Abortions Are Bad--Even In the Zombiepocalypse

I’m a bit of a latecomer to the Walking Dead party. I started watching it a few weeks ago, and for a while it was my latest Netflix binge. I stopped watching lately, though, and I want to talk about why.

[NOTE: Spoilers below.]

So in case you’ve never watched the show, the setting is a post-zombiepocalypse wasteland. The dead are everywhere—and they have a serious craving for human flesh. Non-zombie humans stay alive by sticking together in small groups and moving from safe spot to safe spot—no place stays safe forever.

So in this extremely unstable, dangerous existence, one of the main characters, Lori, gets pregnant. In a world where there are no safe havens, where zombies haunt the woods, towns, houses and roads, and where even other healthy humans aren’t always trustworthy, pregnancy doesn’t just seem like a bad idea. It seems suicidal. When Lori gets her hands on some RU-486—the abortion pill—it seemed like a smart choice to me.

Then she takes the pill—and immediately makes herself throw up. Watching that, I couldn’t help but think—what? Even in a show about an apocalyptic zombie wasteland, we can’t show abortion as a totally sensible decision?

Okay. So I don’t want to get into a complicated discussion of the plot points here. But suffice it to say that Lori is married to Rick, and when she thought Rick was dead she slept with his best friend, Shane. Lori is basically reviled for doing this (because illicit sex is always the woman’s fault—but that’s another blog post). Lots of people interpret her decision not to have the abortion as a redemption.

I didn’t see it that way. Made even worse was the fact that she throws up the pill, but admits to Rick, the dead-not-dead husband, that she still doesn't want to have the baby. When he finds out she’s pregnant he basically bullies her into having the child, and Lori accepts his guilt unquestioningly. Two of the male characters aside from Rick have heart-to-hearts with Lori where they try to convince her to have the baby or tell her husband about it, but she never has a real conversation with any of the other female characters about this--and there are quite a few--so we don't get another female point of view. Nobody ever says anything like "Hey, it's your decision to make, and there's no shame in either choice." It was all just pressure to have the baby--or pressure to let her husband in on the decision. 

The sense I got was that the writers were saying, “Hey. We know abortion is bad. We’d never let this character have an abortion. Even if getting pregnant is a really, really bad idea right now. “

The fact that Lori has essentially no agency in her own decision to keep the baby really bothered me. It would have bothered me less, I think, if there was a clearer underlying reason--for instance, if she was shown to have religious beliefs. The Walking Dead is set in Georgia, where the pro-life position is perhaps the norm—Rick and Lori could conceivably both be pro-life. Except we get no hint of that beforehand to give her decision more agency. The writers also missed an opportunity here to raise the question of whether it’s still possible to hang on to values you held in the old world, like pro-choice or pro-life values, in a world that’s so radically changed. No matter whether Lori winds up keeping the baby or having the abortion in the end, that would have been an interesting point.

But that isn’t what we got. Instead, we got keeping the baby as the only possible decision. The automatic decision. The decision Lori makes even though she doesn't want to; because her authentic choices don't count. Rather than the sense that this was this woman’s actual choice, I got the sense that the writers assumed I would like Lori less if she had an abortion—because good women don’t.

But really, if Lori’s decision to keep the baby felt more character-driven and less like the writers are imposing ideas about abortion that I don't share, it probably would have sit better with me as a viewer, but I still would have been pretty "meh" about it. I’ve seen a lot of women deciding to keep the baby in movies, TV and other media—and it would just have been really, really refreshing to see a woman deciding to have the abortion for once.

I tried to think of an example of a likeable, main-character heroine in television and movies who went through with an abortion—and I couldn’t. In every movie I’ve seen that deals with the issue, from Juno to Knocked Up to The Cider House Rules, the heroine decides not to have an abortion—or, in the case of Knocked Up, doesn’t even acknowledge it as an option. Even Girls completely dodged the issue when Jessa had a miscarriage the day of her abortion appointment.

It’s not just me. I found an exhaustive article in The Week that goes through abortion plotlines in television shows starting in 1975 and going all the way up to the first season of Girls in 2012. What I notice is that a large percentage of the time, women who want to have abortions are guilted or emotionally blackmailed into keeping the baby by the men in their lives, and this is presented as entirely okay—the show is clearly on the side of the guys. When female characters do go through with abortions (which is rare: I counted five out of fifteen episodes where this happened), it’s portrayed as this wrenching, emotional decision that the character struggles with.

Which, to be fair, is the experience of many women who have abortions. But not all of them. For some women in real life, having an abortion is not an emotional choice. Not everyone equates having an abortion with killing a baby. Not everyone is conflicted about wanting a child. People who feel this way are not bad people.

But our films and television shows are telling them that they are. According to Hollywood, you can't stay a sympathetic character and have an abortion--and if you do, it's only okay if you feel really terrible about it.

This matters. Because if, in the stories we tell, characters universally can’t have abortions and stay sympathetic without depicting it as an agonizing choice, it sends a message: in our culture, women who have abortions are not good people. Even among liberal people without a pro-life belief system, having the baby is really the only moral choice.

The Link Between Abortion and Death

For women in TV and film who do go through with the abortion—like April in Revolutionary Road—the consequence is often death.  Both Jezebel and Slate have interesting articles about this. It's pointed out that the frequency of plotlines where women die from abortions on television is around 9%, significantly higher than the real risk of death from complications of abortion—around 1 in 100,000. Female characters in TV and film are even killed off after contemplating an abortion, even if they don’t have one.

This is what happens in The Walking Dead. Lori winds up having birth complications, getting a C-section with no anesthesia, and dying in childbirth. So now she’s a martyr, redeemed for her sexual misbehavior by sacrificing her life for her child.

The idea that you’re supposed to sacrifice your life for your child—symbolically if not physically—is a huge part of the discourse around being a mom in the US. The debate surrounding stay-at-home moms vs. moms who work is all about that; there’s always the expectation that women sacrifice everything from their “grown up” pleasures to their life’s ambitions to be mothers.  There is no corresponding expectation for men to sacrifice jobs, careers, passions, and even their grown-up selves to become parents—and if there is, it’s much less strong.

The message I got from the end of Lori’s plotline in Walking Dead went further than that. It didn’t just say that choosing to have the baby is always the moral choice—in every situation. Or that you're supposed to sacrifice your "life" in a symbolic sense.  It said that actually dying for your baby is the best moral choice. And it’s a message that I think some in our culture—particularly those who are strongly pro-life—identify with.

Which maybe you wouldn’t think at first. Don’t even the most restrictive abortion-limiting proposals make exception for the life and health of the mother? Not always. For example, the Partial Birth Abortion Ban, which was put into effect in 2003 by the Bush Administration. It has an exception for the life of the mother, but not the health of the mother (read more here).

True, it says a woman can have a partial birth abortion if her life is threatened. But what’s the difference between your life and your health being threatened? A complication that risks your health could also become a risk to life down the road. At the very least, it reduces your quality of life because it can lead to health problems of varying severity. In this case, women are still being expected to sacrifice their bodies for their children. The expectation is codified into law.

Some anti-abortion groups in the US publicly discuss how the exception for health is bad for the pro-life effort. For instance, the Colorado Right to Life organization has an article on this topic, where it discusses why there should be no exception for the health of the mother in allowing abortion: essentially, that the health exception is too broad and wouldn’t limit abortions enough.

Making abortions illegal, even at the expense of the mother’s health, does have serious and sometimes fatal consequences for women. I couldn’t find any stories about women in the US actually dying after being denied abortions. But it does happen in other areas of the world, for example in Ireland, El Salvador, and the Dominican Republic. It’s easy to see how, if the health exception is eliminated from abortion restrictions more widely in the United States, these cases could become more common here, as well.    

I don’t think everyone who is pro-life thinks this is acceptable. But I do think there’s a detectable strain in the pro-life movement that says women should be willing to sacrifice their bodies for their children—either their long-term health or, in the most extreme cases, their lives. For people with this mindset, this seems to be the unspoken ideal that all women should be not just expected, but required to live up to. You see it in other countries with more restrictive abortion laws—and in this country, I do think there’s a segment of the pro-life movement who would see some women’s deaths in childbirth as an acceptable price to pay to make abortion illegal again. 

I felt Lori’s death in The Walking Dead aligned with this message. Which is why I found it so disturbing. Watching her writhing on the floor, covered in blood, as her baby was pulled screaming out of her belly, I thought this is what’s expected of us. This is what’s being shown to me as the most acceptable moral choice. The graphic imagery in the show doesn't bother me--it's that message that's hard to watch.