The Walking Dead considers leaving Georgia over abortion law

Politics and entertainment have been mixing over the past week after the Georgia state legislature passed a new law that bans abortions after the time a fetal heartbeat can be detected, which can be as early as six weeks, before many women even realize they’re pregnant. It’s a very restrictive law, and as you can imagine, it’s stirring up a lot of controversy, among citizens and businesses.

On the business side of things, several Hollywood studios have made noise about no longer filming in Georgia if the law is enforced when it takes effect next year. Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos said the company would “rethink our entire investment in Georgia” if the law is enforced (Netflix films Stranger Things in Georgia, among other things). Even more significantly, Disney CEO Bob Iger said that it would be “very difficult” to shoot in Georgia if the law took effect. “I think many people who work for us will not want to work there, and we will have to heed their wishes in that regard,” he said. “Right now we are watching it very carefully.”

Now, AMC has come out with a similar statement, per Forbes. Said a spokesperson:

"If this highly restrictive legislation goes into effect, we will reevaluate our activity in Georgia. Similar bills — some even more restrictive — have passed in multiple states and have been challenged. This is likely to be a long and complicated fight and we are watching it all very closely."

This is important because AMC films The Walking Dead in Georgia; in fact, there’s probably no show more associated with the state. Although the characters have since moved on from the Peach State (the survivors of the zombie apocalypse are mostly tooling around D.C. these days), AMC has shot the show in Georgia since the beginning a decade ago, and has made use of both the state’s urban centers and natural landscapes.

True, The Walking Dead is far from the ratings juggernaut it used to be, but losing this show could do damage to Georgia’s growing reputation as a filming center.

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Will any of this have an effect on Georgia’s abortion law? Almost certainly not, because the point of it and similar laws isn’t really to become the law of the land, at least not yet. With a conservative majority now on the Supreme Court, states are passing these laws knowing they’ll be challenged in the hopes that the cases will work their way up the court system and eventually be heard by the highest court in the land, with the end goal of having the Supreme Court overrule the 1973 decision of Roe v. Wade (later upheld in 1992 with Planned Parenthood v. Casey) that legalized abortion nationwide. (Or if these states don’t expect the Supreme Court to overrule Roe, they at least want it watered down until it’s functionally useless.)

So as AMC said, this is going to be a long and complicated fight.

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h/t Reuters, The A.V. Club