Battlestar Galactica’s Poignent Arguments On Abortion
What a low-budget sci-fi show can teach us about today’s hot-button political issues.
With the recent leak of a draft decision from the conservative-majority supreme court that appears dead set on overturning Roe v. Wade, the hot-button issue of abortion is once again center stage in American politics. Honestly, it’s kind of a relief from so much worrying about a global pandemics, nuclear war and on-stage celebrity slap boxing.
I’ve always thought the issue of abortion was a strange one. Given the way liberals and conservatives each lean when it comes to other issues like gun control, immigration, capital punishment, healthcare and foreign policy, I would’ve actually guessed that the roles would’ve been reversed when it came to abortion.
But it turns out that the same liberals who want to save lives with affordable, socialized medicine and to allow asylum seekers to escape the fatal dangers of their home countries are more than willing to ‘kill’ unborn babies if the mothers-to-be would rather not be. And the same conservatives that support concealed carry, the death penalty and foreign invasions of sovereign countries are desperately trying to preserve a soul-less clump of cells in the name of protecting the sanctity of life.
It just doesn’t make any sense.
Then came Battlestar Galactica
What I needed to make sense of this was something practical—something tangible to actually provide a means for philosophical debate based on logic. And when it finally came to me, it was from the most unlikely of places: Battlestar Galactica.
That’s right, I’m talking about the 2004 TV series based on the 1978 series of the same name. The show was quite popular among sci-fi fans, earning it four thrilling seasons and a series of follow-up spin-offs. Although not as mainstream as Star Trek or Star Wars, it’s certainly earned its place high on the list of great science fiction franchises. But then again, every piece of intellectual property is just one reboot away from becoming a household name for a new generation.
The story
If you don’t already know, the basic story of Battlestar Galactica is that in the distant future, humanity created a race of human-like androids called the Cylons. But human-Cylon relations eventually deteriorated into a long war that finally ended in an armistice, resulting in the Cylons making a grand exodus and setting out into deep space on their own, rarely to be heard from again.
Then years and years later, for reasons unknown, the Cylons launched a massive nuclear attack on all human-occupied worlds that killed billions in an attempt to exterminate all human life. There were only about 50,000 human survivors who managed to escape in a small fleet of space ships led by the only warship (called “battlestars”) that had not been destroyed: Galactica.
This all happens in the fist two episodes and the rest of the show is about these 50,000 human begins trying to survive in space while either running from or battling with the Cylons who are hunting them down.
Coping with a new world
If you’re wondering what the heck any of this has to do with abortion, don’t worry, I’m getting to that. The key thing to understand at this point is that the human beings in Battlestar Galactica are struggling against extinction in the face of a much more powerful adversary who is determined to make it happen. This is an unprecedented situation which the people of the future—as well as we modern people, for that matter—struggle to understand.
One pivotal scene that exemplifies this occurs just after the initial Cylon attack. After most of the human government has been killed, Secretary of Education Laura Rolsin is next in the line of succession and becomes president, the highest-ranking civilian leader. As she is helping to organize a mass evacuation of humanity’s survivors, she meets William Adama, commander of Galactica and now the highest-ranking military leader after the entire chain of command was wiped out. Adama wants to lead his crew into battle against Cylons because he’s angry and believes it is the honorable and right thing to do. Roslin advises him not to do this and the two get into an argument.
Mary McDonnell and Commander William Adama (right) played by Edward James Olmos.
“You can run if you’d like,” says Adama. “This ship will stand and it will fight.”
“I’m gonna be straight with you here,” Roslin replies, understanding humanity’s new plight better than her military counterpart. “The human race is about to be wiped out. We have 50,000 people left, and that’s it. Now, if we are even going to survive as a species, then we need to get the hell out of here—and we need to start having babies.”
Abortion among the survivors
With this setting and these themes established, we can now look at a later episode that deals with the abortion issue directly: “The Captain’s Hand” from season 2, episode 17, originally aired on February 17, 2006.
There’s a few other of subplots going on here, but the one I want to focus on is that of a pregnant teenage girl who stows away on a cargo transport ship trying to get aboard Galactica in order to find the only doctor in the fleet who is equipped to perform abortions. She’s found by security personnel and arrested, and the difficult question of what to do about her situation makes its way up the chain of command to President Roslin and Commander Adama.
When first presented with the issue, the leaders reflexively want to uphold the laws and mores of the human government that was in place before the Cylon attack. Back then, abortion was seen as a personal right available to all women who wanted to terminate their pregnancies for any reason, a vision of the future that would please today’s pro-choice camp.
But as it is debated, it becomes clear that this issue must undergo an agonizing reappraisal under the current circumstances. That initial population figure of 50,000 is shrinking due to the privation and harsh conditions of living in deep space, not to mention the occasional deadly Cylon attack. After crunching some numbers, it looks like at the current rate of population decline, the survivors in the fleet will all die out within the next twenty years. Can this fledgling group of human survivors whose existence depends upon having more babies and increasing their numbers really afford to be terminating pregnancies?
In the end, President Roslin issues an executive order that outright bans all abortions, a move that is begrudgingly accepted as an extreme but necessary measure in these desperate times. You might not be surprised to learn that this then leads to political turmoil and divisiveness; even among this fictitious future fleet, abortion remains a hot-button issue.
Back to the present day
This episode of Battlestar Galactica presents a new angle on the abortion issue of the present, one that I think is helpful in breaking free from the tow-the-line conventions of the pro-choice and pro-life camps that exist in our modern political landscape. It gives cause to more carefully evaluate what does banning abortion or not actually seek to accomplish.
Those who want to ban abortion will usually collect their beliefs under the conservative, religious umbrella of ‘pro-life,’ meaning that they believe abortion is murder because a fetus is a living being. Whether or not you believe this, it’s a nonsensical thing to argue about because it is virtually impossible to prove one way or another. By discussing the issue in these terms, it guarantees that it will continue to be endlessly divisive, and it prevents anyone from getting to the point of what effect—either positive, negative, both or none at all—abortion has on our society.
Those who want to prevent an abortion ban will be ‘pro-choice,’ meaning that a woman has right to make decisions about what goes on in her body and the government has no right to interfere with that. That’s also something that could be argued ad infinitum without ever coming close to consensus. The government interferes in our lives all the time when it’s in the name of protecting our safety and the safety of those around us. Twenty-year-olds are not allowed to drink alcohol, certain medicines are only available with a prescription from a doctor, and in most states no one is allowed to smoke pot.
So what should we really be arguing about?
Population control
In Battlestar Galactic, the ban on abortion was a measure to prevent the extinction of mankind. It’d be a tough pill to swallow, but it’s hard to argue with the logic in that case. But of course, we don’t have that problem today. Arguably we have the opposite problem—or at least we damn sure will in the future—that there’s too many people.
While overpopulation won’t usher in an existential crisis like extinction, there’s a host of other devastating problems that can occur as a result: food and water shortages, poverty, displacement, pandemics, violence and further degradation of our environment. If you could accept that banning abortion is necessary in a dangerously low population, wouldn’t it stand to reason that allowing it makes sense in a dangerously high population? Hell, one day it might even be required, meaning that despite you having gotten pregnant, if you have not received approval from the government to bear that child, it’ll have to be terminated to avoid contributing to the unmanageable population.
So while the leaders in Battlestar Galactica had to ask themselves if they could afford to allow abortion, the question for our time is can we afford to ban it? Can we afford to have our populations grow faster than its already exponential rate without any means of controlling it? Does the world really need more people, especially those whose own conceiving parents already label them as “unwanted”?
Risking one’s life
Another more subtle issue in Battlestar Galactic is that a pregnant teenage girl risked her life by stowing away in a cargo container so that she could get to the one doctor in the fleet who would perform abortions. I think most people regardless of their stance on abortion would agree that this is a problem. Don’t forget: If the girl dies, her baby dies, too, and while this isn’t exactly intentional ‘murder,’ this kind of reckless endangerment could at least be considered manslaughter. So the pro-life camp should be just as adamant about preventing these dangerous situations as they are about preventing abortions.
This issue is actually not at all unfamiliar to us modern people. In the refugee crisis of 2015, people were dying by the hundreds as they risked their lives to cross the Mediterranean Sea from Africa and the Middle East hoping to find safe haven in Germany and other European countries. Whether or not you think people should be allowed to stay if they can even reach their destination, something ought to be done in order to prevent people risking their lives out of sheer desperation to escape some awful situation with which they were presented in their home country. A ban on abortion could lead women to take some pretty serious risks to the health and safety of themselves and their fetus in order terminate the unwanted pregnancies.
And if you look at issues such drugs or prostitution, you have to consider that even with laws on the books that ban these activities, they are still going to happen. But when they do happen, it’s unregulated and carried out by criminals who call the shots and reap all the profit. For drugs like marijuana, this keeps local gangs and foreign cartels rich and powerful, which in turn leads to more crime, violence and even refugee issues. For prostitution, this can lead to human trafficking, slavery, violence and disease. Abortions are the same in that people who really want abortions are going to try to get them no matter what. But if they’re illegal, the conditions under which they occur might bring terrible unwanted consequences that are worse than what the law was hoping to prevent.
So what the frak?
Hopefully this great episode of Battlestar Galactica has helped you, too, to broaden your understanding of what a ban or guaranteed right to abortion really means. While the left can be as just as short-sighted as the right, so far I’ve seen many more logical arguments against a ban on abortion than those in favor of it, including the heartless drivel that “Justice Beer Pong” and his cronies have churned out. It’d be great if the debate gets more intelligent, but honestly, my hopes are not high.
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