Jonah–you’re way more a TV expert than I am, but your comments remind me of that episode of Cold Case I mentioned a few weeks back (a show Ramesh and Stuttaford are more expert on than I am–I saw the one episode). During the whole show I saw, I totally expected the female lead to talk about an abortion she had, since she spent the whole show being in awe of these people who escorted teens to abortions, or the girls who had abortions, etc. But she didn’t, of course, I imagine, because they were afraid, even in an episode knee-deep in abortion sympathy, that would be too much.

I was always surprised Sex and the City didn’t get more into abortion than it did. The sleep-around-town girls never had them during the series run, but Miranda pondered having one (Jonah’s storyline: considers and rejects) but wound up having her baby and Samantha and Carrie talked about past abortions, but never went through them during the show’s run.

Though, that said, an HBO series did pull one going-through-with-it abortion storyline off–Six Feet Under, on which the college-age character, Claire, had an abortion—and clearly was pained and regretted it. I eventually stopped watching it—was getting way too weird in general (which is saying something) and I just didn’t have the time—but in the episodes I saw I was impressed by how honest they were about that particular storyline. She was really messes up by it, and influenced a whole host of her relationships with people. Radley Balko wrote about the Six Feet Under abortion storyline here.