GUYS, FIND ANOTHER PLOT: NBC’s Law and Order Portrays Pro-lifers as Terrorist Bombers.
Last night, NBC’s “Law & Order” portrayed pro-lifers as terrorist bombers who target IVF (in-vitro fertilization) practitioners.
In the episode, “The Meaning of Life,” on Thursday, an IVF doctor named Sarah Heartwood (Erica Sweany) is left in an irreversible coma after receiving a bomb-laden package.
Heartwood’s husband is a well-known atheist author. Law enforcement initially suspects the bomber is a Muslim plumber who attacked her husband at a book lecture. When the plumber provides an alibi, NYPD next arrests a black man who delivered the package. Of course, neither the Muslim nor the black man are the killer. The real killer turns out to be a “random white guy,” in the words of one of the detectives. Surprise!
I honestly had to check on the date of the above Media Research Center post, because this is remarkably old ground for Law & Order to be covering, dating all the way back to the ninth episode aired during the show’s first season — in January of 1991:
After an anti-abortion protester is killed in an abortion center bombing, detectives search for all of her potential co-conspirators.
Sgt. Grevey and Det. Logan investigate a bombing at an abortion clinic that resulted in the death of 22 year-old Mary Donovan who was using the clinic’s bathroom. In fact, Donovan was carrying false ID and it was she who used a basic pipe bomb to blow up the clinic. Donovan was a supporter of the Women for Life organization and the bomb materials are traced to Celeste McClure who likely made the bomb. They suspect Rose Schwimmer, head of the anti-abortion group of having ordered the attack. When they obtain startling new evidence, Schwimmer is charged with murder.
As the late Kathy Shaidle wrote in 2017, “For years I’ve been ‘joking’ that ‘More abortion doctors have been murdered on Law & Order than in real life.’” There may be “eight million stories in the Naked City” (oh wait, that was an even older Manhattan-based series with plots “ripped from the headlines”), but it isn’t the hotbed of Red on Blue violence that Dick Wolf needs it to be to keep ginning up the culture war.