Abortion: Hollywood keeps the baby

The pro-life movement suddenly has “an unlikely ally—the movies,” said Roger Moore in the Orlando Sentinel. Cultural conservatives have long complained that Hollywood portrays sex as rampant and casual, with guilt-free abortions available in case anything goes wrong. But over the past year, several critically acclaimed movies have depicted unmarried heroines who decide when they become pregnant to keep the baby. Last summer’s comedy hit Knocked Up starred Katherine Heigl as a TV producer who carries “a drunken one-night stand to term.” Recently there was Bella, about a chef who helps talk a young woman out of an abortion, and Waitress, wherein Keri Russell keeps the child she’s conceived in an unhappy marriage. Critics are now raving about Juno, the story of a pregnant high school junior who decides to give her baby to an infertile couple. This trend signals an important backlash, said Rick Santorum in The Philadelphia Inquirer. Young people who grew up in a “divorce- and abortion-oriented culture” no longer idealize selfish “choices” by adults. Instead, they’re choosing life, family, and responsibility.

It sounds as if you haven’t actually seen these films, said Jennie Yabroff in Newsweek. They certainly aren’t tributes to traditional values. The pregnant women are mainly single. “Few plan to raise their children in the traditional structure of a biological mother and father.” Yet in keeping with Hollywood tradition, everything turns out all right in the end, said Katha Pollitt in The Nation. If only that were true in the real world. Teen pregnancies, the government recently announced, rose in this country for the first time since 1991. This year, 750,000 teenage girls will become pregnant, and 57 percent will carry to term. Among those in that last group, we recently learned, will be Jamie Lynn Spears, Britney’s pregnant, 16-year-old sister, who is now being shamed in the media as a disgrace and a slut. Tell me: Is everything going to turn out all right for Jamie Lynn and the hundreds of thousands of unwed mothers with far fewer resources?

All in all, this is a strange debate, said Ellen Goodman in The Boston Globe. Suddenly, conservatives who usually clamor for abstinence are applauding both real and fictional girls who have children out of wedlock. “Pro-choice” liberals, who hate to sound like moralistic “fuddy-duddies,” are squirming with discomfort because they don’t like movies that celebrate unwed mothers. Something’s backward here, and if you’re a parent looking for a “teachable moment” in either Juno or the real-life adventures of Jamie Lynn Spears, good luck.

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