Nobody should be Told to have an abortion, but we should be
Last edited Sun Jan 12, 2014, 04:01 PM - Edit history (2)
encouraged by social norms to be aware of it as a potentially wise choice in some circumstances, in the same way people are encouraged to work, to go to college, etc.., as smart life choice made in light of circumstance and reality. (And, as with other things, one can freely reject that "wise" choice. I don't do everything people on TV do.)
Instead, we have a mass culture where abortion damn near does not exist.
On TV and in movies there are a lot of unwanted pregnancies, and hardly anyone even considers the option. (Or, as in JUNO, quickly decides it is for other people.)
It should be an unexceptional social norm that it is not particularly wise, compassionate, moral or otherwise obviously correct for a sixteen year old girl living at home with no prospects in life to CHOOSE to have a baby.
Where is MTV's hit show "Sixteen and NO LONGER Pregnant"?
If she wants to have a baby then that is what it is, but it should be made in the context of a mass culture that views having a baby as one of a set of OPTIONS.
Hell, here is an extreme but telling example... on the TV show LOST, on the island a mysterious thing happened that made pregnancy a death sentence. During the second trimester the woman's body would reject the fetus in a way that was invariably fatal. 28+ woman had died that way... every single woman who had gotten pregnant on the island died. The entire energies of the society of "the others" were dedicated to finding a way to stop these deaths.
A main character finds out she is pregnant (and it might not even be her husband's), facilities are available to easily terminate the pregnancy, and the option is NEVER MENTIONED BY ANYONE, including her fertility specialist doctor. Ever. Sorry, hon... you're gonna die. The 28+ women who had died? The notion that there was any way to terminate a fatal pregnancy NEVER CAME UP. Nor did CONTRACEPTION.
Now, the show could have easily put in a "fix" like, "The process begins at conception and is ireversible... even when we terminated the pregnancies the woman still died." But no, it never came up. And this was a MAJOR plot element of the show for seasons. The character Ben, who was complicit in an actual mass-grave genocide on the island, could not have been shown to be party to abortions because I guess that was too much, even for the villain.
And it isn't possible that the writers (all smart folks, mostly living in LA) never thought of the problem. They just didn't let anyone in the show think about it. The existence of options was obviously damn near unmentionable in polite society, as represented by mainstream TV.
The stigmatization of abortion in American culture/media is incredible, and is related (as a phenomenon) to old school racism in movies and TV.
National cultural attitudes subsume "squeaky wheels." In 1940 the bulk of America would not have been horrified to see a black man in a suit as a minor character in a movie, but one region would not tolerate it and would ban the exhibition of such a film.
(There are always exceptions, of course. A few films were made based on a calculation of whether they would be profitable even without southern distribution)
Since films were distributed nationally the extremist attitudes of the south led to "controversial" black non-servants being left out.
This was abetted by the fact that America was generally racist, so projecting extreme southern attitudes nationally was not itself notably controversial. (In the same way the whole "abortion should be legal but everyone should know it is nasty" attitude allows our mass culture to negate abortion as a choice... it isn't something a sympathetic character would do.)
But then the rest of the nation was acculturated to be MORE racist because of the appeasement of the south. White kids in more liberal areas still grew up seeing no middle-class black person in media. That was the cultural norm they received.
(Norman Rockwell once submitted a cover sketch to the Saturday Evening Post featuring a well dressed black person. He was told that the Post would never publish a cover with a black person who wasn't holding a tray or a mop. The Post was a RW, rural leaning publication, but was also the top-selling magazine in America and read by many people in cities... people who never saw a well-dressed black person on the cover because some other place wouldn't stand for it.)
And abortion is the same way. Abortion being shown as a REAL CHOICE would cause some people to go nuts, so abortion vanishes as a thing in the national culture.
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