ABC's "Scandal" lived up to its name last week when main character Olivia Pope decided to get an abortion during the show's winter finale. Planned Parenthood was one of the first to sing the show's praises:
Thanks to @shondarhimes for standing with Planned Parenthood & for being groundbreaking creator! #Scandal #StandWithPP
— Planned Parenthood (@PPact) November 20, 2015Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards offered her own statement, thanking producer Shonda Rhimes for doing her organization a service.
"Tonight, the millions of people who tune into Scandal every Thursday night learned that our rights to reproductive health care is under attack...Never one to shy away from critical issues, Shonda Rhimes used her platform to tell the world that if Planned Parenthood lost funding for contraception conseling, STI testing, cancer screenings and safe, legal abortion — millions of people would suffer."
Nowhere in Rhimes' script was a monologue explaining how thousands of lifesaving pregnancy centers are available to women throughout the country to meet their maternal needs. The misleading notion that women would have no access to healthcare as a result of defunding Planned Parenthood is just too good a plot for Hollywood to pass up.
The Federalist points out that Shonda Rhimes has often used her ABC dramas to promote abortion.
On “Grey’s Anatomy,” Cristina Yang decided to abort her husband’s child over his objections. The reasoning was sloppy at best—mostly for convenience and to hurt her husband by declaring he did not deserve a say in the fate of his own child. Rhimes’s spin-off, “Private Practice,” spent numerous storylines allowing OB/GYN Addison Montgomery to pontificate about abortion and even agree to abort a 19-week-old baby despite the objections of the ostensibly “pro-life” partial owner of the practice.
Rhimes knows her primetime hits are perfect opportunities to politicize a controversial issue.
As if the "Scandal" scene wasn't disturbing enough, producers chose to play the song "Silent Night" in the background as Pope went through with the procedure.
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