POPULATION GROUP HONORS TV SHOWS

Receiving an award Tuesday from the Washington-based Center for Population Options, Perry Lafferty, producer of “An Early Frost” on NBC, happily noted that it had to be the “the first time in television history” that two shows playing opposite each other received the same honor.

Sharing the honors at the Beverly Wilshire for portraying “sexual responsibility in the media” were Barney Rosenzweig, executive producer of “Cagney & Lacey,” and the team that produced “The Clinic” episode of that series for CBS. Both shows aired Nov. 11, 1985. “An Early Frost,” a two-hour television movie, dealt with a family’s reaction to AIDS afflicting their son. “The Clinic” took on the issue of abortion.

Robin Elliott, chairman of the organization, praised the television industry for its “quantum leap” this season in areas of depicting matters of sexual responsibility.

(Planned Parenthood recently took out full-page ads in newspapers around the country decrying television’s lack of responsibility in depicting sex.)

Other winners of the Nancy Susan Reynolds Awards Tuesday were “Babies Having Babies,” a “CBS Schoolbreak Special,” Martin Sheen, executive producer; and an installment of “The Cosby Show” entitled “Denise’s Friend,” Marcy Carsey, executive producer.

Al Rabin, executive producer of “Days of Our Lives,” received a certificate of merit for a sequence portraying a teen-age boy refraining from sex because he didn’t have birth-control protection. A later scene shows the boy in a pharmacy, pointing to a shelf and asking the druggist for something “from that section, right there.”

Author Judy Blume received the John Rock Award for her writing. (Rock developed the birth control pill.)

Population Options, a nonprofit volunteer organization, was founded in 1980 to address the problem of teen pregnancy and familiarize the nation with it.