Somebody Please Explain the Morning-After Pill to Male TV Writers

One of life’s more enduring mysteries is how an astonishingly small percentage of television writers understand the female reproductive system.

Black Mirror ‘ s fourth season reached Netflix last week, entertaining audiences with mini-movie-length meditations on all of the ways the tech-driven future will kill our bodies and souls.

This season is special. All six episodes feature a female lead, since “women” seem to be a newly-discovered demographic in entertainment.

But despite the deliberate effort to produce a show that is less pale and less male than most, one episode in particular has some women and public-health advocates riled.( If you care about spoilers , now would be a good time to stop read .)

Episode 2, entitled “Arkangel,” features a mother named Marie, played by Rosemarie DeWitt, who has a chip installed in her young daughter’s chief that allows her to track the little girl’s motions and essential. Complications arise as Sara ripens, and boil over when Sara becomes sexually active as a teen. In the scene that serves as the linchpin to the episode’s bloody climax, Marie detects, through her app companion to her daughter’s tracking chip, that the girl is pregnant. She drives to a drug storage in the middle of the nighttime and acquires Emergency Contraception, which she grinds up and casually adds to her daughter’s smoothie the next morning. Sara becomes nauseous at school, and the nurse advises her that her illness is due to the emergency contraception she took to end her pregnancy.

Black Mirror is a fictional prove set in an imagined future, but none of a detailed description of Sara’s pregnancy or narcotic make any biological appreciation.

” Pregnancy doesn &# x27; t happen right after you have sex ,” explains Elizabeth Clark, Schemed Parenthood Federation of America’s Director of Health Media.

And” emergency contraception” doesn’t cause a morning-after abortion.” Sperm can actually live inside person &# x27; s body for up to six days after sexuality, waiting for an egg to show up to be fertilized ,” Clark adds.” The morning-after pill runs by temporarily stopping ovulation so the ovary doesn &# x27; t liberate an egg .”

Emergency contraception won’t work if pregnancy has already arose and can’t interfere with teenage pregnancies that already exists.

Further, the drug is most effective the sooner it is taken after unprotected sexuality, thus its availability over the counter is helpful to women who don’t want to waste precious hours for a doctor’s permission. It doesn’t making such a sense, even in the world of Black Mirror , for Marie to hold the pills overnight and casually drop them in her daughter’s smoothie the next morning; that decreases the drug’s effectiveness.

Does it matter if nobody in the team behind “Arkangel” —< em> Black Mirror inventor and writer Charlie Brooker, episode administrator Jodie Foster, superstar Rosemarie DeWitt, the rest of the casting and crew and production team–could pass a detailed exam on how maternity operates? Of course not. But what’s unfortunate about this particular mass flub is that their delusion mirrors the misconception contraception antagonists rely on to justify limiting women’s access to reproductive options.

Contraception antagonists like the Catholic Church, the March for Life, Susan B. Anthony’s List( a group that aims to elect anti-abortion politicians, a sort of Bizarro World EMILY’s List ), and others use” emergency contraception” and” the abortion pill” interchangeably, and by design. Belief that life “re starting” the moment of conception and not the moment of implantation means that anything that might intentionally interfere with the implantation of a fertilized egg in the uterus is the same thing as slaying.

Conflation of emergency contraception and” the abortion pill “– two very different medications–reinforces that faith. I’m not sure that’s what director Jodie Foster would have intended.

Black Mirror is far from the first display to get it incorrect. Back in 2011, The Walking Dead flubbed a” morning-after capsule” plotline in a nearly identical route. When audiences pointed out the flaw, the show’s creator Glenn Mazzara issued a flippant dismissal of their concerns.

” We exercised our artistic creative permission to explore a storyline with one of our characters , not to make any pro-life or pro-choice political declaration ,” he said.” We sincerely hope that people are not turning to the fictional world of &# x27; The Walking Dead &# x27; for accurate medical information .”

Seven years later, TV novelists are inducing the same mistake, Donald Trump is president, and the Department of Health and Human Services is stacked with people who believe that myth. But sure, it’s just television.

” Film and television have a unique opportunity to portray sexual and reproductive health care in medically accurate and nonjudgmental ways for millions of spectators ,” PPFA’s Elizabeth Clark adds.” With access to health care and sex education under constant assault, it’s more important than ever for us to recognize accurate storylines when it comes to contraception, abortion, and other sex health issues–as well as a whole range of people’s authentic experiences .”

Netflix and Black Mirror have not returned a request for comment.

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