No Easy Decision: MTV tackles abortion

The term “teachable moment” has become a cliché, said Josh Grossberg in Eonline.com, but give MTV credit for at least attempting one. A spin-off of MTV’s controversial reality show 16 and Pregnant, last week’s No Easy Decision followed one previously featured teenage mother, Markai Durham, as she and her partner made the difficult decision to seek an abortion rather than have a second child. Now 19, Durham became pregnant again after missing an appointment for her regular birth-control injection, and she and her boyfriend—struggling to survive and provide for their first child—reluctantly chose abortion over adoption or a second mouth to feed. The show enraged some pro-life groups, said Sean Daly in the New York Post, with some accusing MTV of allying with pro-choice groups to promote abortion as the best option for pregnant teens.

Actually, “MTV got it right,” said Lynn Harris in Salon.com. No Easy Decision lived up to its title, making it clear that Durham’s choice was agonizing. In the end, Durham and her boyfriend decided on abortion not out of selfishness or irresponsibility, but so as to devote their scarce resources to their existing daughter. As Durham put it, “I don’t want her to struggle because of my mistake.” Durham also articulated the tragedy inherent in every abortion with “heartbreaking” simplicity, said Ross Douthat in The New York Times. Having been advised to think of her fetus not as a child but as a tiny clump of cells, Durham at one stage broke down, pointed at her beautiful, living daughter, and said, “‘Nothing but a bunch of cells’ can be her.”

That’s right, said Matthew Archbold in National Catholic Register online, and if MTV really wanted to give us an “unflinching” look at abortion, why flinch from televising the actual procedure? MTV and the “abortion industry” both know that if people could actually see the destruction of the “clump of cells,” with its tiny limbs and its beating heart, the moral repugnance of abortion would be impossible to deny. Another instructive spectacle MTV might usefully inflict on its young viewers, said Judy McGuire in SeattleWeekly.com, is “a three-hour, hopefully prime-time, primer” on the proper use of birth control. A show like that might reduce the “supply of knocked-up cast members” for MTV’s reality shows like 16 and Pregnant and No Easy Decision, “but it’s about time [MTV] gave back a little.”

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