![\"Elizabeth](\"http:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/heffron-252.jpg\")
Four decades after the U.S. Supreme Court\u2019s landmark decision in Roe v. Wade<\/i>, the issue of abortion remains deeply polarizing, so much so that frank and open discussions about the procedure and the complex range of circumstances in which it is considered or performed are rare.<\/p>\n
Inspired by the true story of a young woman\u2019s late-term abortion and the personal tragedy and legal struggles that precipitated it, playwright Elizabeth Heffron M.F.A. \u201914<\/strong> penned the comedy-drama Mitzi\u2019s Abortion: A Saint\u2019s Guide to Late-Term Politics & Medicine in America<\/i> to jump-start a constructive dialogue among families, medical professionals, politicians, and the public at large, regardless of where they stand in the abortion debate. Heffron wrote the play in 2006 and it premiered to rave reviews in Seattle, where she resides, and Washington, D.C.; in November, Mitzi\u2019s Abortion<\/i> made its national university debut as Hollins Theatre\u2019s fall production.<\/p>\n Mirroring the actual case, \u201cMitzi is 23, married to this military guy, and she finds herself pregnant,\u201d Heffron, a student in the Playwright\u2019s Lab at Hollins, explained. \u201cAt six months an ultrasound discovers her fetus\u2019s brain has no frontal cortex.\u201d<\/p>\n The defect, anencephaly, eliminates all brain function except for the autonomic nervous system. The condition is fatal: the baby dies at birth or shortly thereafter. \u201cBut inside the womb, with the help of the mother, the fetus continues to live,\u201d Heffron noted. \u201cWith this condition these pregnancies can go well past nine months because it\u2019s the frontal cortex that tells the mother when it\u2019s time to go into labor. It\u2019s emotionally, physically devastating.\u201d<\/p>\n As with her real-life counterpart, Mitzi and her husband have military-provided health insurance. But because of the Hyde Amendment (passed by Congress in 1977 to prohibit using federal funds to pay for abortions), their medical plan refuses to cover an induction of labor, determining it to be tantamount to an abortion procedure. Mitzi\u2019s physician faces a difficult decision: allow the pregnancy\u2014and Mitzi\u2019s suffering\u2014to continue, or commit fraud and claim her water broke, a circumstance in which inducing labor is justifiable because the mother\u2019s life would then be in danger.<\/p>\n (In the actual case, a court ordered the insurance company to cover the procedure. However, the decision came with a caveat: It could not be used as a precedent for similar cases in the future. \u201cIn reality,\u201d Heffron said, \u201cdoctors have had to make that kind of choice.\u201d)<\/p>\n Heffron believes this dilemma is tailormade for the playwriting genre. \u201cI majored in psychobiology at UCLA and was studying behavior from the inside out\u2014what happens in your brain, for example, when you recognize someone. Playwriting is sort of the outside in: you\u2019re watching people on stage and you\u2019re seeing why they are doing things. It\u2019s a three-dimensional form of writing as opposed to prose or poetry.\u201d Heffron also uses the format to blend the real with the surreal as she weaves in the history of abortion with the central story. Reckless Mary, a Scottish midwife, and 13th-century Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas are key characters.<\/p>\n Mitzi\u2019s Abortion<\/i> does not take sides other than to convey that abortion is not a black-and-white issue. \u201cIt\u2019s clear we\u2019ve got laws that are trying to fit everything into one category or another,\u201d Heffron said. \u201cThere are a lot of situations that just don\u2019t match that.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI was amazed at how many people have been through, if not this, something close. After seeing the play, a woman and her husband told me, 30 years before, they had gone through an experience similar to Mitzi\u2019s. Because they felt so demonized, they had never been able to discuss it or even grieve. So they wrote and said, \u2018Thank you so much for this play. We were able to go home and talk about this for the first time.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Jeff Hodges is director of public relations.<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Elizabeth Heffron M.F.A. \u201914 wrote Mitzi\u2019s Abortion to foster common ground in a contentious debate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4797,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[52],"class_list":["post-4752","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","tag-winter-2014"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4752","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4752"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4752\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4798,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4752\/revisions\/4798"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4797"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4752"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4752"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4752"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}