'P-Valley' Showrunner Katori Hall Talks Tackling Teen Pregnancy And Abortion
essence.comP-Valley has continued telling timely, relevant, relatable stories that show taboo topics from an alternate lens. This week’s A-plot found Mercedes and her daughter Terricka in an all-too-timely scenario in our post-Roe world, traveling hours away from their hometown to secure abortion access.
The timeliness of the subject matter hits hard for Katori Hall, P-Valley creator and showrunner. When it first became a topic in the writer’s room, the team was understandably naive about what was to come for America’s women, particularly those living in Southern states like the characters in fictional Chucalissa, Mississippi.In S2 Episode 7, “Jackson,” Mercedes (Brandee Evans) deals with the fallout of her daughter Terricka’s newly discovered pregnancy at 14 while having flashbacks of how her mother treated her around the same age.
She proactively drives her over an hour out of town to the nearest abortion service provider and pushes her to examine her options before it’s too late.“When we decided to tell the story of Terricka getting an abortion, it wasjust around the time that the case was being pushed up towards the Supreme Court,” Hall tells ESSENCE exclusively about the process of writing “Jackson.” “Obviously, in the writer’s room, there were a lot of us who were like, ‘no, this will never happen.
They’ll never overturn Roe vs. Wade.’ But the fact that we were writing an episode that was about that organization, The Pink House, and the fact that even at that moment, in the yesterday of our fictional Chucalissa, abortion was restricted [is timely].
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