Abortion not an Option in Popular Culture [View all]

[cthulu2016]

Last edited Wed Apr 30, 2014, 05:24 PM - Edit history (5)

In the last several decades of popular culture (roughly since the mid-1980s), abortion is not an option for sympathetic characters. I am sure there are some contemporary exceptions, but in general I think that's a fair description.

A sympathetic character can consider abortion. But at the last minute she will come to her senses.

If Ellen Page's smart, independent, iconoclastic character in Juno wasn't going to get an abortion than who the hell ever would?

We had a five year soap opera in Secret Life of the American Teenager (was that what it was called?) about a 15 year old who had never even *dated* wrecking her life, and those of everyone in sight, by not even considering abortion as an option for her. (I watched some of it recently because the star was incredible in The Descendants as George Clooney's daughter.)

MTV does not have a show called "16 and NOT pregnant, and doing fine thank you very much."

Now, hilariously, some people claim that 16 And Pregnant discourages teen child-birth by showing what problems these girls face. Yeah, right... and JACKASS discourages riding a skateboard off a roof by showing how painful it is. Except that is not how the world works.

What if MTV had a show about young girls who find out they are pregnant under ridiculous circumstances to be pregnant and address the problem and it works out okay? Then those girls would be role models competing with the role models (if you're a sympathetic character on TV then you're a role model) of the 16 and pregnant girls.

It is the damnedest thing... on TV, when someone finds out they're pregnant then they are for sure going to have a baby. (Despite the fact that people on TV have sex indiscriminately and seemingly without contraception... which is odd, considering that they live in a world where abortion is not an option.)

Yet abortion is, in the ethos of TV land, something that should be available. Of course! Gotta be available... for some unconsidered, unseen class of dreadful people who would do something like that.


It is no surprise that abortion is always under attack (and will probably be rolled back more before advancing any).

Think where gay rights would be today if TV still had no gay characters. Imagine if TV dramas were all about people who politically favored gay rights though god knows THEY would never do anything like being gay and had never met anyone who would and any character who was gay would have to be written off the show as unsympathetic... but yea gay rights! Y'know... in the abstract.

Added on Edit: Neutrality can be condemnation and an attempt to avoid controversy is actually, itself, social engineering. Example: Back in the day, say a character hails a cab. The cab driver will be white. Why? Because the south would ban a movie that showed a black person operating in normal human society, whereas the rest of the country had no comparable objection to a white cab driver. So the correct business decision was to avoid controversy. But the product of that "neutrality" was the whole country seeing a New York or Chicago with a mysterious absence of black people, and that is itself a segregationist message. Similarly, on today's media world a sympathetic character does not condemn other people for having an abortion but there are not examples of sympathetic (good) characters doing so. So it does become, "We don't object to black people driving cabs, we just prefer to not show it because it upsets some of our viewers." The act of not upsetting some viewers is itself a statement.