Last Night's Veep Was a Hilarious Tragicomedy About Abortion Politics

Only two episodes into its third season, the brilliantly written and wonderfully acted Veep (starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus) is already tackling the highly politicized and ridiculous Washington abortion debate by proving the seemingly impossible — that abortion legislation and the tragic circus that surrounds it can actually be funny.

“I can’t identify myself as a woman. People can’t know that,” Vice President Selina Meyer tells her staff after the POTUS announces that he 1.) will not be running for a second term (leaving the door open for Selina to run in his place) and 2.) that he is quite suddenly pro life.

The president’s announcement puts pressure on Selina to define her own position on the abortion issue, which, in private, she has pretty strong feelings about (“Get the government out of my fucking snatch”). In public, however, she’s been much more infuriatingly vague and noncommital about taking a stance for fear of alienating voters.

In the clip above, the VP and her staff attempt to refine her position to something a little more specific than her past statement of “Freedom is what this nation is built on, blah, blah blah — and freedom means the freedom to choose how to use that freedom to protect the freedom of others.” Unfortunately, they fail to do much better.

That’s the bad news. The good is that with lines like “I can’t get POTUS to wave his transvaginal wand and make it all go away,” Veep has become one of the best (if not THE best) sitcoms on television.