TV Law and Order: NOT

Last night Ward and I were flipping channels and this show caught our eye. We are not regular followers, we rarely watch any current TV shows, but the idea of a pregnant teen's boyfriend going on trial for killing the unborn baby of his girlfriend by beating it death in the womb caught our attention. As we watched there were subtleties about the case that we couldn't figure out. It became curiouser and curiouser, until BAM it hit us right between the eyes.

The show is Law and Order: Special Vicitms Unit and it was the episode titled Rockabye. Here is TV.com's summary:

After sixteen-year-old Lauren Westley loses her unborn child due to a severe abdominal beating, her father's insistance that Lauren was raped leads detectives to the baby's father, but it isn't long before the detectives realise that Lauren was an active party in her own beating, and the two teens had found it necessary to take the steps they did because the abortion clinic kept putting off Lauren's request for an appointment. Novak faces a tough opponent in her own office when she and Branch disagree over the appropriate action to be taken against Wayne Mortens, the young girl's boyfriend.

Isn't that interesting wording, that the two teens found it "necessary to take the steps they did"? No, they couldn't just have the baby and give it up for adoption, that thought never occurred to them. But I digress, the plot line follows the story as to the plight of their dire situation, that after having tried for two whole weeks to get an abortion. You see the doctor at the abortion clinic said she had a fever at 22 weeks and she shouldn't have the procedure done due to risk of infection. But she called the clinic everyday (gosh sometimes three times a day) for two weeks and then because she was past 24 weeks they NO CHOICE but to take matters into their own hands, gee these poor kids were forced to brutalize the fetus. Oh the inhumanity of it . . . as their case is told in court about how the cruel doctor kept them at bay, the judge realizes in a light bulb moment that here we have a very simple case of medical malpractice! This doctor obviously was subverting abortions!! It was the doctor's fault that they had to kill their baby, oh wait, we're only allowed to call it a "fetus" in court . . . but it was the doctor's fault that they had to terminate the pregnancy in the only way their feeble little teen minds could come up with . . . they pummeled it to death. Having aroused the sympathy of the entire court room, the judge says, let's let these poor kids go. Please see to it that the doctor is arrested on grounds of criminal malpractice (or some such charge).

So the twisted logic of the court seems to say, because the doctor didn't kill the baby, if was his fault the baby was killed!

Now I realize that I am getting all worked up about some idiot television show, except that I am told that these shows are based on real cases. And if that is true . . . God help us all!