Abortion on the Battlestar

The subject of abortion has come up twice on Battlestar Galactica. The first time involved the threatened termination of the human/Cylon hybrid.

There were enough moral ambiguities in this case that it wasn’t especially controversial. Is a hybrid human? Does it have a soul? Is it made in God’s image?

In addition, the hybrid is an unknown quantity, conceived by the hostile Cylons. Is this a mortal threat to the remnants of the human race?

The second time is more typical. An underage girl from a pious family “finds” herself in the family way with an unplanned and unwanted pregnancy.

She escapes to a neutral ship. Her host colony stages a protest on the basis of parental rights, colonial rights, and religious rights.

The representative from Gemini is a stereotypical “fundamentalist,” appealing to the sacred scriptures. It comes across an unreasoning appeal to blind, fanatical faith.

Actually, the show itself has laid a foundation for the authority of the scriptures. When Pres. Roslin was taking a hallucinogenic drug for her cancer, she had prophetic visions which corresponded to the ancient oracles. Logically, then, she should defer to the authority of the scriptures.

But she doesn’t. She at first stakes out the knee-jerk feminist position. Until, that is, it comes to her attention that the fleet is not reproducing at a replacement rate. What remains of the human race will become extinct in a few years. So she decides, in the end, to issue an executive decree banning abortion.

This, in turn, causes Vice Pres. Baltar to publicly oppose her in a cynical act of political and personal revenge, in what sounds like a studied allusion to the Patriot Act.

The writers have cast the socially liberal characters in hawkish, reactionary roles, while the standard-bearer for the liberal cause is the seditious and demented Baltar.

What we have here are thinly-veiled political allegories of a post-9/11 world. And the writers are trying to play both sides of the fence. Purple instead of red and blue.

What is striking is that they don’t simply take the party-line approach of The West Wing.

One wonders if this doesn’t reflect the growing power of the religious right. Are some segments of the mainstream media beginning to reach out to the audience which abandoned the networks for the alternative media?