Midwives for Abortion

 

The BBC series “Call the Midwife” was the perfect premise for a life-affirming, faith-affirming show: about a convent running a midwife service in impoverished East London. And for the first few seasons, based on one midwife’s autobiography, it was.

Then it, improbably, swerved into fictional story lines about how homosexuality was innate and involuntary. Into tales of wifebeating; into the evils of slum landlords; into editorializing in favour of abortion, and against the moralistic sort of religion.

Odd that it should go about to trash its core appeal to its natural core audience.

The obvious reason is that, after the first half-dozen seasons, they began to run out of interesting complications in childbirth. The newer ailments were getting obscure, and sometimes trivial. “It is a very rare condition, and no, it will not harm the baby.”

A long-running show tends to run out of plot ideas. That’s where “jumping the shark” comes in, and that  lack of new ideas has infected Hollywood with their sequel mania. 

CTMW has a bit of an advantage, because they can bring in new characters. But they decided to bring in “ethnically diverse” characters. And ethnically diverse characters must not have any flaws or dark pasts or even interesting eccentricities. So they cannot inspire any good new plots. 

So what can you do? The temptation is to get political to keep interest up: find a news hook.

This is tiresome, and obvious; but wouldn’t be as bad if doing so these days always means a whiplash-inducing veer to the left. Particularly ill-suited to this show premise.

But then, they really haven’t had a choice. There’s the immigration issue. That’s in the news. Imagine if they were to feature an immigrant family that was not settling in, but resented the new country. The son was up for raping some girl, or staging a random knife attack. 

There’s the abortion issue; pretty natural for such a show. Of course, a religious order of midwives should be firmly opposed. Yet imagine if they had a sympathetic character point out with emotion that abortion kills babies?

Or that homosexuals can choose to stop having homosexual sex?

Imagine if they showed a wife abusing her husband, or blackmailing him with false charges?

The leftist cancel culture machine would wheel into action. Advertising would be pulled, they would be picketed, probably cancelled. The writers would be blacklisted, possibly thrown in prison, at a minimum lose their careers.

So the minute they raise a political controversy, they must show only the approved leftist narrative. And it’s a race to the farthest left possible, because what you said ten years ago, when the Overton window was different, can now be held against you. There are currently cries on the left and in the media to ban a local candidate from the next provincial election, because she objected to gay marriage in a book she wrote in 2008. A time when almost all of the developed world were also opposed to gay marriage, including, say, Barack Obama or Bill Clinton. 

We have all been bullied in this way for years; creative types more than anyone. Which is why all we get from the arts and entertainment sector any more is predictable and perverse.

The good news is that the right has recently woken up to the strategy. They have started to do the same, and things are swinging back to sanity. Mass farmer protests in Germany. Bud Light, Disney, Harvard, Target; the boycott head count is growing.

The culture war has passed its Stalingrad moment.