Friday Night Lights: Teen Pregnancy and Abortion in Prime Time.
by Meredith O'Brien (Moms in Pop Culture & Politics)
It's been a compelling, controversial storyline nominally about abortion but more, I think, about mothers: Mothers of teens, a woman who was a teen mom and a teen who was almost a mother.
Friday Night Lights has garnered a lot of publicity in the last few weeks over its storyline involving Becky Sproles, a 15-year-old girl who got pregnant during a one-night-stand. Becky wavered on what to do about her situation and wound up consulting the principal of a nearby high school and, ultimately agreed with her mother's strong recommendation that she have an abortion.
As the fall-out from Becky's abortion continues in a new episode this coming Friday, I've been more interested in how the various maternal characters have made their way through this emotionally difficult thicket.
Take Cheryl, Becky's mother. She had Becky when she was a teen and regretted it, blamed her constant struggle for money and her dead-end job, where she tends bar at all hours of the night, on the fact that she had a child when she was a child. Cheryl wanted something different for her daughter - whom she largely ignores, leaving the girl painfully lonely - and, when she learned that Becky had become pregnant, was petrified of history repeating itself. Regardless of what Becky said, as far as Cheryl was concerned, there would be no decision made other than to have an abortion, very much the position taken by Dr. Naomi Bennett on Private Practice when her 15-year-old daughter got pregnant, but Naomi was outvoted by her daughter Maya (who's much more confident than Becky) and her ex-husband Sam. "She's not having a baby; she's having an abortion," Cheryl angrily told the doctor when Becky still wasn't sure if that was the right choice for her.
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Do you pay attention to how the mom characters are portrayed on your favorite TV shows? Loathe the so-called "mommy wars" on which the news media love to focus? Each week, Meredith O'Brien's Moms in Pop Culture & Politics column provides a reality check on how TV shows, movies, and the media depict moms. A longtime journalist and mother of three, Meredith O'Brien formerly taught journalism at the University of Massachusetts, is the author of A Suburban Mom: Notes from the Asylum and writes the Picket Fence Post blog for GateHouse Media. Follow Meredith on Twitter: @MeredithOBrien.
