‘The Walking Dead’s’ Abortion Misstep
Googling “The Walking Dead” and “abortion” yields hundreds of results from the past week—sites ranging from Jezebel to the ACLU have written about a plot turn in the Nov. 20 episode. And they’re all really mad about it.
In the course of AMC’s successful post-apocalyptic zombie drama, Lori (Sarah Wayne Callies)—one of the survivors—has had sex with two men, one of whom is her husband. She has found out she is pregnant and, because they’re in zombie hell, decides to end the pregnancy. In the recent Season 2 episode in question, she takes a bunch of tablets labeled “morning-after pills.” But, like so many TV characters before her when faced with this decision, she changes her mind and throws them up. (She can form a club with Andrea from Beverly Hills, 90210, Miranda from Sex and the City, Ryan’s girlfriend Theresa on The O.C., and many others.)
What got the Internet upset is the misinformation the show spread by showing Lori taking a handful of morning-after pills when she is weeks’ pregnant with the aim to no longer be pregnant. The Walking Dead is adding to the confusion between emergency contraception such as Plan B (which is, indeed, a morning-after pill, and prevents a woman’s egg from being fertilized) and RU-486 (which is administered by doctors and does cause abortion).
“Aren’t they supposed to have fact checkers to catch this kind of thing?” asked the ACLU blog.