Mitzi's choice: staging a controversy

More than a million U.S. women have abortions each year, even as fierce battles over the procedure (legal and philosophical), rage on.

Yet somehow, depictions of women choosing to terminate a pregnancy are largely absent these days from America's theatrical, TV and film fare.

These media have not shied away from stories that ponder such fervently debated national issues as the AIDS epidemic, the Iraq War, gay marriage — and, in the past, abortion.

Some media watchdogs assert that producers and writers are avoiding the abortion question for fear it's become the "third rail" of American drama (an issue so hotly contentious, it can't be touched without getting burned). But that hasn't fazed Seattle area playwright Elizabeth Heffron.

Her bluntly titled new work, "Mitzi's Abortion," premieres Thursday night at ACT Theatre. Commissioned by ACT, and winner of its first New Play Award, the script merits attention as one of few current dramas to place a woman's decision to end a pregnancy front and center.

"Mitzi's Abortion" attempts to examine the increasingly intricate and incendiary issue from many angles — familial, psychological, medical, financial, historical — through the experience of a young Western Washington military wife.

Loosely inspired by an actual case involving a Navy wife in Everett, the play reflects Heffron's own political stance. But it also endeavors to respectfully factor in other fervent responses to the disputatious question of whether, when and how women should be allowed to legally end a pregnancy.

"I'm worried that more and more reproductive policies are being made by our government and insurance companies without any concern for the individuals involved," states Heffron. "As a culture, we've completely neglected our responsibility to have clear, fair, compassionate rules about abortion."

She hastens to add, "But my play doesn't demonize people who think differently about this issue. Not at all."

ACT artistic director Kurt Beattie says he nurtured "Mitzi's Abortion's" gestation and is staging its debut because it "contains many points of view, and doesn't bash you over the head with one. At essence, it tells a very human story."

Unsolicited advice

That story centers on 19-year-old Mitzi (played by Seattle actress Sharia Pierce) who learns, entering her sixth month of pregnancy, that she's carrying an anencephalic fetus. In this rare prenatal condition, the baby has a brain stem but virtually no brain and will die in the womb or soon after birth.

Mitzi is advised by her doctor to have an abortion, as women do in about 95 percent of such cases. But her decision is complicated by external pressures that mirror the escalating national fracas over the procedure.

Her husband, friends and relatives urge her to abort and not to abort. Her U.S. military insurance won't pay for the procedure, due to restrictions on federal funding for abortion unless the woman's life is endangered.

Unsolicited counsel also arrives from the ghosts of a 17th-century midwife and sainted Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas. (The writings of Aquinas include his views on "ensoulment," which some controversially interpret as condoning early-stage abortions.)

A Pandora's box

Heffron, a Bainbridge Island mother of two, spent several years writing "Mitzi's Abortion," her first major work since her 2001 counter-culture comedy "New Patagonia" debuted at Seattle Repertory Theatre.

To research the play she spoke with doctors and scientists, boned up on the history of contraception and abortion (evidence of which goes back to ancient times), studied global policies, and spoke with other women about their own experiences and views.

But simply airing a range of divergent opinions does not a play make. And Heffron likens writing candidly on this subject, in today's contentious socio-political climate, to "unwrapping a big, unopened Pandora's box. There's something about the underlying biological femaleness of this issue, and all it implies, that makes it hard to pull out into the light and really examine."

The leeriness about holding frank, public discussions about abortions extends beyond stage and screen, says Denise Dudzinski, a clinical ethicist who teaches at the University of Washington Medical School.

"I know people who work in ethics who don't want to teach about abortion, because it's too divisive, and [they think] we can't have a productive conversation about it," says Dudzinski.

Dan Kennedy, the CEO of the anti-abortion group Human Life Washington, says he regrets the topic doesn't generate more dramatic treatments.

"Abortion is such an emotional issue that it rarely gets mentioned in the arts," Kennedy observes. "But I think it's very important that it does."

From "Maude" to Mitzi

Yet the question of how to represent abortion, and what messages are conveyed by that representation, has been a loaded one for decades.

The first major controversy flared even before the landmark 1973 Supreme Court ruling of Roe v. Wade legalized abortion nationally.

The provocation was a two-part episode of the topical TV sitcom "Maude," which aired in 1972, two years after abortion was fully legalized in New York. The popular CBS show depicted middle-age, married Maude (played by Beatrice Arthur) getting pregnant in her mid-40s and deciding not to have the baby. The episodes' initial airing and rerun elicited very high ratings — and more than 20,000 letters of protest from abortion foes.

Since then, the voluntary termination of a pregnancy has rarely been illustrated so directly or sympathetically. But abortion has received periodic airtime on TV, film and stage. The last big wave was in the 1990s, in part as a response to the growing political clout of the anti-abortion movement.

In the '90s, HBO's star-studded, pro-choice TV movie "If These Walls Could Talk" portrayed women coping with unwanted pregnancies in three different eras, and the acclaimed indie film "Citizen Ruth" satirized an ideological tug-of-war over a pregnant, low-life drug addict exploited by proponents on opposite ends of the issue.

At the theater, Jane Martin's intense 1993 drama "Keely and Du" (later staged here by ACT) became the first widely produced play to spotlight the extremist fringe of the anti-abortion movement. The plot entails a Christian fundamentalist group's abduction of a pregnant woman to prevent her abortion.

In 1997, Seattle Repertory Theatre introduced Peter Parnell's play "The Cider House Rules," closely based on a John Irving novel. Both couch an abortion debate in the life story of a pre-Roe v. Wade physician, who runs a Maine orphanage while secretly offering safe but illegal abortions to women. (A 1999 movie of "Cider House Rules" was picketed in some cities by anti-abortion groups.)

Today, such matters are rarely tackled so forthrightly in fictional drama. The subject of abortion still pops up sporadically, most visibly on such steamy network TV series as "The OC" and "Desperate Housewives."

Yet some media critics note that today's TV plots rarely resolve in a decision to end a pregnancy — especially on commercial networks susceptible to lobbying. In a 2005 essay for salon.com, Rebecca Raber suggests we "might as well be living before Roe v. Wade as far as TV is concerned. Characters these days rarely even say the word abortion when confronted with an unplanned pregnancy — let alone have one."

The shifting landscape

What has changed in the past decade? Many things.

UW prof Dudzinski points to the rising political influence of the Christian right, whose anti-abortion positions are often shared by President George W. Bush and some prominent Republican legislators.

Also, there are increasingly complex bio-ethical debates over new reproductive science, in relation to stem-cell research, cloning and the Plan B (aka "morning-after") contraception pill.

Another development: an incremental yet significant shift in public attitudes. A 2006 Harris Poll and other surveys suggest that while a majority of Americans favor some form of legalized abortion, that support is smaller and more qualified than in the 1990s.

And many states are adopting or considering new legal restrictions on the practice, which Heffron says helped prod her to write "Mitzi's Abortion." Recently, a near-total statewide ban on abortion was enacted in South Dakota, and here in Washington the state pharmacy board just approved for consideration a proposal to allow pharmacists to refuse, on moral grounds, to fill Plan-B prescriptions. (Public hearings on the latter will be held in August.)

Can we talk?

With its nervy mingling of science and theology, Everywoman realism and time-tripping fantasy, and it's a risky powdering of zany humor, will "Mitzi's Abortion" further public discourse, in search of common ground? Or just cement the positions already held by those who see it?

"Part of the problem is that we've reached a point where we don't know how to talk about this subject anymore," Heffron suggests. "The culture is so divided about it, partly because religion has entered into the debate in a very big way."

Kennedy hopes new abortion dramas, like Heffron's, will offer what he considers a more "balanced" take on the issue — one that doesn't "glorify abortion" or depict its foes as "brutish, knuckle-dragging Neanderthals." Asserts Dudzinski, "Instead of starting where we don't agree, we might get someplace if we start where we do agree."

Though Heffron is upfront about her personal pro-choice stance, she describes "Mitzi's Abortion" as "a pro-talking play. There's a tremendous amount of fear in our culture — of the rest of the world, and of each other. In my own way, I'd like to help counter that."

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com