Abortion and Olivia: Prison Has Many Forms and So Does Freedom

We watched Olivia Pope have an abortion right in front of us, with Silent Night playing in the background; it was unsettling, right?  Not just for the irony of the Christmas soundtrack, but also because the song’s “mother and child” were themselves unwelcome.  There’s more to these sorts of moments than pretty, sort of symbolic, Christmas music. As usual with Olivia, the truth is complicated.

“Family is the only thing that has kept you alive here.” Huck tells his captive, Olivia’s father Eli.  But Eli argues that family doesn’t save us, it’s an “antidote to greatness.”  “Family doesn’t complete you, it destroys you” he says.

For Olivia though, destruction is the inevitable outcome of the the stolid White House life, the outfits entombed in the Presidential bedroom, the so-called fairytale life of a First Lady, her very real prison.  We see she manages her performance well; we need to know that for her choice to make sense.  No she wasn’t leaving because she wasn’t good at First Lady-ing.  A bird (even a successful one) in a gilded cage is still locked up.

We always knew (and some of us hoped) that she’d go.  Fitz’s questionable worthiness, not withstanding, she had to get out o there!   Her life, however twisted, said so much to all of us and taught us this – that this is possible:  Olivia Pope doesn’t do shotgun, she drives the car!

Even so, a woman of such stature who had surrendered so much, couldn’t walk away without an amputation – metaphorical – but real too.  Alone, telling no one, she chooses to end a pregnancy that no one knows exists.  It’s hers.  Hers to keep, or not.  Hers to speak about, or not.  And so as she leaves her pregnancy behind her, so too she leaves a life that has been confining almost to the point of trauma.

As fiercely pro-choice but also a baby addict, I find I surprise myself as I write this.  I feel, I see, I know that sometimes choices I’d fight not to have to make myself are life and soul-saving for another.

Eli’s meditation on family is either a counterpoint or a validation of his daughter’s decision.  Like the decision itself, it depends on who’s watching.  From over here where I am, she made the right choice (because, after all, she had a choice) the right way.  Would that every women had the power, and the money, and the access, to do the same.