Friday Night Lights 7/9/10 (continued)

To show how the show failed, let's look at a positive reaction from a viewer on NBC.com:

I am so grateful to NBC for being brave enough to air this beautiful and thoughtful episode. I look forward to watching this story line unfold further. Thank you!

and simply:

[I]t seems so real.

First of all, What's "beautiful" and "thoughtful" here? The only person who was not allowed to think and deliberate and choose for herself was the person in whom the authority for the decision is vested. The one time we hear what she really wants—to raise the baby, if she had the money—she's in tears. Why? because she feels trapped. Why does she feel trapped? because she's been given one option and ordered to take it. Why is she at the house of a woman she doesn't know, the principal of another school across town, at three o'clock in the morning pleading, "What do you think I should do?" Because her mother already told her what to do and she didn't like it. So what's the problem with keeping the baby, saying, "It's ok, Becky, you can do this, you have that option if you want it"?

Well, Becky's reservations are about "the money". But aside from a very brief passing reference to adoption at their first meeting (in which Tami puts Becky in contact with an abortion clinic after Becky says that's what she wants to do), Tami won't mention that here. She can encourage Becky about choosing the abortion ("I don't think you'll go to hell"), but she can't encourage Becky about choosing to let the baby live.

But this isn't about the legality of abortion. It's about the logically prior problem of choosing an action for whose likely, foreseeable, and even primary(!) consequences one neither desires nor is prepared or willing to accept responsibility. One might say, she is accepting responsibility; she’s making a terrible and enduring decision. To which I ask: terrible and enduring for whom? But I will return to this issue momentarily.

And this is beautiful and thoughtful?

The second problem is with the viewer's comment, "[I]t seems so real," in light of Becky's "I don't want to throw my life away." The solution adopted avoids "throwing one's life away" (in other words, raising a child as a single mother). But how is this done? By throwing away another person's life (and now we're actually talking about doing something permanent, something that precludes all of the possibilities of any kind of life for a person). Try telling a woman who raised or is raising a child by herself as she watches her daughter play her first piano recital, or her son become the first African American President of the United States, that she has "thrown her life away". Real?

Please.

Next you can tell me about how Barack Obama is proof of a life thrown away.

This is why stable societies have strong sex customs. To aid weak-willed individuals (like Becky the teenager who allows two grown-ups to make the decision for her) as well as responsible ones who might make mistakes, not to make those mistakes in the first place. A taboo against premarital sex or one which forces shotgun weddings gives the rational or not-so-rational (or momentarily irrational!) agent the support of his community, instead of leaving him adrift in a moment or a state of inhibited reason, helping him to see the immediacy of the consequences while empowering him (or in this case her) to make a decision for himself. (Incidentally, this is why Luke is able to choose for himself and Becky is not; his freedom is respected and he lives his life in a social context, not as an individual adrift. This is not to impugn Becky for her circumstances, but as a matter of fact she has circumstances and these are among their effects.) It gives him a chance to avoid choosing an action (in this case sex and ultimately abortion), the likely and foreseeable consequences of which he is unable or unwilling to bear.

One might object: what "stable societies"? Abortions have always happened, and always will. They're a part of civilization.

My response: "Your conversation is in free and easy defiance of Murray's Grammar, and is garnished at frequent intervals with various profane expressions, which not even the desire to be graphic in our account shall induce us to describe."