Is TBS Taking Sides in the War Over Abortion? : Television: Tonight’s pro-choice polemic, ‘Abortion Denied,’ is moving and well-produced, but the other side isn’t getting equal time.

TBS is now two for two.

Sixteen months ago, Ted Turner’s Atlanta-based cable network aired a half-hour documentary-style film on behalf of the abortion-rights crowd. At 7 tonight, TBS presents another.

It’s called “Abortion Denied: Shattering Young Women’s Lives” and, like its predecessor, “Abortion: For Survival,” it’s attached by umbilical cord to the Feminist Majority organization and is a relentlessly one-sided program, hermetically sealed off from alternative points of view.

Disdaining equity, meanwhile, TBS has rejected a half-hour documentary-style program from anti-abortion forces, although its backers have even offered to buy air time to present it.

This is an issue of fairness, not abortion. Although programs with strong points of view are welcome, somewhere down the line there should be balance.

At stake is access to the 54.5 million households TBS claims to reach.

However meritorious, the films from both sides are shrewdly produced “infomercials” that hit one emotional button after another. If TBS provides air time for one side’s propaganda, shouldn’t it do the same for the other?

Keying on stringent Minnesota laws and the case of a 17-year-old Indiana girl who died in 1988 of an illegal abortion, “Abortion Denied” blasts parental consent and notification statutes requiring females under the age of 18 to tell their parents prior to having an abortion. Such laws have been enacted by 34 states, although less than half are said to enforce them.

The parents of Rebecca Bell tonight blame the Indiana law for the death of their daughter, who they say had an illegal abortion rather than notify them of her pregnancy. A graphic description of her death is sad and moving.

More than merely an attack on restrictive laws, however, “Abortion Denied” is a flat-out abortion-rights polemic that uses health-care and other professionals, for example, to support its thesis that putting infants up for adoption is not a viable alternative to abortion.

The Feminist Majority film makes its case compellingly. But it does so in ways that totally exclude the opposition (the worst of motives are attributed to consent and notification advocates without giving them a chance for rebuttal), while manipulating emotions with melancholy music.

The anti-abortion film that TBS refuses to air--”Eclipse of Reason”--is just as one-sided and even more manipulative, with obstetrician Bernard Nathanson--who four years ago made the infamous anti-abortion film “Silent Scream”--narrating an abortion that viewers can observe through a “fetus scope.” The stage of pregnancy is not identified.

Nathanson’s cool dispassion only accentuates the heat of his message: “This was a little boy. . . . The nose . . . here is the mouth. . . . This little fellow can be seen swallowing water.” And through pictures, the program equates abortion with nearly every imaginable evil, from nuclear holocaust to the Ku Klux Klan.

Although “Eclipse of Reason” has run on some public-access cable systems, KDOC Channel 56 in Orange County is the only over-the-air commercial TV station nationwide to accept the program, according to George Wakeling, president of Circle of Concern, a San Clemente-based organization helping to distribute it.

His group bought air time on KDOC for three showings last June, Wakeling said, and 2,000 viewers responded to a plea within the program to send mailgrams to Turner urging that TBS also run “Eclipse of Reason.”

To no avail.

“Eclipse of Reason” was vetoed by TBS executive vice president Robert H. Levi. “I remember seeing it and turning it down because it was just unnecessary to run it,” Levi said from Atlanta. “It was very one-sided.”

In rejecting the film in September, Levi wrote Wakeling, maintaining that TBS had treated the abortion issue fairly and that “we have no plans to accept or schedule any further programs on the subject of abortions.”

Tonight’s “Abortion Denied” contradicts that.

Although Levi said he can’t recall Wakeling asking to buy time for “Eclipse of Reason” on TBS, Wakeling produced a letter he had sent to Levi making such a request.

“We also tried to buy time on every station in L.A.,” Wakeling said. “Some said it was too controversial. Some said it doesn’t fit in with their format. Some said they showed it to their sales staff, and they turned it down.”

Blaming “media bias and the liberal L.A. area” for failure to place “Eclipse of Reason” here, Wakeling said he came closest to getting it on the air at KCOP Channel 13, which initially approved a 1 a.m. time slot, but then changed its mind.

“I did consider doing it (selling time for the program) in theory, before I saw it,” said KCOP station manager Rick Feldman.

“What happened was, I showed the tape to a group of women at the station who found it to be extremely violent,” Feldman added. “It made them feel real uneasy, which was the point of the program in the first place.”

As for finally rejecting “Eclipse of Reason,” Feldman noted that, after all, his station had not run any abortion-rights programs, either. “If I had run the Turner program, I would have felt more of a need to run the other program,” he said. “I would have felt compelled to run it.”

No such compulsion exists at TBS.

Nor is the door still open to “Eclipse of Reason” at KDOC, according to Wakeling. “We tried to go back to Channel 56,” he said, “but they turned us down because they said they had pressure from two advertising agencies who threatened to pull their clients if it was run again.”

“That did happen, plus we have been trying to get pro-abortionists to put on a program so we can be fair to both sides,” KDOC General Manager Calvin Brack said.

KDOC program director Bill Dailey said that after the June airing of “Eclipse of Reason,” he was contacted by someone from the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW) about airing an abortion-rights program. He said that after subsequent conversations, she refused to return his calls. Dailey could not recall the name of the woman.

Meanwhile, Wakeling said that after “Eclipse of Reason” was rejected this time by KDOC, he sent an SOS letter to Pat Boone, the gospel-preaching singer who is part owner of KDOC and president of its board. He said the letter was never answered.

It’s a tough economy out there. When the anti-abortion line takes on the bottom line, apparently it’s no contest.