Screening Choice

Given my undying love for Freaks and Geeks (and, by extension, Judd Apatow), I’m totally seeing Knocked Up this weekend. In her review for Slate, Dana Stevens answers a question that occurred to me after watching the preview: Do they discuss abortion?

Allow me to briefly divagate here on the nonexistence of abortion as an option in Knocked Up. This omission smells of the focus group, and it’s a disappointment in a movie that otherwise prides itself on its unsentimental honesty about the realities of unplanned parenthood. It’s just not believable that, in Alison and Ben’s upper-middle-class, secular L.A. milieu, abortion would not be matter-of-factly discussed as a possibility in the case of a pregnancy this accidental. If she doesn’t want one, great — obviously, there’d be no movie if she did — but let’s hear about why not. Otherwise, her character becomes a cipher, a foil for Ben’s epiphanies about growing up, without being allowed any epiphanies of her own. The biggest unanswered question about Heigl’s character is one the movie never tiptoes near — why does she decide to keep the baby?

Seems like a glaring omission to me. This is the key point in Stevens’ excellent critique of Apatow’s failure to write female characters who are quite as real as their male counterparts. I’ll reserve judgment until I see the movie. But Knocked Up, however touching and entertaining it may be, certainly seems to fit with Hollywood’s long history of professing pro-choice beliefs and then writing scripts in which women with minimum-wage jobs and no support system make last-minute decisions to not have an abortion, unplanned pregnancies end with deus ex machina miscarriages, and characters who do choose abortion are killed off in subsequent episodes. Most often, though, the A-word isn’t even mentioned.

This is often an unwelcome surprise, but none of these fictional characters, unlike their real-world counterparts who might agonize over the choice to have a baby, will choose to end their pregnancies. In fact, we might as well be living in an era before Roe v. Wade as far as TV is concerned. Characters these days rarely even say the word abortion when confronted with an unplanned pregnancy — let alone have one.

Premium-cable shows like Six Feet Under have done a slightly better job of portraying women struggling with and making a variety of choices about pregnancy. And it’s worth noting that this year’s Palme d’Or prize-winner at the Cannes Film Festival was a movie about illegal abortion in Romania. But I have a hard time thinking of many films or TV shows that have realistically portrayed women making choices about unplanned pregnancies — and living with those choices. Nominations for best/worst portrayals of choice on-screen?