Earlier this week, the allegedly impartial BBC broadcast its heavily promoted abortion drama, Three Families. Screened in two one-hour episodes on consecutive nights on BBC One, it proved to be little more than a shameless attempt to convince viewers that they should be grateful to live in a country where over 500 children are killed by abortion every day.

Set in the dark days before the London government brought enlightenment to Northern Ireland in the shape of the most radically anti-life legislation in Western Europe, author Gwyneth Hughes told three stories supposedly based on “real-life” cases of families who had to deal with the horrors of living in a society without the benefits of legal abortion. Needless to say, since it was broadcast by the BBC, the drama set out to generate the maximum level of sympathy for advocates of abortion. Its rather cartoonish representation of pro-lifers, on the other hand, seemed tacked on simply because it was deemed necessary to provide a “straw man" that viewers could reject. There was no serious reflection of the pro-life message and therefore there was no real tension or drama. To be fair the show’s purpose wasn’t to make the audience think but to tell them what to think. It was the BBC equivalent of Soviet ‘agitprop’ theatre, it was never intended to be Euripides or Shakespeare.

In the first storyline, we’re introduced to Orla — a pregnant 15-year-old with an abusive boyfriend — and her mother, Theresa. Even though Theresa believes abortion to be a sin (we’re not told why exactly she believes it’s a sin) she decides that she has no choice but to ditch her religious principles and the criminal law and does what any loving mother would do, she buys abortion drugs online and gives them to her daughter. Later the abortion is discovered and Theresa’s charged with performing an illegal abortion which killed her grandchild and put her daughter’s life at risk. The sheer injustice of it! It didn’t seem to occur to the producers that any woman who did the same in England or Wales today would be breaking the same law and face the same consequences.

The second subplot follows Hannah, whose baby is diagnosed with Thanatophoric dysplasia, a severe skeletal disorder. Hannah, who is told that her child will likely be stillborn, is unable to get an abortion. When she gives birth her baby is dead.

Finally, we meet Rosie, whose baby is diagnosed with Edwards syndrome, a chromosomal abnormality which the doctors say is “incompatible with life”. Her baby will likely not survive to birth. Rosie also seeks an abortion on the grounds of mental health. She is refused.

We are meant to sympathise with the families involved, and of course who wouldn’t sympathise with a pregnant mother who is told that their child will almost certainly die soon after birth. The problem is that Three Families holds out the lie that abortion is the solution to the difficulties these women face.

Take Hannah whose baby is given a terminal prognosis. Here abortion is depicted as an act of mercy and in the child’s best interests. It’s suggested that her baby, later named Molly, would have wished to be aborted. The logic is twisted but the message is plain — if they could, the weak, the vulnerable, the profoundly disabled and the terminally ill would thank us for killing them. Don’t we owe it to them to bring their tragic lives to an end?

Equally absurd is the treatment of Orla and her baby’s father. We’re told that one reason for Theresa’s decision is that Orla is being coerced by her no-good violent teenage sociopath of a boyfriend. We see Orla telling her mum that: “…he said he’d kick it [the baby] out of me. He said he’d stab me the day that it was born. He says I’ve got to get rid of it. Says he’ll tell everybody I’m a slag.” (Do 15-year-old girls really use the term slag? Orla's dialogue seems a bit dated.)

Bizarrely, the boyfriend is hardly ever mentioned again. Coercion, as SPUC has attested to, is a cause of abortion. But the depiction of it in Three Families sounds more like the kind of thing you’d tell the police when you’re asked to explain why you performed an illegal abortion on your underage daughter you’ve failed to protect from a local thug. Hughes clearly isn’t interested in examining the real and very serious issue of ‘intimate partner violence’. In a study of London clinics, there was a six times higher rate of IPV in women undergoing abortion compared with women receiving antenatal care[1] but this doesn’t fit the agenda the BBC is pushing.

Another serious problem is that the arguments presented on both sides of the debate were so shallow that viewers were offered little more than clichés and caricatures. But the platitudes from the pro-life camp were particularly feeble and could be summed up as “abortion is a sin”. Is this really the best that Hughes could come up with?

If she carried out even ten minutes of research on the internet she would have found out that science confirms that human life begins at the first moment of conception, that a baby’s heartbeat can be detected at just three weeks and he’ll recognise his mum’s voice at 18 weeks.

She would have discovered that suicide is around six times greater after abortion than after childbirth,[2] that a study from New Zealand revealed that 42% of women who had an abortion experienced major depression, 35% higher than those who had continued their pregnancy.[3] Or that according to researchers in Finland, the mortality rate for suicide after abortion was 21.8 per 100,000 women, while the rate for women who gave birth was just  3.3 per 100,000.[4]

The most positive portrayal of a pro-lifer was Louise, a friend of Therese who’s played by real-life pro-life actress Kerri Quinn.  Louise’s pro-life views seem to be based only on her religious faith but still, she comes across as a decent human being who protests outside the Marie Stopes clinic in Belfast. But Quinn’s character has nothing especially insightful to say, this is not the actress’s fault, she does the best with the lines she’s given. The other minor pro-life characters appear unsympathetic to the plight of women.

Just as lazy, however, is the pro-abortion line “it’s easy to be pro-life “until it happens to you”. Is this what Hughes calls “extraordinary truthfulness and emotional depth”? Even the Guardian called it “a surface-level study of abortion anguish”.

But beyond the turgid dialogue, the pot-boiler arguments, and the unconvincing motivation for some of its characters, the most disgraceful aspect of Three Families was that it used the predicament of parents faced with the loss of a desperately ill child to promote the killing of such children. In “real life” the pro-abortion campaign that inspired Hughes’ drama exploited women who were grieving and traumatised, not because they couldn’t have an abortion but because they had travelled to England to abort a baby they had already bonded with. There is a solid body of evidence showing that when an abortion is undertaken for reasons of foetal anomaly the psychological after-effects can be particularly traumatic. Women in this situation can experience strong, persistent grief, similar to that associated with stillbirth, but with the additional factor that they know they chose the abortion.[5]

In reality, those women needed to come to terms with the role they played in the deaths of their children. They desperately wanted the whole world to tell them that they did the right thing. The knowledge that the law in Northern Ireland viewed abortion as wrong meant they couldn’t rest until the law was changed.

And the BBC was instrumental in bringing that change about through its news coverage which dehumanised unborn children with life-limiting conditions. However, its drama department is a completely different story. When Up the Junction and The Naked Civil Servant were screened in the 1960s and 70s they had a powerfully destructive influence on British culture which, arguably, we’re still dealing with. Thankfully, today’s BBC is incapable of producing anything with that level of impact. In the end, Three Families is an artificial and morally confused piece of third-rate pro-abortion propaganda that will be forgotten by this time next week.