in her life who are against the procedure. Then when she decides she is going to go through with it, because she's not ready to be a mother at that young age, she miscarries just hours before the procedure.

Thereby preserving her innocence in this process. You have an episode where faced with the choice, that is hers. Multiple people get to tell her what they think she should do. She struggles, the decision becomes the point of conflict in the story. Then just when she decides to go through with the decision that is best for her, she's saved from having to make that choice at all.

Melissa Harris-Perry: There are all kinds of things on TV that aren't utterly unlike real life. Even when I think about primetime television, I can probably count the number of times that I saw anyone on primetime television watch TV. In my real life, almost everyone I know watches a little TV every day, but I can hardly think of the friends maybe three times they ever just sat down and watched television. Even though we were all watching them on our televisions. Isn't TV just, not primetime TV in particular, isn't it not supposed to be realistic?

What's the big deal about the fact that they are getting the abortion decision, that they're creating a kind of a trope around it rather than portraying the real life. It's not a documentary after all.

Tanya Melendez: Television is what we refer to as a meaning-making medium. In other words, what we watch on TV matters culturally, because it creates the understanding of what is acceptable. What is unacceptable. What is good or moral or bad or amoral. It creates blueprints for us to talk about issues in our lives, and we know that that works. We understand that representation matters. We understand the effects of television in a lot of ways. It's why TV was urged to demonstrate things like not having a character smoke, for example. Or very special episodes that we grew up with in the '80s and '90s that highlighted the particular issues.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Oh, man. The very special episode, I totally forgot about. It's a very special episode of, yes, right.

Tanya Melendez: We know that those things have effects. When it comes to abortion we know that there's been an effect of these collective stories, all one on top of the other, because narratives tell us how to talk about these issues. How to take the real things that happen in our lives and talk about them in a way we have been taught to discuss them from television characters that we care about.

One of the reasons why I focused on main characters and not every instance of abortion on TV shows, but specifically main characters is because of the relationships that we form with them. Parasocial relationships have been in the news lately and by news, I mean Twitter, I shouldn't have said news. [laughs] One of the reasons why that conversation has come up again is because we know that people form attachments to fictional characters and what they do matters.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Has any primetime show ever gotten this right? Is there a clear example of a main character making an abortion decision and whether they decided to carry through with an abortion or made the decision not to. In that process of representing it, represented in a way that allowed us to have a different kind of conversation about abortion?

Tanya Melendez: The first major abortion decision on television that I think really represents how a writer can get this correct is in 2015 on broadcast. That would be Scandal. Shonda Rhimes went out of her way to show Olivia Pope's abortion as a medical decision, not a moral one. What I mean by that is we never see the scene in which Olivia figures out she's pregnant. We never see her angst over the decision, we never see her call to make an appointment. What we see on the show is a one-minute scene where Olivia goes to a medical facility.

Again, not a clinic with lots of protesters outside on a shady street, a medical facility. She puts on a hospital gown, she wears her hairnet, she lays on the gurney in the-- I don't know what we would call that room, an exam room, I suppose. You can hear the vacuum aspirator work. What we see is a medical process. It's a medical gaze and because of that, the power of the choice is already established. There's no question that it was her decision. What we get instead is this is what abortion looks like.

I think that was probably the most fundamentally important abortion narrative of the last 20 years. Particularly I'd also, I can't not add Olivia is a Black woman who is unmarried. In the context of the show, she was impregnated by the president of the United States. Yes, it's a soap opera, but--

Melissa Harris-Perry: I was like if you want a scandal, watch her, I know that sounds nuts, but it makes perfect sense if you were one of us Scandalites, yes.

Tanya Melendez: Exactly. This is why that's important in terms of the abortion narrative. She doesn't ask for anybody else's opinion and for an independent Black woman to do that on television matters. It matters for representation of a medical process as a woman's sacrosanct decision.

Melissa Harris-Perry: In the work that you're doing, I know you're a doctoral student. I'm not sure, where you are in your process if you're currently finishing a manuscript, if you're thinking forward to your book. I'm wondering if you've had an opportunity to talk to any television creators or-- man, I suddenly want to hear a conversation between you and Shonda Rhimes about this moment. I'm wondering if the folks who have created this primetime TV, either in talking with you or with others have said their reasons for representing abortion in the way that they do, well or poorly.

Tanya Melendez: I know that Shonda has talked about it. I believe it was at a PaleyFest as my recollection and that she wanted to show agency in the decision for the woman. I think that public statements of creators are becoming more and more commonplace as more and more women in particular, but also some male showrunners are putting abortion plot lines in their main characters' hands that are much more representative of what women actually go through.

For example, Jane the Virgin in 2016 shows an abortion of a Hispanic woman who already has children who simply does not want to raise another child. They demonstrate that through the process of her telling her family, this is an important aspect to represent. I know the creators of Jane the Virgin have spoken about that decision intentionally and in public. Same thing with something like the show GLOW on Netflix in 2017, that shows an abortion process in the mid-1980s. These showrunners are pretty vocal about why they're doing it and those interviews are out there.

If you want to set up a time for me and Shonda to talk, I'll take it. I'll take it happily.

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Melissa Harris-Perry: Listen, I was like, man, let's get Carrie, Shonda, Tanya, all y'all in here. A very special episode of The Takeaway, yes.

Tanya Melendez: Yes it would be. I think that it's interesting to me because we're still in a time period where it's rare enough that I think writers and showrunners are talking about it publicly because A, they can. We live in an age in which they directly communicate with fans. B because they still need to point out why it matters that their characters are doing this.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Tanya Melendez is a doctoral student in Rhetoric at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Tanya, absolutely delightful to speak with you. Thank you for joining us.

Tanya Melendez: Thank you, Melissa.

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