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The Politics of ShmashmortionKnocked Up as litmus test.

By Dana StevensPosted Friday, June 8, 2007, at 3:30 PM ET

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The question is, from whose point of view is it that abortion is "a really horrible thing to do"? Apatow's? We have no idea from the film what the filmmaker's personal abortion politics are—I'd imagine that he votes pro-choice, whatever his reservations as an individual—but for the purposes of this discussion, it doesn't matter. Apatow's reticence on the subject seems to spring less from personal conviction than from the fear of offending his audience's sensibilities. This kind of Trojan horse moralism is maddeningly common in pop-culture representations of abortion, which seem muzzled, invisibly policed, by either the pro-life lobby or the fear of it.

It wasn't always thus, of course—Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Dirty Dancing were just two of the '80s coming-of-age stories that used a character's abortion as an important plot point without fainting in horror at the notion. These days—and it's hard not to track "these days" in conjunction with the movement for a federal abortion ban—a fictional heroine has two choices, if she wants to maintain the audience's goodwill: carry the baby to term or have a convenient miscarriage. The only recent exception I can think of is Six Feet Under's Claire (Lauren Ambrose), who visits an abortion clinic in Season 3—but not without being visited in the next episode by a dream of her baby as an angel being cared for by dead relatives in heaven. Even Citizen Ruth, Alexander Payne's superb 1996 comedy about the absurdity of the abortion debate (in which both "pro-life" and "pro-choice" groups are sent up with wicked precision), ends with Laura Dern's paint-sniffing, knocked-up Ruth miscarrying the very morning she's scheduled to abort. A decade later, we're allowed to debate the procedure as an abstract policy issue, hand-wringing all the while about "safe, legal, and rare," but God forbid that anyone on television or the movies has one, talks about having one, or (apparently most reprehensible of all) advises anyone to have one.

As the mother of a 1-year-old daughter, I think I can say that if she turned up pregnant in her early 20s under exactly Alison's circumstances—single, barely acquainted with the father, financially dependent (she lives with her married sister), weeping miserably at her first sonogram—I would encourage her to at least consider the possibility of abortion, without in any way impugning the "realness" of the child should she decide to keep it. In that same hypothetical conversation (which I hope to forestall by lecturing her about birth control till she squirms), I would certainly tell my beloved girl that, like most of my close female friends (and like Barbara Ehrenreich–see her remarkable 2004 Times op-ed on this subject), I had an abortion myself around that age, and while it was far from the high point of the decade, it's a decision I look back on now with neither anguish nor regret. (Any readers planning to send me hate mail can direct their letters to the Supreme Court, which, touchingly, still insists on paper correspondence.)

That same Atlantic blog post concludes with the opinion that the movie is "almost naively pro-life"—that Alison decides to keep her baby because "killing it" would be "obviously and terribly wrong," and Alison, bless her heart, is not a "bad person" who would do such a thing. The 77 percent of Americans who support abortion rights—and the 40 percent or more of American women who have exercised that right—can be excused for wondering where that supposedly obvious moral consensus is coming from. Roe v. Wade may be in perpetual danger of erosion, but look on the bright side: We still have more choices than most pregnant women in the movies.