In catching up on some comic books the other night I was caught surprised by Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 9 #6, in which (1) Buffy gets pregnant; and (2) Decides to have an abortion. Apparently, this was a big-deal media story last month. Who knew?

The Buffy comics have been breaking bad for while now. There was the ridiculous Buffy lesbian romp. The second half of Season 8 was often incomprehensible–I mean this literally, not pejoratively. The art–with the very notable exception of the lovely Steve Morris cover for #1–keeps getting flabbier and less interesting. This was already a title on the margins of my pull-list.

The abortion issue kicked it over the side.

I’m pretty live-and-let-live when it comes to politics in art. I never would have voted for Jed Bartlett, but I loved the first couple seasons of The West Wing. Like my friend Mike Russell, I’d argue that–for all sorts of reasons, including your own sanity and sense of peace–it’s best to separate an artist’s politics from his art. All you should demand is that when art deals with political or moral questions, it do so intelligently, fairly, and artfully. That’s why I hopped off the bus during The Bourne Ultimatum–because the movie’s politics were suddenly causing contortions in a central character just to fit the film-makers’ ideologies.

And that’s pretty much what happened with Buffy’s abortion. She gets knocked up by some unknown dude she mysteriously slept with during a bout of binge drinking. It’s not even clear from the writing that Buffy remembers having sex at all on the night in question–let alone who the guy was. And to sort out whether she should embrace motherhood, give the baby up for adoption, or abort him/her, she finds out she’s pregnant, walks over to have a single conversation with a peripheral character, and then makes her decision.

What’s worse, is that Buffy asks this other character, Geez, don’t you wish your mother had aborted you? Look how lousy your life has been! And his non-committal answer is, No, not entirely. It’s complicated and I support whatever decision you make!

I’ve never seen statistics on this, but in my own anecdotal encounters the most vehemently pro-life people I’ve met aren’t Republicans or evangelicals. They’re people who were adopted. Of the adopted folks I’ve known, even the intensely liberal ones have been really, really anti-abortion. But Whedon doesn’t want to grapple honestly with the question, so he uses a straw man.

What’s worse, is that Whedon is perverting his own character by having Buffy so cavalierly choose abortion. Jump back to the climactic moments of Season 5 when the Big Bad Glory reverts to the human form of Ben. Buffy won’t kill him, because taking a life is wrong; Giles has to do the dirty work for her. Maybe she would find the moral calculus between killing an innocent man to save the world and killing an unborn baby to save her social life to be quite different. But at least the Buffy of Whedon’s previous creation would have wrestled with it. (If Whedon had written the abortion arc for Faith it would have been in total keeping with her character.)

So why did Whedon warp his character? For his own, provincial political purposes. Here he is talking about it in an interview with Entertainment Weekly:

Did you always know that she would be getting an abortion, or did you ever contemplate the notion that she would keep the baby?
No. I think strongly that teen pregnancy and young people having babies when they are not emotionally, financially, or otherwise equipped to take care of them, is kind of glorified in our media right now. You know, things like Secret Life [of an American Teenager] and Juno andKnocked Up – even if they pretend to deal with abortion, the movies don’t even say the word “abortion.” It’s something that over a third of American women are going to decide to have to do in their lives. But people are so terrified that no one will discuss the reality of it — not no one, but very few popular entertainments, even when they say they’re dealing with this issue, they don’t, and won’t. It’s frustrating to me.

I don’t think Buffy should have a baby. I don’t think Buffy can take care of a baby. I agree with Buffy. It’s a very difficult decision for her, but she made a decision that so many people make and it’s such a hot button issue with Planned Parenthood under constant threat and attack right now. A woman’s right to choose is under attack as much as it’s ever been, and that’s a terrible and dangerous thing for this country. I don’t usually get soap box-y with this, but the thing about Buffy is all she’s going through is what women go through, and what nobody making a speech, holding up a placard, or making a movie is willing to say.

Leave aside, for a moment, Whedon’s seeming ignorance about the statistical realities of abortion in America. What we have here is yet another example of Whedon declaring that his art is no longer art because what he’s really interested in making is political propaganda.

All of which explains the decline of the Buffy comics: They’re no longer written with story-telling as the first consideration.