The former ‘Orange Is the New Black’ writer wants the setting in a Texas reproductive healthcare clinic.
by Tommy Cummings
Reaction to Merritt Tierce’s recently published essay about abortion just reaffirmed her position that audiences are ready for more stories about the topic.
Tierce, a North Texas native and author, took a deep self-examination into her long-ago decision to not have an abortion in a New York Times Magazine cover story titled “The Abortion I Didn’t Have.”
The response over the essay was overwhelming, Tierce said in an email.
“I have a whole pile of responses from people weeping at their desks and another pile of responses from people weeping in their cars,” Tierce wrote. “I’ve heard from everyone I’ve ever known and tons of strangers. And while it’s nice to see all the compliments about the writing, for the most part, people are expressing gratitude — which is something of a surprise.
“I seem to have said something so many people have connected to, and they’re telling me they haven’t seen these ideas represented enough in the larger conversation about abortion and parenting.”
For the past two years, Tierce has been trying to develop a television program focused on abortion. She was a staff writer for Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black series before its seven-season run ended in 2019 and the experience gave her ideas on the show’s location — a Texas reproductive healthcare clinic.
“The people fighting this fight in Texas are my heroes, and Texas has this amazing history with respect to abortion,” she said. “But I’ve been astonished that even with everything that’s going on with SB8 and the likely overturning of Roe, Hollywood is still pretty chicken when it comes to abortion. There’s still this clenching, this cringing, that I encounter whenever I say the word. We have to get past that!”
She said a show on the topic is “one of the last frontiers in prestige television — we’ve crossed all the other lines when it comes to violence and depravity and war and zombie apocalypses, but the fear and stigma and shame surrounding abortion are still so entrenched that there’s never been a show about it.”
TV has not handled the abortion debate consistently, according to an opinion piece (“How TV lied about abortion”) in Vox by Tanya Melendez, a distinguished fellow at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
“For decades, abortion on television was largely depicted as a debate in narrative form, one that pitted melodramatic anti- and pro-abortion rights stances against each other through characters audiences knew and loved,” Melendez wrote.
Melendez said that an abortion plotline barely appeared on TV before 1980, except for a groundbreaking episode of Maude in 1972. Bea Arthur’s character, who was 47, discovered she was pregnant and eventually had an abortion. The show was watched by an estimated 65 million people or nearly one-third of the American population at the time, Melendez reported.
Tierce said: “It’s been encouraging to see that more and more shows and movies will have an abortion storyline or an abortion episode, but I think we need a show as big and longrunning as a Grey’s Anatomy or an Orange Is the New Black, to tell all the stories that can be told.”
She said all kinds of people have abortions for all kinds of reasons, “so it’s a storytelling goldmine. You can never run out of abortion stories.
“But what I’m interested in most is how abortion is situated as a nexus of all these super-powerful forces — politics, healthcare, education, religion — all these institutions in our society and culture that want to control people’s bodies and how people have sex.
“Really, I want to make a show about sex and sexual pleasure as much as a show about abortion.”