Television censorship

The NY Times had a pretty decent article about the portrayal of abortion on television, an issue that always bugs me.  On TV, it seems like abortion mostly doesn't exist, and if it does, it's never actually used.  And, on the rare occasion that the option is actually undertaken, the writers take great pains to make sure that it's portrayed "ambigiously", which is to say that they take pains not to offend the religious right. 
So, when unplanned pregnancy enters the picture on TV, good writing flies out the window.  On "That 70's Show" recently, a character was set up as her class valedictorian, bright, independent, aware, ambitious, and well-read.  She had sex with Kelso (hey, it happens--no problem there), blew him off (understandable), but then found she was pregnant. And while I understand that it's a light, fluffy, silly comedy show, it was impossible to ignore the option that the writers were carefully ignoring.  They were pretty much asking the audience to accept not only that a girl like that wouldn't even consider an abortion, but that no one around her thought of it either.  And that no one even seems to know that abortion is available just a few years after Roe vs Wade.  I guess they just didn't watch "Maude".
This article is pretty good--they point out that we've regressed in our ability to deal realistically with abortion since the famous episode on "Maude".  They mentioned my pet peeve--characters who consider having one, but chicken out, leaving the viewers with the impression that having an abortion is the scariest thing possible, and far scarier than being a single teenager mother.  Like on "The O.C."
 
Later, she asserted: "I make $11 a day in tips. Not having this baby makes the most sense." But then, after speaking to an older character who was melancholy about her own, long-ago abortion, Theresa retracted her decision. "As hard as it is to imagine having the baby," she explained to Ryan, "I can't really imagine not having it."
 
The writer, Kate Aurthur (what a great last name for a writer!) doesn't mention my other pet peeve--the character who considers having one and then not and is spared by a miscarriage.  Or it turns out she wasn't pregnant at all, which is more common on the shows I see lately.  But it's a short article, and not the place for a history of unplanned pregnancy on TV.
But Aurthur does fall down on the job, because she obviously called up the writers on various shows and didn't challenge them on some of the more ridiculous things they said or wrote into the shows.  Like this:
 
The episode ended with the doctor who performed the abortion going to church: "Bless me, Father, for I have sinned," he confesses to a priest. About his choice to end the episode that way, Mr. Berlanti said, "For me it wasn't the punctuation mark of the show."
 
Is that so?  If it wasn't the punctuation mark of the show, then why end the program with it? Perhaps Mr. Berlanti is into some sort of nouveau punctuation, but the rest of, including no doubt every single person who watched that episode, would assume that the last scene on the episode was it's punctuation mark.
I also wish she would have challenged Josh Schwartz, who created "The O.C.", about this:
 
Mr. Schwartz chose not to use the word "abortion" in the season finale. Characters spoke about "an appointment at Planned Parenthood" and trailed off at the ends of sentences.
 
Not only is that weaselly, it sounds like he's reinforcing the already widely spread misbelief that Planned Parenthood and abortion clinics are one and the same.  Schwartz may be pro-choice as the day is long, but not only did he pander to the religious right by punting a chance to have a character actually have an abortion, he played right into the hands of anti-contraception forces by accepting one of their favorite tactics of equating a birth control clinic with an abortion clinic.
The other article in the Sunday Times also dodged the important questions of what and why about the new enthusiasm for television censorship.  This article brainlessly repeats the contention that it's the portrayal of sex and violence that are under attack, an assertion that doesn't hold up under the examples that they list of things that were cut from programs.   Every example of something cut is either a naughty word or is about sex.  And all the sexual stuff that was cut makes it clear that sex isn't the problem--portrayals of sexual activity outside heterosexual intercourse, and even then only from the perspective of men, is the problem.  Things that were censored include implied masturbation, a shot of an elderly woman's breast, a man dressed as a woman, and tellingly, a female character's orgasm was cut while the male character's was approved.