Insight: Georgia Abortion Law Could Kill Animation Industry “Made In Georgia”

Georgia should be on your mind.

A lot of people may not know this, but a bunch of adult animation is produced in Georgia and it’s some killer titles as well. With the recent announcements from the likes of Netflix, NBC Universal, WarnerMedia, Disney, and a host of other studio heads noting that it would be difficult to see a producing future in Georgia should the famed “Heartbeat Bill” pass.

What’s the Heartbeat Bill? In 2013, North Dakota was the first state to try and take a major stab at the 1973 Roe v Wade case which passed the Supreme Court and made it a woman’s right to choose as to what to do with her body in the case of pregnancy. The Heartbeat Bill would effectively make Roe v Wade obsolete as it makes illegal the termination of pregnancies at six weeks which is typically when women find out if they are pregnant. From a scientific point of view, it may actually take 12 weeks before a fetus has any sort of a measurable heartbeat.

Regardless of your personal feelings about the matter, this is going to be a big decision from the State of Georgia. On one hand, the state can continue to believe that the state and religion are, in fact, one and as such they feel they have a spiritual and dogmatic Christian right to pass this bill. On the other, 80,000 jobs could be at stake including a slew in the areas of animation. Popular series like Squidbillies, Archer (including the new after show that was just picked up for three episodes), and a number of other series from Bento Box Animation (producers of Bob’s Burgers, Paradise PD, etc) call Atlanta home (or in Bento’s case, a second home). And less we forget, the one and only Adult Swim/Cartoon Networks keep their headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia.

From what I’m hearing, that last part may not matter. AT&T is in the process of going into each and every one of the Turner Networks’ back-end operations with a scalpel and are offering employees early retirement incentives so as to leave or move to NYC, this will effect CNN, Adult Swim/Cartoon Network, TBS, TruTV (which just announced a slew of upper management changes last week), and TNT. So whether or not animation for those networks is produced in Atlanta may be a formality at this juncture. That said, studios like Awesome Studios, Inc, Floyd County Productions, and the aforementioned Bento could see their animated efforts shut down if this bill passes thereby putting lots of people out of work and most likely seeing earlier mentioned series either shortened, canceled, or their jobs transferred to Canada and LA as a result.

The true heartbeat of Georgia, is it’s workforce. If Georgia’s laws against a woman’s right to choose passes, it could be the equivalent of the Kano heart-rip fatality from Mortal Kombat, only in this instance, the crumbling body is that of the affluent animation industry in Atlanta. On a personal note, I can’t imagine the state of Georgia hasn’t learned from it’s mistakes as it pertains to hurting the entertainment industries as a result of archaic ways of thinking. In 1961, Ray Charles was banned from playing in his home State after refusing to play for Jim Crow, and wouldn’t be allowed to do so until nearly 20 years later when in 1979 when he actually performed the song on the floor of the state legislature when we was welcomed back and given a full pardon. Georgia had to pay for it’s short sightedness once before, it will be interesting to see if history repeats itself.