Abortion in Films before 2001

While providing counseling at an abortion clinic in New York in 1999, Heather MacGibbon encountered a woman who told her: “I am not a victim or hero. I am just pregnant and can’t be right now. … I saw this movie the other night—the girl got to keep her baby … but my life is definitely not like that.”¹ Many women she spoke with at the abortion clinic looked to cinematic depictions of abortion to better understand and communicate their experiences, even if these depictions have rarely done justice to the complexity of women’s lives. It becomes all the more pressing, then, to understand how abortion has been portrayed in film.

MacGibbon went on to write a book entitled Screening Choice: The Abortion Issue in American Film, 1900–2000 in which she focuses on the main stereotypes of women seeking abortion: prima donnas and martyrs/victims. The earliest known film to touch on the subject, the silent film Where Are My Children? (1916) by the female director Lois Weber, provides an excellent example of each of these roles. Early in the film, after viewers are informed that the District Attorney is sad at his wife’s childlessness, his wife is seen playing with her pet dog: she clearly does not share his sorrow. The viewer learns over the course of the film that the wife has not only procured abortions for her friends but has had some herself; the film portrays these women as “social butterflies” who reject the sacred responsibility of motherhood and selfishly enjoy themselves instead. They have access to expensive doctors who are willing to give them abortions, even though these secret operations are technically crimes. The “martyr/victim” role is played by the housekeeper’s daughter, who is seduced by the wife’s scheming brother, has an abortion, and dies. Her vulnerability as an innocent, inexperience girl is stressed, making her a clear contrast to the wealthy prima donnas having abortion so that they can have fun.

The prima donna role fades over the course of the 20th century. One reason is the weakening hold of eugenics—the ideology that the population can be improved by encouraging those with more desirable characteristics to reproduce while discouraging or even preventing those deemed “unfit” from having children. As eugenics wanes in influence, prima donna characters—respectable married white women—are no longer so clearly exhorted to reproduce for America. Another reason the prima donna role fades is that childbearing is no longer seen as the primary purpose of marriage, so a married woman who does not want to have children is no longer such a morally problematic character. If the prima donna role almost vanishes, however, the victim stereotype does not. The idea that women, and sometimes men, are the victims of abortion persists in post–2000 films, both when a woman obtains an abortion and—often even more powerfully—when that supposed crisis is averted. A few representative films in a variety of genres—Christian, thriller, horror, and historical—will highlight continuities in this victim archetype.

Only in the last few years have a few abortion films begun to break out of the near-universal tendency to depict abortion as tragic. These films (all two of them) are groundbreaking in many ways. They show young women making a clear decision to have an abortion, not agonizing about it for the entire plot. They depict some of the barriers to obtaining abortion that many American women face, even if they do make these barriers seem more easily surmountable than they actually are. After decades of censorship and then reluctance to show abortion procedures onscreen, these films accompany their protagonists into the doctor’s office. Most radically, perhaps, whereas past abortion films have made the experience out to be a stigmatized secret that a woman cannot discuss with either her parents or closest friends, these films use the abortion plot as a way of creating, not destroying, female community. When the protagonists of these movies discuss their abortions, they learn that their mothers, grandmothers, and friends have also had them—some back when abortion was a crime—and that their family and friends, and sometimes even their boyfriends, are willing to support them. While these films do represent a major advance in the history of reproductive rights onscreen, they also belabor the immaturity of their protagonists to demonstrate why these 20-something women need abortions and to preserve sympathy for these women.

Victims in Christian, Thriller, Horror, and Historical Abortion Films

The New Abortion Film

Two more recent films, Obvious Child (2014) and Grandma (2015), establish that women can have abortions and remain sympathetic. Obvious Child has been dubbed the first “abortion rom-com”; its heroine, Donna, is a 20-something Brooklyn comedian pregnant after a post-breakup one-night stand. She even cracks jokes about the situation: when a friend encourages her before a show, saying “you’re going to kill it,” she replies “no, that happens tomorrow.” In the films just discussed—and in films in general—women are often depicted as humorless rule-followers compared to fun-loving men, as in Knocked Up and Juno (in which the adoptive mother is a control freak who also has to learn to loosen up). Obvious Child and Grandma are radical departures: they show women making jokes, not just being the butt of them—and they make jokes about abortion instead of pregnancy.

Donna doesn’t ignore the existence of abortion, nor does she recoil when a friend or her mother tentatively, euphemistically, brings it up. She doesn’t agonize about whether to have one. Instead, the film highlights other issues involved in abortion, like the cost—about $500: Donna laments, “That’s, like, my whole rent almost.” (We never learn, however, how Donna pays for it.) The film follows Donna into the procedure room, showing a close-up of her relaxed, sedated face at the beginning of the abortion. There is a cut to the recovery room, and then there is a similarly framed shot of her relaxed face, stressing that the experience was not traumatic. Another woman smiles at her, and she smiles back.

This mutual smile epitomizes another radical element. Instead of showing abortion as an issue that divides people, Obvious Child shows abortion as an experience that brings people together. Donna learns that her friend has had an abortion, too. Her friend expresses a fully rounded relationship to her own experience, which acknowledges difficulty without turning that difficulty into trauma: she says: “I think about it sometimes. Once in a while. And then I get really sad for my little teenage self. But I never regret it.”

Donna is clearly closer to her dad, who, ironically, has much more of a sense of humor than her mother: he’s a puppeteer, while her mother teaches business. Donna is intimidated by her mother, who wants her daughter to do more than part-time bookselling and stand-up comedy. The abortion is a bonding experience for them. When Donna tells her mother that she was afraid she would be angry and disappointed, her mother says that she is neither, continuing: “I can't believe I never told you this, but when I was in college, I had an abortion.” Her mother then describes her illegal abortion: her own mother (continuing the women-bonding theme) drove her to a stranger’s apartment, were there were other women “in some kind of stupor.” This somewhat didactically contrasts the bad old days of illegal abortion with the freedom some women enjoy today—if they can afford abortions and/or live in an area where they are accessible—but it also reverses the trope of abortion as isolating by allowing women to tell each other their stories. Abortion does not bring Donna closer just to her mother, but also to Max, who supports her throughout: in the final scene, they are cuddling. This is also a reversal of the idea that pregnancy brings a couple together, as in Knocked Up and Juno.

Grandma also shows women being funny—the title character is played by comedian Lily Tomlin—and focuses even more explicitly on intergenerational bonding. Tomlin’s granddaughter Sage, a college student with no interest in feminism, asks her grandmother for help getting an abortion because—again—she is afraid of her hard-as-nails mother. Tomlin plays Elle, an aging lesbian hippie who doesn’t even have a valid credit card, so the two set off on a road trip to try to collect the $600 cost of the abortion. Elle does not minimize the experience of abortion; in fact, the filmmakers probably have her overstress the potential fallout when she says Sage will probably think about it every day, which may or may not be true for all women. After all, in Obvious Child, Donna’s friend thinks about it “sometimes,” not daily. Perhaps Elle is speaking from her own experience. Sage learns that Elle once had an abortion too—like Donna’s mother, illegally. Elle said it was done by a man who “claimed to have gone to medical school. I don’t believe he ever did.” In this film, again, a woman’s contemporary abortion narrative uncovers the illegal abortion story of a mother or grandmother, showing that the need for abortion remains constant across generations even as the laws change. These plots may overemphasize the trauma of illegal abortion: after all, many were done safely and through feminist organizations like Jane, an underground service that operated in Chicago from 1969 to 1973 and provided women not just with abortions, but also with counseling and follow-up care. Narratives that stress the horrors of illegal abortion, however, serve as a reminder to younger viewers that they should never take their right to abortion for granted. Women like their mother and grandmother had to risk their lives to end unwanted pregnancies.

Elle and Sage ultimately give up trying to raise the money themselves and are forced to visit Sage’s mom, Judy. If Elle personifies second-wave feminism and Sage the threat of postfeminism (although the abortion is clearly awakening a feminist consciousness), Judy is the incarnation of 1980s corporate feminism in her pink power suit. The way the three women verge on caricature suggests their differences. Yet because both mother and grandmother care deeply about Sage, her situation brings her somewhat estranged mother and grandmother together. In Grandma, an abortion narrative is powerful enough to bridge three generations of women and, by extension, three feminist eras. Abortion, here, unites women around a common need and a feminist sense of outrage at the difficulty accessing abortion and the stigma it still carries.

Limitations and Liberation in the New Abortion Film

In its rejection of anti-abortion ideology, Grandma offers an explicit rejoinder to Juno: when a protestor at the clinic yells “Your baby has fingernails!” Elle retorts, “Not until 22 weeks, genius!” This rewriting of earlier films on abortion happens on a broader level; both Obvious Child and Grandma rewrite their predecessors by showing abortion not as a tragedy but as an experience that, while not without its difficulties, can prove liberating. The women getting abortions in these films are not prima donnas, victims, or martyrs. However, the films do take pains to establish, and even exaggerate, how unprepared both Donna and Sage are for motherhood, both financially and psychologically. Sage is portrayed as somewhat unrealistically childlike and dependent; her grandmother has to teach her how to be tougher and more mature and educate her in the ways of feminism. Donna drinks a lot, does stand-up, works at an independent bookstore, and is generally goofy. Although the film seems to view them as such, these are not disqualifications for parenthood. It would be even more positive if these films could have shown confident, even successful, women who say they are not ready to have children without dramatizing and exaggerating that unreadiness in the interest of preserving audience sympathy and reinforcing restrictive and harmful norms of what maternal “readiness” might mean. After all, the idea that teen mothers cannot possibly be “ready” contributes to the stigmatization of adolescent pregnancy, which a film like Juno is designed to combat. Overall, however, these are powerful, groundbreaking films that challenge a century of tired tropes by showing that abortion, instead of being a tragic, fatal, regrettable, isolating, traumatic experience, can liberate women and even bring women together.

Review of the Literature and Primary Sources

Heather MacGibbon’s Screening Choice: The Abortion Issue in American Film, 1900–2000 (2009), the most comprehensive book available on the subject, argues that representations in American cinema of women seeking abortion fall into two main archetypes: prima donnas and martyrs/victims. MacGibbon traces these archetypes across the 20th century, along with patterns in the depiction of abortion providers, who are sometimes shown as criminal and incompetent, even monstrous, and other times as heroic. She also demonstrates that the male partners of women seeking abortions are subject to similar binaries: some are portrayed as controlling and others supportive. Her book draws on work by communication studies scholars such as Celeste Michelle Condit, whose Decoding Abortion Rhetoric: Communicating Social Change (1990), shows how this rhetoric shaped the development of public policy and private practice, and Andrea Press and Elizabeth Cole, whose Speaking of Abortion: Television and Authority in the Lives of Women (1999) tracks how American female spectators see the role of class in media depictions of the abortion debate. MacGibbon’s book also includes a helpful list of American films that deal with abortion; many such lists exist online, and using imdb.com can also be a useful way of locating such movies.

Karen Weingarten’s Abortion in the American Imagination: Before Life and Choice, 1880–1940 (2014) focuses primarily on novels and short fiction but also discusses the censorship of interwar films such as Kitty Foyle (1940), adapted from a bestselling 1939 novel by Christopher Morley in which the title character has an abortion; in the film, the character does not have an abortion but instead gives birth to a stillborn boy. This avoidance of abortion was necessitated by censorship, but the pattern of resolving an abortion plot without recourse to abortion continued long after this censorship ceased to operate. For example, the 1999 film Citizen Ruth, which satirizes both sides of the debate, ends when the title character has a miscarriage and flees the abortion clinic to which she has been taken by pro-choice supporters.

The sociologists Gretchen Sisson and Katrina Kimport have published multiple articles in the last few years identifying persistent tropes in the depiction of abortion in American film and television. For example, in “Telling Stories about Abortion: Abortion-Related Plots in American Film and Television, 1916–2013,” they show that a disproportionate percentage of women who even consider abortion end up dead—many not by the procedure itself, but rather by murder or suicide. In their work on television, including “Facts and Fictions: Characters Seeking Abortion on American Television, 2005–2014” (2015), they point out that most such characters are white, young, affluent nonparents, which fails to reflect the range of women seeking abortions in real life. Their 2016 article, “Doctors and Witches, Conscience and Violence: Abortion Provision on American Television,” shows that characters who provide care legally using established medical methods are depicted as effective and compassionate, while—as in the case of Obvious Child and Grandma—anyone providing an abortion illegally is shown as potentially unsafe. The patterns they identify in recent television narratives likely apply to films as well, but more research is necessary to demonstrate this.

Abortion narratives are, of course, also pregnancy narratives. Recognizing them as such challenges the teleological view of pregnancy as constructed by dominant medical, legal, and social discourses, which assume that pregnancy always ends in a baby. Academic texts that focus on pregnancy in film, such as Kelly Oliver’s Knock Me Up, Knock Me Down: Images of Pregnancy in Hollywood Films (2012) and Parley Ann Boswell’s Pregnancy in Literature and Film (2014) discuss how abortion is rejected and seen as a stigmatized option. Little work has been done on the depiction of pregnancy in women who are considering abortion or who obtain abortion in films or on new abortion films that challenge the tropes described in these books.