Abortion in Film & Television

There is a problem in depictions of pregnancy in films & television.

I want you to think about something for me. Take any film or television show where a woman has become unexpectedly pregnant. The two stages to this are:

1) Does she abort the foetus
2) Is she comfortable with this action

Now, I’m a man and therefore don’t know what it’s like to have a semi living being inside me. I am fairly confident, though, that there are a lot of women out there who get accidentally pregnant and just don’t want the damn thing.

Now, if you’re like me, you’ll be having considerable trouble thinking of any film or TV series where a woman has had an abortion. I’ve seen plenty of phantom pregnancies and miscarriages which are lame cop-outs for writers to avoid writing about difficult subjects.

After some considerable thought, I realised I could only think of one instance in all the television and film that I’ve seen – an episode of Battlestar Galactica in the latter half of series 2 where a woman flees her religious family in order to have her foetus aborted. We never see her reaction afterwards, only the political fallout.

Now, there can only be one reason for this: Film and television does not want to be seen as encouraging abortion.

Why the hell not?

Abortion is the single most important women’s right available, in my opinion. Deciding what to do with your body and whether or not you want to be stuck with looking after an annoying brat for the next 18 years is kind of important.

I don’t want to point the finger at religion because religion gets a lot of shit for stuff that’s not really their fault but in this instance, I think it really has to take the blame.

I can’t imagine a scenario arising in Friends, 30 Rock, Dexter, Supernatural or Family Guy (to pick four popular shows at random) where a woman aborts a foetus and is liberated by the decision because the right wing media would crucify the show and they’d probably get fined by the media regulatory board.

I really hate this bullshit attitude- the attitude that all life is sacred. It’s not. To reduce this to flippancy, Hitler’s life was definitely not sacred. I think we all wish that Hitler had been aborted as a foetus. Doesn’t that kind of prove that abortion can sometimes be a good thing?

Well, not really because it weakens the argument. The abortion debate is not one of Preserving Life vs The Right to Chose because only an idiot would favour one and not the other.

Nethertheless, the media consistently comes down on the side of preserving unborn so called life. Whether this attitude is right or not is genuinely up for debate but it would be really nice to see the other side of the argument every once in a while.