The Reality Behind Hollywood Pregnancies

By Susie Bright, SusieBright.com. Posted January 7, 2008.

I finally went to see Juno. I've been making the rounds of "Smushmortion" Cinema.

I was one of the last to see the popular comedy, Knocked Up, but I giggled my fair share. I teared up over Quinceneara. I Netflixed my way to Waitress, the most mouth-watering of the bunch. I had to leave Bella behind at the trailer, 'cause I got a tummy-ache. But who can forget Miranda's little package that started the whole trend on Sex and the City?

I'm perplexed by the newest baby-happy trend in movies with female leads. A woman becomes unexpectedly, unhappily pregnant. It's under "the worst possible circumstances."

The beautiful woman ... and I mean, she's STUNNING ... makes the decision to keep her baby and have the perkiest, most upbeat pregnancy I've ever seen in my life. I can't recall a single friend who PLANNED to have a baby, who ever had as great a gestation period as these heroines.

Here's some of the things you can look forward to in your unplanned Hollywood pregnancy:

Billionaire mentor leaves you all his money on his deathbed (Waitress)

Your first high school lover ends up being the most perfect love you will ever know (Juno)

You really ARE a virgin... the sperm only seeped through your jeans (Quinceañera)

Parents who rejected you take you back into their loving arms at the last moment because they realized they were all wrong (Quinceañera)

Closed adoption, another last minute decision, works out for the best for everybody (Juno)

Raising a child-like boyfriend is a darling substitute for an infant (Juno, Knocked Up)

Your professional entertainment career finally takes off (Knocked Up)

International soccer star and his loving relatives become your surrogate family(Bella)

Guys quit their jobs and give up their best buddy's approval just to be with you (Knocked Up, Bella)

You see the light and cancel your abortion seconds before the procedure begins (Sex and the City, Juno)

Keeping the baby gets you your boyfriend back and makes you realize you really do want to get married to him, after rejecting him for years (Sex and the City)

Abortion is fine for someone else, but not for someone heroic and plucky like YOU! (ALL)

Now, don't get me wrong; I enjoyed these movies. I laughed, I quoted the best lines, I sighed over the hot sex and loving moments. I choked up. Really.

But the overall effect was disquieting. The movies are farces, masquerading as romantic comedies. In a couple cases, it alarmed me that they couldn't utter the word "abortion" aloud, no matter how many naked boobs, swear words, or bong jokes were included.

I asked my friend and culture critic, Laura Miller, what she thought about these abortion-free flicks:

LM: They bothered me, too. Fictional characters are barely allowed to consider abortion, but there are some technical reasons why.

You don't make a character pregnant just to have it go away with a minimum of fuss; pregnancy and a baby provide the kind of conflict that drives stories. So if a story-tellers make a character pregnant to begin with, it's usually because they want it to play out.

They might try to milk a little extra drama out of her deciding whether or not to terminate, but that's about it. Some of this is probably a moral thing, but a good portion has to do with the necessities of generating plot.

As for a movie where someone does decide to have an abortion -- I think it's hard to ever present this as an affirmative experience.

Sure, people have them, get on with their lives, and are grateful for the choice. But it's not like anyone's ever happy that they had to have an abortion, only that they had the option. Like a root canal, it's a hard experience to build a movie around, especially now that fewer people remember what it was like when abortions were illegal.

See more stories tagged with: hollywood, abortion, unplanned pregnancy, pregnancy, juno

Susie Bright is an author, editor, and journalist known for her original and pioneering work in sexual politics and erotic expression. She writes about sex and politics every day at her blog.

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