When I was a teenager in the mid-sixties, an unwanted pregnancy was a nightmare. One girl I knew who did not want to tell her parents travelled secretly to a small town to visit a semi-competent abortionist. Another 17-year-old friend had an abortion performed on her family's kitchen table by two women who injected a saline solution into her as her wealthy mother stood by. She delivered a fetus into the frilly wastebasket in her bedroom.
Then along came legalized access to safe, therapeutic abortions, and the nightmare became a distressing but manageable circumstance. While few young women I know have lightly taken that option, many women do take it, for all sorts of reasons.
Which is why the newest crop of movies about unwanted pregnancy makes me feel like I'm living in a time warp.
In both Knocked Up, a ribald comedy starring Katherine Heigl as a beautiful, ambitious woman in her 20s who gets pregnant during a one-night stand with a semi-slacker guy she meets in a bar, and Juno, featuring Canadian actress Ellen Page as an adorable, wise-cracking 16-year-old who gets pregnant after one-time sex with a friend, the abortion option is firmly dismissed.
The word "abortion" is not even mentioned in Knocked Up, but instead coyly referred to as "shmashmortion" and presented as unthinkable.
What's really unthinkable is for a young, up-and-coming broadcast journalist to not only continue a fluke pregnancy by a man she barely knows, but settle down with him.
Yet, as Slate.com noted, the movie had at least one conservative columnist crowing that abortion is presented "as an option whose time has come and gone."
In fact, that is simply not true - not in the United States, where even after decades of agonizing Roe v. Wade debate and cuts in access, multitudes of women still seek abortions.
And certainly not in this country, where Statistics Canada reports that while the teen pregnancy rate, and thus the abortion rate, has declined since the late nineties, the most common outcome of teen pregnancies is still a therapeutic abortion. (In 2004, Statscan's figures show that 58 per cent of pregnant teenagers in the 15- to 17-year-old age group had an abortion, up from 48 per cent in 1995.)
In Juno, the pregnant-teenager movie that even grandmothers are raving ecstatically about, she runs in horror from an abortion clinic where a pro-life classmate picketing outside informs her that the baby she's carrying already "has fingernails."
Juno opts instead to carry the baby to term, in the process becoming her high school's "cautionary whale", and chooses an affluent couple to adopt it, a decision that has its own complications.
I loved Juno, a movie that presents a pregnant teenager as anything but a victim, and ends up questioning the very definition of family.
However, these movies, along with the bizarre announcement last month that Jamie Lynn Spears, the younger sister of notoriously troubled Britney, was pregnant at 16 and going ahead with it, do make me wonder whether pop culture is trying to pretend abortion doesn't exist.
Abortion is one of the trickiest and most personal issues around. In practice, it's still kept very quiet. Our society still finds it easier not to acknowledge that so many women among us - friends, sisters, daughters, even mothers - have terminated an unwanted pregnancy.
As for these movie plots, several women's health specialists I contacted described them as "extremely unrealistic."
But could they also be part of a subtle attitudinal shift against abortion that conservative thinkers like David Frum are calling for? Mr. Frum, in his new book Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again, prescribes "education and persuasion ... rather than changes in law" in the continuing fight against abortion.
Kathleen O'Grady, a research associate with the Simone de Beauvoir Institute at Concordia University, currently at home on maternity leave with a two-month-old, hasn't had time to see Juno, but she did see Knocked Up. She thought it was "a fun movie, but it sidestepped the abortion option ... which seemed out of touch with the modern, hip audience that the movie was otherwise directed toward."
Here's a movie, Ms. O'Grady says, "that can crack candid jokes about the awkwardness of sex during pregnancy, but can't include abortion as part of the decision-making process." Abortion, she says, "remains the last Hollywood taboo."
Not so much in Europe. If you want abortion realism at the movies, there is the recent Romanian movie, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, which has rightly landed on many critics' top 10 lists. One of the most harrowing films I've ever sat through, it is about two female college students, one pregnant, in the dying days of the Ceausescu regime. It is so wrenching in its depiction of both state-sponsored oppression and the gruesome details of a hotel room abortion that I sat protectively pressing my legs together, thinking back to those comparatively benign but still bad old days in Canada.
You could say the "message" from all three movies is roughly the same - an unplanned pregnancy is a bomb that goes off in a young woman's life.
Yet in Hollywood these days, even a teenage pregnancy has a misty-eyed happy ending as Juno, sadder and wiser, goes back to her pre-pregnancy life.
Meanwhile, in real life, a great many teenage pregnancies end at the abortion clinic. Which isn't to say that doesn't provide a somewhat happy ending too.
Just not one that you'll see on a movie marquee these days.
jtimson@globeandmail.com
