pro-life on "the small screen"

More from Lynn Vincent in World...

In the second half of her article, she traces the contemporary pro-life emphasis in movies back to slightly earlier efforts on TV...

It's possible to argue that Hollywood's startling new egalitarianism on abortion started on the small screen then leapt to the large. While some shows, like Law & Order, have in recent years painted pro-life activists as murderous vigilantes, others have been more fair. On CSI Miami in October 2002, for example, lead character Horatio Caine (David Caruso) watches a technician remove an early-term fetus from its mother's womb following a car crash: "Not just skin cells, is it?" Caine says.

HBO's Six Feet Under in a July 2003 episode had main character Claire terminating her pregnancy at a local abortion clinic. Producers of the episode portrayed the clinic as a sterile, unfriendly place, running women through like cattle at a slaughterhouse. Still, Claire moved through the scenes emotionally detached. After the procedure, a friend drove her home to recover and that was that. But a later episode mirrored real life: Though Claire, like many women, experienced mainly relief in the immediate wake of her abortion, a breakdown followed. Asked to babysit her infant niece, she becomes ill. Then she has a dream in which she meets her aborted child in heaven.

An April 3, 2007, installment of House went further. This time, Dr. House and his team treat Emma, a photographer about 19 weeks pregnant with a life-threatening heart condition. House's basic message: The "fetus" is threatening your life. Abort or die. But Emma refuses to abort and demands that House save them both.

House's boss, physician Lisa Cuddy, refuses to back House's recommendation to terminate. That sends the medical team, now led by Cuddy, in search of new treatment. Later, when House agrees to participate in exploratory in utero surgery, the hand of the "fetus" emerges from the incision and briefly grasps House's finger. He freezes in astonishment and—in something wholly alien to his grizzled character—rapt wonder.

"It was some of the most shocking footage on abortion ever seen on TV," Knight said of the reenactment of the controversial 1999 photo in which a 21-week-old baby seems to reach from his mother's womb during prenatal surgery and grasp the surgeon's hand.

"House was stunned," Knight said. And, in a stunningly un-Hollywood development, House thereafter refers to the "fetus" as a "baby."