Show creator and star, Seth McFarlane spoke with TV Line about a couple of themes shown within this current season that happened to coincide with current real life events:
"Yeah, that was an interesting and unfortunate coincidence [on 'Gently Falling Rain' airing the day before Roe was overturned]. I think we wrote that script two years ago…? And of all times for it to land, it was pretty insane," MacFarlane said. "There's a great essay that was written by Karl Sagan and Ann Druyan in the '90s, specifically about Roe v. Wade, and I would sound like an idiot if I tried to paraphrase it here. But it was written from a scientific perspective, really breaking down the biology of how abortion works and drawing the conclusion that the specifics of Roe v. Wade — just not the existence of it, but the specifics of it — were prudent and made a lot of a sense. It's something that I always try to post on social media periodically when I think of it."
The mentioned episode featured a holographic simulation generated by the Krill, a reptilian alien species ruled by an extreme theocratic government who aggressively seek to prevent abortion practices, where parents who went through the abortion would see what their child could have looked like and where the simulated child ask the parents why they had chosen to "send them away.".
In some states, you hear rumblings — if I were more educated as far as specific legislation, I could tell you which specific states — about the woman being forced to look at an ultrasound of her fetus before an abortion is allowed, which is pretty perverse," MacFarlane explained. "It's a very bizarre concept, and you can imagine a future society looking at it, going, 'Wow, what in the world is happening here?' When we wrote the episode, that was really the impetus for that wrinkle in their culture — how would a future society like Krill employ this kind of practice, with the technology of the future? This idea of extracting DNA and forcing the parents to sit and talk to "the child that could have been" seemed like a pretty potent science-fiction idea worth presenting."
https://tvline.com/2022/07/05/the-orvil ... verturned/
