Shonda Rhimes faced “big time” pushback from ABC when it came to Olivia Pope’s abortion story line in Scandal.
“I can’t get in trouble now, but the network had a problem with it,” Rhimes, 55, said during her Wednesday, October 8, appearance on the “Call Her Daddy” podcast. “They wanted to edit it down and they wanted to be like, ‘You can’t show it.’”
This wasn’t the first time Rhimes had written an abortion story line into one of her shows. Years prior, she almost had Sandra Oh’s Cristina Yang terminate her pregnancy in Grey’s Anatomy.
“The first time Cristina Yang becomes pregnant on the show — which I think is at the end of season 1 — that was supposed to be Cristina Yang getting an abortion,” Rhimes recalled. “The network didn’t tell me I couldn’t do it, but they did come to me with all of their concerns and I got scared. So she had an ectopic pregnancy instead.”
Despite concerns, Rhimes went through with Olivia’s abortion during season 5 of Scandal.
“I knew what I was doing and I was like, ‘This feels so right for this character,’” she said. “It’s not even a question for me.”
Rhimes knew that viewers spent “a lot” of time with her characters, so she really wanted it to have an impact.
“I wanted people that somebody knew and loved to be going through this and for it not to be, like, ‘The Abortion Episode.’ … That was the Christmas episode actually,” she explained. “It’s a very interesting episode.”
Kerry Washington played Olivia Pope on Scandal for seven seasons from 2012 to 2018. The fictional Washington D.C. fixer was embroiled in an affair with the President of the United States, Fitzgerald Grant III (played by Tony Goldwyn) throughout the series. The November 2015 episode revealed Olivia’s pregnancy early on and showed her getting the abortion in a scene set to “Silent Night.” As Olivia made the decision to terminate her pregnancy, Republican senator Mellie Grant (President Fitz’s ex-wife played by Bellamy Young, whom he divorced earlier that season) filibustered a bill about Planned Parenthood funding.
“When we did the abortion, if you notice two seasons earlier or three seasons earlier, Olivia stands with a soldier while she has her abortion. She holds her hand while [the soldier] has an abortion,” Rhimes said on Wednesday. “It’s the same scene.”
She added, “The network was like, ‘You can’t show this.’ And I was like, ‘But we already did. It’s right here.’ … With all the same sounds, with all the same equipment. They wanted us to remove some of the sound from the abortion machine. All of these things.”
Rhimes explained that the concerns came from the audience’s reaction to a “particular person” finding out about the abortion.
“What I thought was important was that people kept being like, ‘It’s going to be a big deal when Fitz finds out,’” she continued. “I was like, ‘That is not the story. This is not about him.’”
Rhimes previously discussed her decision to include the scene, revealing that she expected to face more backlash for showing an abortion on network TV.
“I thought the reaction was going to be so much stronger … which is always awesome when it’s not,” she said at the Vulture Festival in 2016. “Because the fans are always much more enlightened than, you know, the studio lawyers are.”
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