Hollywood and Abortion

Politically, we all know that Hollywood is pro-abortion.  But, with the release of Knocked Up, several commentators have noticed that Hollywood seems very reticent to celebrate abortion in its movies.

Gerard Baker writes:

In Knocked Up, the very word is avoided completely — the closest is when one of the characters suggests maybe the heroine should have a procedure that rhymes with “shmashmortion”.

It is not just in Knocked Up, and feminists have noticed, Baker points out.

They point out that in Hollywood, for decades — in everything from Sex and the City to Parenthood — women confronted with an unplanned pregnancy almost always choose to keep the baby.

Actually, that’s not quite true.  The 1999 move The Cider House Rules celebrated abortion, or at least illegal abortionists, and it grossed $56 million.

But Cider House Rules, you could argue, was an art-house film, whereas Knocked Up ($73 million after two weeks) is a movie marketed as the general unwashed.

Baker wonders if Hollywood’s reluctance over abortion tells us something.  Maybe we all know that abortion is a bad thing, whatever we say, and so we don’t want to be confronted with it when we’ve checked out for a bit of fantasy at the movies.

I’m convinced that we will some day come to view it in the way we now view slavery, a moral abomination that generations simply became inured to by usage and practice.

That’s a thought.

The Germans, of course, have no such squeamishness. In Edgar Reitz’s vast panorama, Heimat, the cellist heroine undergoes an illegal abortion in The Second Heimat on camera and nearly dies.  But she was impregnated not by the noble artistic hero but by one of couple of rich kids.  So that’s different.