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Preserve the Right of Choice Trudy L. Cole Offset, 1992
FADE IN:
INT. HOUSE, BEDROOM—NIGHT
SONIA (39) and BRIAN (43) in bed, staring at their phones. She notices he's looking at baby bottles.
BRIAN
Do we want Natural Flows, Natural Feels, or Closer to Natures? I can't tell the difference.
Turned on by his interest in baby merch, Sonia mounts him.
BRIAN (CONT’D)
She likes it when I register for baby stuff?
SONIA
Can we watch more pregnant porn? Pretend our baby'& right here in my belly making ne all big and sexy?
BRIAN
Yes we can.
Faster than you can say sexxxpectant, he's got the porn pulled up on his phone and mirrored to the TV. He scrolls.
SONIA.
Wow, her tits are amazing.
BRIAN
Agree. Those are definitely some Natural Feels.
They watch the porn and begin to get down.
BRIAN (CONT"D)
Wait. Is that—Alyssa?
He stops kissing Sonia and stares at ALYSSA (29).
BRIAN (CONT"D)
(alarmed)
That’s Alyssa.
Sonia and Brian sit up.
ECU on Alyssa's big pregnant belly, moving rhythmically as the guy thrusts hard.
I’ve been trying to make an abortion show for the past five years. I spent ten years working in the abortion rights movement in Texas, from 2004 to 2014, and then I wrote a novel that got me a job on the writing staff of Orange Is the New Black. When Orange ended in the summer of 2019, the show’s creator, Jenji Kohan, asked me what I wanted to do next. I said I want to make an abortion show and she said Let’s do it.
What’s an abortion show, you ask? A television series all about abortion, which is to say all about sexual pleasure. But did your asshole clench up when you read the word “abortion”? Because that’s what’s happened over and over to the sphincters of the various executives in Hollywood, in whose airspace I’ve uttered that noxious word: Uh oh. An Issue. How could it ever be entertainment?
The all-male city council of Waskom, Texas, voted to make Waskom the first city in the nation to outlaw abortion, declaring itself a “Sanctuary City for the Unborn.” Population <2,000, Waskom is a tiny town deep in East Texas. There’s no abortion clinic in Waskom. Mark Lee Dickson, an itinerant preacher who claims to be a virgin, invented the idea of the Sanctuary City for the Unborn, and is driving around Texas trying to persuade other municipalities and counties to outlaw abortion.
So Jenji got me a pilot deal with Netflix, which means I get paid to write the script for the first episode of the show I want to make. It doesn’t mean they’ll actually shoot it, or the series will ever actually exist. Most pilot deals don’t result in a new TV show. Most movie and television scripts are never produced. But I’m 40 years old and it feels like making an abortion show is what my life has been building toward. That sounds grandiose; I’m not a simpleton. I mean that making an abortion show now would be worth all the effort I could put toward it. I heard so many abortion stories when I was working for the abortion fund in Texas, and I’ve had two abortions myself. One because I didn’t know who the dad was, one because I did know who the dad was and we had a messed-up relationship, and both because I couldn’t afford another kid. My children are now 18 and 19 and I’m divorced (twice). I also had a miscarriage in there somewhere, back before I got my tubes tied so I could have sex without getting pregnant. After all these chapters of my life now I’m in love with an Israeli scientist I met on a dating app, who’s in Peru doing a lot of ayahuasca. He calls to say I’m the woman of his dreams, and there’s no way we can be together.
In East Texas, Mark Lee Dickson has signed up five more Sanctuary Cities for the Unborn: Omaha, Naples, Joaquin, Tenaha, and Gilmer. The combined population of all five towns is 9,625. None of the towns has an abortion clinic, but abortion is now illegal within the city limits.
I want to make an abortion show because abortion is about sex, love, death, religion, politics, it’s this rich nexus of taboos and existential mysteries, it’s timeless and profound. Abortion is an inexhaustible goldmine for a storyteller because all kinds of people have abortions for all kinds of reasons, and feel all kinds of ways about it. I want my show to be a big drama set in Texas, that takes place in several different theatres, one being the Capitol in Austin, with a far-right Republican governor and a firecracker legislator. I was at the Texas Capitol in 2013, with my twelve-year-old daughter, when Wendy Davis filibustered the abortion bill. We shouted and stomped so hard that the granite building shook and we helped her run out the clock. They couldn’t take a vote partly because they couldn’t hear, over our anger. Another theatre of action in my show would be an abortion clinic, with an abortion doctor protagonist. She’s pregnant and she loves sex. People think abortion and kids don’t go together but all the abortion doctors I’ve known have kids. Most people who have abortions already have kids. People think sex and abortion don’t go together either, but the reason people try to keep abortion down is they’re afraid of sexual pleasure. Sexual pleasure is so powerful they think if women get to experience it with no consequences, they’ll stop holding up the weight of the world and everything will devolve into chaos while women get their fuck on.
I want to put all that right into the body of my abortion doctor protagonist. She loves sex, she’s 35 years old and she’s a mom and she’s divorced and she’s smart and her sister is her best friend. Television executives want a character to be good at her job, so she’s good at her job. She’s pregnant with her sister’s baby, carrying it as a gestational surrogate. So I’m throwing in the Assisted Reproductive Technologies story from the top too. Another theatre of action in my big Texas drama is the high school, where they’re required to teach abstinence-only sex “education.” I’ll have a basketball coach teach the health class, so he’ll be the one telling adolescent mammals not to have sex. And he’ll have a student, a young woman who’s a basketball star, who gets pregnant and needs an abortion so they can win state.
And then I’ll have a Catholic church, with a priest character. That’s the theatre where they revere the mother of God and erase her sexuality. Christianity is the religion of unplanned pregnancy: a young woman got pregnant without expecting to, without choosing it, and that’s supposed to be the holiest thing that’s ever happened in the history of history. The message is You shall be a mother, because that’s your destiny and that’s what’s best; and you shall have no sexuality. It’s a primitive spell designed to hoax women into believing they won’t be loved if they follow their cunt or they don’t have kids or they don’t do all the work of raising the kids, without complaining.
In my big drama set in Texas I want to show how all these institutions are conspiring to control who has sex for what reason. I’ll follow every character’s sex life, and every character’s reproductive life. I’ll explore themes of control and freedom, and how we don’t have as much as we wish we did, whether we want a baby or want to end a pregnancy.
But I also know the scaredy-cat men who have the power in Hollywood don’t want to think about it. You say the word abortion and they turn gray. You say the word abortion and their stomach flips. You say the word abortion and sometimes they say Oh that’s so important, good for you. But it’s too hot for us. You say the word abortion to the lower-level female exec who gets it and used to work for Planned Parenthood and she starts helping you figure out how you can convince the man above her it’s worthwhile. How, together, you can handle his queasiness. I had awful morning sickness when I was unexpectedly pregnant with my son, at the age of 19. I threw up all day every day for three months. I could only nibble on Saltines. I hate bananas and for some reason they were one of the only foods I could keep down. It may have seemed like I was trying to starve myself to starve the fetus out, because I definitely did not want to become a mother at that point in my life, and abortion was not an option. I was a good Christian girl. No one told me good Christian girls have abortions all the time. So I wasn’t trying to end my pregnancy, it was trying to end me. Maybe we could offer a sleeve of Saltines and a banana to the queasy exec. How do we convince him abortion is entertaining? (Why do we have to?) But how do we convince him that if he just has the baby of the abortion show, we know he’ll love it? Who would ever want to think about abortion? For their shows, people want to think about World War II, and cops and robbers, and aliens and dinosaurs, and the Kardashians. We’ve explored the farthest redundancies of war, killing, violence, space, genre, and celebrity, without getting close to abortion. People think they know what abortion is, and people think abortion isn’t funny.
Skipping ahead, past the part where I finished the big drama and Jenji and I pitched it to Netflix, and the three executives we pitched to left the company immediately after, without responding to our pitch. Skipping past the part where my Israeli climate scientist got hit by a bus in Tel Aviv and decided he had to try to be with the twice-divorced, sterilized shiksa he loved (that’s me), so I moved to Israel during a global pandemic. Past the part where I finally finished an essay about how hard it was for me to become a mother before I was ready, even though I love my son beyond measure; it took me a year to write that essay but I was afraid of what my boyfriend would think of me, as a woman, if I published it, so I withdrew it. Past the part where my boyfriend and I couldn’t figure out how to be together and I had to come back to Los Angeles. Now I’m dating a philosopher who writes about mistakes, and Netflix is giving me and Jenji another shot at my abortion show. But we have no idea what they want, aside from “second-screen content.” Since people think abortion isn’t funny, I’ve scrapped the big drama and written a workplace comedy version. I took out all the politics, I turned it into baby food. It goes down easy because it starts with pregnant porn. Isn’t that funny?
The Texas legislature, after calling a special session solely to unconstitutionally outlaw abortion, voted to unconstitutionally outlaw abortion, by enacting Senate Bill 8. The governor signed it into law right away. SB8 prohibits abortion after six weeks gestation; most people do not know they’re pregnant at six weeks. The bill also includes a unique enforcement mechanism allowing private citizens to sue anyone who performs or aids and abets an abortion. This “bounty hunter” tactic was masterminded by a lawyer named Jonathan Mitchell, who workshopped the strategy to help Mark Lee Dickson bag more Sanctuary Cities. By July 2021, thirty-five cities in Texas, Nebraska, and Ohio have outlawed abortion, and SB8 effectively fires a far-right anti-abortion proton torpedo into the reactor core of due process and state government.
If you want to know how we get from the pregnant porn to an abortion show—well, I wish I could say you’ll have to watch the show, but Netflix passed, which means they said no. They offered no substantive reason to Jenji Kohan, who helped make Netflix Netflix—Orange was one of the first shows to pioneer the binge drop model and show how streamers could make their own binge-worthy content. Jenji thought she was making a little web series for an upstart DVD company and instead she helped make them masters of the entertainment universe. In 2021, Netflix will spend $17 billion on new programming. Cool. When they decided not to move forward with my workplace comedy abortion show they said only We’re going in a different direction, which is the same direction everyone I’ve ever pitched an abortion show to has gone in. To her eternal credit, Jenji pointed out to her Netflix execs that the Texas legislature had just passed a bill unconstitutionally outlawing abortion in Texas, and said I wish you were brave enough to let us tell these stories.
Most people don’t know they’re pregnant at six weeks, but I track everything, it’s always been a habit, plus my period is very regular, that’s how I know I’m pregnant the first day after the day I don’t bleed. I go to Planned Parenthood a week later to get an abortion. In Texas in 2004 you can get an abortion up to 24 weeks of gestation. But after the sonogram they say it’s too early: the products of conception are too insufficient to permit a therapeutic abortion. That doesn’t make sense to me but they tell me to go home and come back two weeks later.
I miscarried that too-small pregnancy before I could have an abortion. But in 2006 I needed an abortion again and went to a clinic my abortion fund had a strong relationship with. Some of the other abortion fund volunteers were working as clinic escorts outside the clinic that day, defending the already-born women who were going into the clinic for an abortion. Even though I was on the side of the people protecting the freedom to abort, I was embarrassed for anyone I knew to see me going into the clinic. Because I worked for an abortion fund, I thought people would think I should know how to not get pregnant and not need an abortion. Even if they wouldn’t have judged me, I didn’t want to have to talk about it. I just wanted to get it over with. But after I had that abortion, at ten weeks gestation, my follow-up visit showed there were still products of conception in my uterus and I had to have another D&C. I had to ask for more time off from the restaurant where I waited tables and my boss, whom I’d told about the abortion in order to prove I was a good worker and would never take time off except for something essential like an abortion, said What, did they lose an arm up in there?
Back to when I was first trying to figure out my big drama: I’ve been re-reading Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born. So much of the cultural production, if you zoom way out, is telling the story of male valorization of separation and fear of dependence. To look at abortion casually or with humor or gentleness or curiosity threatens the matrix. I don’t know how to write a pilot.
My best friend had her first baby, twenty years after I had mine. When she went into labor I did too, although I didn’t tell her that and no one would believe me. But it was real, like a poodle’s false pregnancy. I knew my friend had gone to the hospital to have the baby and I was lying awake in bed, unable to sleep because I was excited for her, and I started to feel heavy intense contractions in my abdomen. They came in waves for several hours. It took her two more days to have the baby. I went to visit them in the hospital and we had a lovely conversation for an hour while I sat on the pink exercise ball in their room and she nursed the newborn baby. I was so happy for her. She’d had a beautiful healthy son right as she turned 39, with a kind man who adored her and would be a wonderful father. As I walked out of her room I began to shake and by the time I stepped into the elevator I was sobbing. I couldn’t find my way out of the hospital. There was a sign on a stanchion in a hallway that said NO BABIES PAST THIS POINT. When I finally found the exit I stumbled into some bushes and cried and cried and cried on my knees in a flowerbed. Several people walked past me without acknowledging me. I couldn’t stand up for some time. I suppose I was feeling something big and old related to the trauma of childbirth, or unplanned and unchosen pregnancy, but I don’t know who could ever tell me what that was about.
I bouldered with Jenji in the desert and she said I don’t know what my show is because I don’t know who my characters are. I Googled how to create a character. Many responses instruct a writer to think about what a character eats for breakfast. My main character is Dr. Genie Waters, a pregnant, sex positive, motorcycle-riding abortion provider. Why not? It’s TV. I don’t know what she eats for breakfast.
I went to El Paso with my TV-writer friend Anjali, to think about setting the show there. We toured the embattled clinic by the freeway, a multi-site like I want for the show. A multi-site means they do abortions but they also do contraception, cancer screenings, STI testing, vasectomies, etc. So I could tell all kinds of sex stories in addition to abortion stories (and every abortion story is a sex story). I could tell that story about the woman whose jaw got frozen open while she was going down on her girlfriend. I could tell some funny/sad/it’s-okay herpes stories. Is herpes the last blind spot of political correctness? Everyone still thinks it’s okay to make herpes jokes. The multi-site staff generously met us at the clinic on their day off to show us around. While we were in El Paso, Anjali and I had breakfast tacos for breakfast. We visited two clinics in El Paso and one clinic fifteen minutes west of El Paso, across the state line in New Mexico, where the abortion laws are very different. We went for a hike and talked about how Anjali wants a baby so badly but her husband doesn’t want kids and maybe she’s too old now anyway. Well, we talked about: Who wants a baby? Babies cry and scream and poop and take over your life. Both Anjali and my best friend who had the baby a couple months ago have looked at my relationship with my grown kids with desire and admiration, wishing they could skip to that part. I agree this part is great. But I also felt like I knew what to do with a baby. A brand new baby. I liked holding and changing and nursing and rocking and being attuned. It was when they started needing more than that that it got more complicated. Anjali was on her period and she’s had the same menstrual cup for fifteen years. That’s a relationship. At the top of the hill we could see across the pass to Juarez, where some rocks spell out in Spanish: The Bible is the truth. Read it.
When I got back to LA, my dear friend Julia came from Texas because I said I’m freaking out, I need help. I don’t know how to write a pilot. So we broke the big drama pilot using a basic Save the Cat! structure. Save the pussy: if you could tell a hundred abortion stories, you could tell one about someone who wants an abortion because she doesn’t want pregnancy and childbirth to wreck her body, to reshape her vagina. That’s the whole reason. She wants to keep her pussy tight. If you can tell only one abortion story, the matrix says it always has to be: Woman Is Sad [Regardless of Compelling Situational Details That Plainly Justify Abortion] So We Know She Has Appropriate Uncomplicated Orientation Toward Mothering.
If I could tell a hundred abortion stories, it would become obvious I don’t believe in the justification framework.
My daughter’s college campus in New York closes and she has to come back to Los Angeles and attend college over Zoom. Except it’s not Zoom, it’s a janky proprietary platform called Big Blue. My daughter won’t let me help her figure out how to get it working from her computer, and won’t use my computer, and won’t let me help her figure out how to get the audio working from her phone. When people say they want kids, what do they mean? Do they mean they want the experience of interacting with an unreasonable person who won’t let you help them, over and over? My daughter did let me watch her homework movies with her, for her “Women in Film” class. We watched Portrait of a Lady on Fire, both of us riveted. The abortion scene is one of my favorite on-screen abortion scenes; it’s moving and radical because the young woman who’s getting the abortion in a hut in 18th-century France is holding a baby’s hand, while the baby’s mother does the abortion on the young woman. It all goes together, it always has.
The governor in Texas tried to use the pandemic to outlaw abortion, saying abortion wasn’t “medically necessary,” so I wrote an op-ed about how dumb that is.
Now I have a shopping agreement on a Planned Parenthood doctor’s book, an anthology of abortion stories. A shopping agreement is where the author of the book agrees to let you pitch an adaptation of the book to potential producers, and you both hope one of those producers will see the potential of the show. Then they’ll pay the author of the book to option the book, and they’ll pay you, the writer, to create a show from it. My reps sent the project to thirty high-level prospects in the industry. Only one responded to set a meeting, but she’s the Executive Vice President of Television at a respected company, and said she was very pro-choice. In the meeting I said so many impassioned things about why we need an abortion show and what it could be. The Executive Vice President of Television said Well, “abortion anthology” is not one but two words no studio wants to hear.
My essay “The Abortion I Didn’t Have” was published the week of the Dobbs hearings. That’s the one I was afraid to publish before, because I thought my Israeli ex-boyfriend would think I was a bad mother. When the opportunity came again I still thought it might be a terrible thing to do. I felt crazy, I thought I should do it, I felt crazy, I asked friends for advice, I felt crazy. I didn’t want to hurt my son. I published it because I thought it might help me make an abortion show. A million people read it. People keep thanking me for it. I thought Now someone will let me make an abortion show.
Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy resigns. I’m sitting in the Orange writers’ room and another writer shows me the news notification on his phone. I feel a gross clamminess spread throughout my body. They have the numbers, it’s only a matter of time now.
I’m standing in my kitchen in Iowa City while I’m in grad school, listening to NPR, and they say the House voted to defund Planned Parenthood. I feel a crazy woolly spike of fear bloom from my pelvis up out the top of my head. It seems so ignorant, and ridiculous. Who thinks planning parenthood is bad?
They did it. It happened.
My friend Diana moved to Los Angeles last year. She directed one of my favorite abortion movies—Vessel, about Dr. Rebecca Gomperts, the Dutch abortion doctor who invented Women on Waves and Women on Web. Today Diana and I saw the film adaptation of Annie Ernaux’s Happening at the WGA theatre, at 11 AM. That book crushed me when I read it wide-eyed in one sitting two years ago. The opposite of my story. The same as my story. She got pregnant at a crucial time in her life, when she was too young and her identity as a writer and thinker was being born. If she’d had the baby then, she would have had to abort the writer/thinker, probably forever, definitely for some time. She quite likely would never have become who she did become because she got that harrowing abortion. She would have had a baby and lived out her life in obscurity, instead of living her life in literature, having children later when she wanted to, and winning a Nobel. As the credits rolled I doubled over in the almost-empty movie theatre (who wants to see an abortion movie at 11 AM? who wants to see an abortion movie at all?), my gut aching, crying, I couldn’t stop it. I couldn’t stop the happening of my unexpected baby, so I couldn’t stop crying in a movie theatre twenty-two years later.
The same happening happened when I saw Juno, at the end when she has the baby. My face cracked open and I started crying at the Magnolia Theatre in Dallas. I was 27 and my son was 7 and my daughter was 6 and I was divorced and my life was hard. I hadn’t written anything yet. I was a waitress because I had to give up my dream of being a writer because I had kids so young because I was a sexual being living under the primitive shame-based hoaxes of Christianity. When I saw Juno I didn’t know I would still become a writer. I loved my unexpected son and I didn’t know how to be his mother. I wasn’t sad because I didn’t want my children, I was sad because they were the most beautiful children and I would never be ready for them. I would never be thirty-nine when they were born, financially stable, beloved by a mature partner, with a strong sense of self and the ability to be joyfully present when they were 6 and 7. When they were 6 and 7 I would only ever be a waitress who burned and cut herself and was always going away from them and had very low self-esteem. They don’t show you what happens after Juno has the baby. I had to walk out of the theatre, my arms wrapped around me.
After we saw Happening we had to walk slowly around the block in the sun while I got ahold of myself. It’s a gorgeous film, to say nothing of abortion. 60s France, my God. I always thought the title, in English, was ill-chosen. It’s an awkward title. Happening. It doesn’t convey anything. I assumed it meant something more or better in the French, and they chose to stick with the literal translation, but I thought that was a mistake.
Then it happened and I couldn’t think of another way to say it. It happened. The happening of it. It wasn’t potential anymore. It wasn’t coming. It was here. It happened. It has happened, it happened, it’s still happening. The way a pregnancy happens and then either a baby happens or an abortion happens—a miscarriage, an end, a termination, not-a-child. A happening.
The Supreme Court decision overturning Roe was leaked. Now, I thought. Now someone will let me make an abortion show.
We started the abortion fund in Texas in 2004 because we thought the situation was so bad then. 2004 was a paradise of a smorgasbord of a cornucopia of abundant abortion access compared to now. We had no idea what was coming. Well, some people did. Some people were ringing the bell for years and years. So I expected it more and more, through everything that happened, as they crossed lines and invented crackpot strategies that worked to finally win the contest for reality, and now reality is that we claimed the Constitution protected the right to abortion but it never did. So when it actually happened, I’m surprised to say I fell to the floor and bawled. It was rage, it was shock. The hatefulness. This felling happened to many other women. The fall of Roe caused this floor-falling, a felling, a happening. I went to DC to be arrested. Like that did anything. Such Kabuki! I stopped running, for the first time in three years. I started smoking. But that’s wrong, all wrong. You have to be stronger, you can’t quit running, you can’t start smoking. I still had the shopping agreement on the Planned Parenthood doctor’s anthology. I thought: Now. Now someone will let me make an abortion show. Now that it’s illegal, at least someone will let me make an abortion show.
I’ve gotten involved with a powerful group of female showrunners who are trying to make Hollywood do something about abortion. I’ve been spending all my time doing admin for them. Day and night, adding people to the mailing list, corresponding with new advocates, helping draft a letter to studios, attending consciousness-raising Zooms. We raised almost three million dollars to donate to abortion funds. We sent a letter to the big nine—Amazon, AMC, Apple, Disney, Lionsgate, NBC, Netflix, Paramount, Warner—demanding they do something. You can’t keep shooting television in states where abortion is illegal. It’s a labor issue, it’s a gender equity issue. 1500 showrunners and directors signed the letter.
Diana and I are working together now, to adapt the abortion doctor’s anthology into a TV series. We’ve created a pitch (where we describe the show in a way that’s designed to seem extemporaneous and conversational, but is completely scripted), and a visual deck (a presentation of images and text describing the show, and representing the look and feel and tone). This work took one hundred hours and fifty-eight minutes (I track all my time on all my projects) and we have not been paid by anyone for this work (which is normal, and why only rich people or people with rich spouses can afford to try to be writers in Hollywood). You may be thinking Okay so not even three weeks of full-time work, what’s the big deal? But it doesn’t work like that. Diana has a young child who’s not in school yet, and both of us have to do paying work so we can afford to do the non-paying work here and there. It took us three months to do those hundred hours of work, and then it takes another month or two to schedule the pitches. But we raced, because of the fall of Roe, doing everything faster, hoping to catch a wave of pro-abortion sentiment. We’re about to pitch the show to three exciting production companies.
All the companies we pitched our abortion show to, the summer Roe was overturned, are going in a different direction.
Five years is not that long. Many film and television projects die ten different ways, over many years, before they appear on a screen. And five years is nothing in abortion-strategy time. The antis were waging their death-by-a-thousand-cuts war for nearly fifty years. They curtailed and chipped and contorted, they contrived and distorted and defamed and reframed and cheated and lied and won.
I woke up one morning and thought I know, they’ll let me make an abortion show if I make it about MEN! and dreamed up a movie called Offside. It’s about four Texas high school football players (boys) who find themselves pregnant, right after they make the playoffs. It’s a body-switch comedy. It’s Freaky Friday Night Lights! They have to figure out how to get abortions in the most pro-football, anti-abortion state in the country. “Offside” means a part of your body is on the other team’s side. Jenji’s into it, we’re setting up pitches.
I was almost on Wife Swap, before my book was published, before I’d even finished my book, before I came to Hollywood to be a screenwriter. I was the executive director of an abortion fund and Wife Swap was thinking about doing a pro-choice/pro-life episode (as they called it). The producers came to my town in Texas and shot a sizzle reel and the idea was I would go live with a pro-life (sic) family and a pro-life (sic) woman would come live with my boyfriend and our three children. Luckily our children’s respective other parents said No way to that, but before they did, the ABC producer, while he was pressuring me to commit to the show, also said I don’t think you can say the word “abortion” on network television.
I almost had a deal to develop a show about Linda Coffee, one of the two young attorneys who argued the Roe case, but it fell apart at closing. It would have been a good show, set in Dallas and Austin and DC in the 60s and 70s, with two gay main characters: Linda, and her lifelong friend Henry McCluskey, the gay rights attorney who handled the adoption of Norma McCorvey’s aka Jane Roe’s baby (even though abortion was legalized because of Jane Roe’s unwanted pregnancy, she herself still had to have that baby). Henry was the only person who knew the identity of the Roe baby when he was shot in the back and left in a ditch when he was thirty years old. That was just six months after his friend Linda won her abortion case, on January 22, 1973. Linda Coffee prepared the legal strategy but her friend Sarah Weddington presented the oral arguments. Sarah was twenty-six years old and had never presented a case in court before. Before Roe, Linda helped Henry create the legal framework to win an historic SCOTUS victory in a Texas sodomy case, but she didn’t want her name on it because she was still in the closet.
They say No one buys period shows, meaning shows set before the present, because you have to recreate a time period, and they say You can’t sell a limited series, meaning a show you intend to run for only one season. If you try to pitch a limited series they say Why not do it as a movie?
Jenji and I have pitched my movie Offside to five major studios. We’re waiting to hear. Diana and I are still trying to sell our show based on the abortion doctor’s anthology. I’ve started dropping cringey hints in the showrunners’ group about my abortion show, but I don’t give a fuck. When have I ever been connected to so many powerful fun people?
All the companies passed on Offside. They all said Fantastic idea, write it on spec and we’ll read the script! Spec means for no money and I need a job so bad.
Diana and I pitched our abortion show to a new company and got a second-round meeting with a producer who could greenlight a pilot deal. He’s asked us to make one big change to the story, to make it more like Breaking Bad, but if we’re willing to do that, he seems genuinely interested. We don’t like the Breaking Bad version, but we ask ourselves: Do we want to make an abortion show or not?
Pencils down. Because the Linda Coffee deal fell apart, Jenji got me a new deal with Netflix to write a new abortion show, but the Writers’ Guild is on strike so we’re not allowed to do any writing or have any meetings about any projects.
The strike is still going. We’re walking around and around the buildings all summer, holding signs. Before the strike, I wrote about the Mifepristone case where they’re trying to outlaw medication abortion even though the abortion pill is safer than Tylenol, safer than a tonsillectomy, safer than a colonoscopy. I discovered the far-right judge who’s hearing the Mifepristone case went to the same tiny Christian college I attended, at the same time, and we were both radicalized by unplanned pregnancy, but in opposite directions. This discovery gave me the germ of the idea for my new abortion show project with Netflix, but I can’t do any screenwriting so instead I helped organize a Dobbs Day picket at Amazon, for the showrunners’ coalition, to mark the first anniversary of the fall of Roe. It was magical. Lily Tomlin, Brandee Evans, Gloria Allred. Did the showrunners really force the studios to do anything that will make a difference, though? I don’t think so.
The strike is over but the business is still collapsing.
I had to sublet my apartment because I have no money. I sublet it to another TV writer who’s pitching an abortion show. Maybe there are a lot of us. After Diana and I put another fifty hours of work into our abortion show, to make it more like Breaking Bad, we learned that producer had left the company. I need to work on my new Netflix pilot, but I can’t calm down about how unpredictable this business is, so I start trying to get a real job. Aside from writing I’m qualified to do nonprofit work in the reproductive justice world, or wait tables. I think about going back to delivering the mail but that pays only $19 an hour. I never think about going back to waiting tables. I interview for a couple of jobs at reproductive rights organizations I love, but I’m overqualified in some ways and underqualified in others, and they don’t understand why I would want to come work for them when I’ve made it to where I am. You could do anything you want!
I’ve given up on love, and on making an abortion show. I’m just going through the motions. Of dating, and pitching. I’ve been on 142 first dates since I moved to Los Angeles in 2017 and I’ve done 48 general meetings with Hollywood executives. A general meeting is a lot like a first date: hypothetical. It’s not about an actual job or anything, the way a first date is not about anything except how you’re both single. You talk about how great you are and they talk about how great they are and then the executive, who is often not an Executive Vice President of Television but someone with a title like Director of Development, often younger than thirty years old, often in possession of a degree from Oberlin or Harvard or USC, and often not in possession of what you would judgmentally judge to be “life experience” says We’d love to find something to work on with you! and you say Abortion show, likewise, abortion show and then you ghost each other forevermore.
“Milton produced Paradise Lost for the same reason that a silkworm produces silk. It was an activity of his nature.”—Edward Bulwer-Lytton
I keep pitching abortion shows and dating men because it’s an activity of my nature. I’m not getting anywhere. I’m sitting in a pile of floss. Here it is. What do you think?
I wish I could have told you about the Inez Burns project, and the polyamorous Brazilian guitarist I dated, and the guy I went to meet in Sarajevo, and the guy who came from Hawaii to meet me, and the entire many-episode arc of my younger child’s gender identity journey, and the story of my new abortion show with Netflix. I told Netflix Don’t worry, I know abortion is a huge boner-killer and I’ve tried to make sure the word “abortion” never appears in the pilot. I didn’t tell you about all the meetings I’ve had over the years, with all the rad abortion doctors, clinic staff, and activists, or about all the panels and talks and interviews. I’ve just appeared on another panel about portrayals of abortion in film and television. I’ve become a sought-after expert on how to not make an abortion show in Hollywood. If I could tell you all these stories, you’d see how they go together, so I started working on a fake Wikipedia entry called No Abortion Show:
No Abortion Show is an American comedy-drama television series created by Merritt Tierce, that aired for three seasons on Showtime and Paramount+ with Showtime subscribers. The series follows a twice-divorced 40-something TV writer as she tries to make a TV show about abortion, find love through online dating, and parent her grown children.
I started writing episode summaries for every episode in the show No Abortion Show. I thought maybe that would be the form this essay would take. Instead it’s become an anthology of attempts, of abortion stories, of incidents and anecdotes and stardates and happenings. “Abortion anthology” is not one but two words no studio wants to hear.
Long before Call Me By Your Name and his prolific career as one half of Merchant Ivory, James Ivory escaped the temperamental Oregonian winters for the desert. Here, he revisits his adolescent sojourns in Palm Springs, a site of a sensual coming-of-age
The Otherness Archive is an open-access online library gathering moving image works by and for the transmasculine community. Here, they present a collection of film stills from their catalog, along with an essay by Ellis Kroese.
