By Season 5 of the prime-time soap opera MELROSE PLACE, the character
Alison Parker has been through a lot. Maybe not as much as Kimberly Shaw,
who had multiple personalities and had committed at least one act of
terrorism, but Alison, played by Courtney Thorne-Smith, was troubled enough
that an entire section of her fan wiki page is simply labeled "traumas".
There was the time she was almost raped by an ex-boyfriend, who then shot
himself. Or the time she recovered memories of being molested by her father
right before she was set to get married to novelist–turned–advertising
executive Billy Campbell (Andrew Shue).

But in Season 5, she's dating dutiful bar owner Jake Hanson (Grant Show),
who has cheekbones for days. Perhaps good times have come at last. Except
they haven't, of course. This is a soap opera and no one can remain happy
for long. It turns out that Alison is pregnant with Jake's child and unsure
if she wants to marry him. She and Jake split and get back together. What
will she do about this pregnancy?

The answer, of course, is that she will have an extremely convenient
miscarriage. This plot arc aired in the mid-1990s, when abortion wasn't
really an option for characters on television shows. If a series even
openly discussed abortion, it risked the ire of highly organized media
watchdogs on the religious right who would lead boycotts and threaten
skittish advertisers. Yet if you look closely at "101 Damnations", the
MELROSE PLACE episode in which Alison miscarries, you might notice
something quite odd: There *is* a reference to abortion in the episode.
It's just visual instead of spoken. Through much of the episode, Alison
Parker is draped in a quilt that bears the chemical structure of RU-486,
the so-called abortion pill.

And that's not all. Watch enough episodes of MELROSE PLACE and you'll
notice other very odd props and set design all over the show. A pool float
in the shape of a sperm about to fertilize an egg. A golf trophy that
appears to have testicles. Furniture designed to look like an endangered
spotted owl.

It turns out all of these objects and more than 100 others, were designed
by an artist collective called the GALA Committee. For three years, as the
denizens of the Melrose Place apartment complex loved, lost, and betrayed
one another, the GALA Committee smuggled subversive leftist art onto the
set, experimenting with the relationship between art, artist, and
spectator. The collective hid its work in plain sight and operated in
secrecy. Outside of a select few insiders, no one--including Aaron
Spelling, MELROSE's legendary executive producer-- knew what it was doing.

The project was called In the Name of the Place. It ended in 1997. Or,
perhaps, since the episodes are streamable, it never ended. Twenty-five
years later, discovering this project while researching a book about the
culture wars of the late 20th century, I was left with several questions:
Who were these people? Is what they made art? Did it matter? And how in the
hell did they get away with it for so long?

https://slate.com/culture/2023/12/melrose-place-abortion-art-gala-committee-mel-chin.html

BTR1701 <no_email@invalid.invalid> wrote:

https://slate.com/culture/2023/12/melrose-place-abortion-art-gala-committee-mel-
chin.html

>. . . Yet if you look closely at "101 Damnations", the
>MELROSE PLACE episode in which Alison miscarries, you might notice
>something quite odd: There *is* a reference to abortion in the episode.
>It's just visual instead of spoken. Through much of the episode, Alison
>Parker is draped in a quilt that bears the chemical structure of RU-486,
>the so-called abortion pill.

You know, if you drink enough, you can see all sorts of things
representing other things.

According to the Wikipedia page on the drug Mifepristone (RU-486), it
was invented in 1980 but not on the market -- in France -- till 1987.
Seriously, an artist's representation of the drug's chemical structure
was subtle lobbying to get a safe pharmaceutical for abortion approved
for sale in the United States, which wouldn't be on the market here till
2000?

Whomever wrote this article is on drugs and I doubt any of them are
legal.