American moviemakers' spineless fear of a woman's right to choose

[BurtWorm]

Warning to anyone who doesn't want to have the plot of Greenberg spoiled for them: Don't read further.

















This is from Daily Beast, and it hits on the annoying tendency of contemporary American movie and television pregnancies to always end in births of perfect babies, regardless of the mother's personal circumstances. The choice to abort is nodded to nervously in the script, but it's a safe bet, the female character won't choose it, and will, in fact, rule it out without much thought or discussion at all.

Maybe that will change:


http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-04-12/the-taboo-breaking-abortion-in-greenberg/?obref=obnetwork

Greenberg hasn’t yet provoked much controversy—partly because the abortion is downplayed in the movie. Gerwig’s Florence tells Greenberg that she is going to the hospital for “a D and C” (the word “abortion” is never used), but it’s perfectly clear that she is terminating the pregnancy. In addition, the film hasn’t stirred an outcry because it’s so far showing only in major cities where critics may be more blasé (or more out-of-touch) than moviegoers in the heartland.


This plot twist is pretty revolutionary for a Hollywood film in 2010. When did you last see an American movie that portrayed a woman opting to have an abortion? Thirty-seven years after the Supreme Court declared abortion legal in Roe v. Wade, the subject is more polarizing than ever, as the rancorous Congressional debate over health care demonstrated. In this contentious atmosphere, Hollywood has chosen to play it safe and keep abortion invisible.

In recent films and TV shows about unplanned pregnancy, the heroine almost invariably decides to have the baby. In a much-debated episode of the racy HBO series, Sex and the City, a pregnant Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) decided against abortion at the very last minute—the same second thoughts have occurred on shows such as Dawson’s Creek and Beverly Hills, 90210. In Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up, an ambitious career woman with a demanding job gets pregnant as a result of a drunken one-night stand. Amazingly, she never considers an abortion. Juno focuses on a high school girl who does visit an abortion clinic before deciding to have the baby and give it up for adoption. It might be argued that in these cases, there would have been no story if the characters had had abortions in the first or second reel, yet the films ended up making an implicit political statement that dismayed pro-choice activists as well as other filmmakers.

Screenwriter Erin Dignam, whose recent film The Yellow Handkerchief features abortion as a plot point, says, “The writing and directing in Juno were very good. But how did they end up making that statement? In 99 percent of cases of 16-year-old girls who get pregnant today, that wouldn’t be the result. People have very deep, unresolved feelings about abortion, and that may be why they’re afraid to show it.”

Abortion is treated more forthrightly in acclaimed European films like Mike Leigh’s Vera Drake, which earned several Oscar nominations in 2004, or the Romanian film, 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2007. But abortion has disappeared from American movies over the last two decades.

This silence is not new. The Production Code that censored movies from the 1930s to the 1960s forbade any mention of abortion. During the freewheeling ‘70s, the subject finally came out of the shadows in a number of movies and TV shows, including the much-publicized Maude episode, broadcast on CBS in November 1972 (abortion was legal in New York state before the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Roe v. Wade), in which Bea Arthur’s Maude decides to have an abortion after learning of an unexpected pregnancy. While some local stations refused to broadcast the episode and some viewers registered angry protests, the show was watched by tens of millions of Americans. On the silver screen, Cabaret, The Godfather Part II, and Paul Mazursky’s Next Stop Greenwich Village also focused on women who choose to have abortions.

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