Legal Commentary

Sherry Colb has a FindLaw essay and blog post on the movie 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, which depicts the efforts of a student to obtain an illegal abortion in Ceausescu's Romania in the late 1980s. In the post, Colb wonders why abortion is not depicted as a serious option in recent American movies such as Waitress, Knocked Up, and Best-Picture nominee Juno (and I confess to not having seen any of these). Colb suggests these films "demonstrate the success of a pro-life movement operating within a pro-choice regime."

I want to agree with Sherry and expand on something I wrote in the comments. The success of the pro-life movement has been in controlling the rhetoric of popular culture on the subject of abortion. It now is inconceivable that a mainstream movie or television show (especially a comedy or "dramedy") would depict a character choosing to have an abortion. The anticipated and expected enraged backlash from the pro-life movement, Republicans, and the right-wing media (mainstream and alternative) would scare any major (and most minor) studio or network away from the subject and the overall project.

Compare this with two examples from the not-so-distant (which is to say, within my lifetime) pop-culture past in which very different characters are shown choosing to terminate a pregnancy in very different circumstances: Fast Times at Ridgemont High, where a high school sophomore becomes pregnant after a one-time mistake with a jerk, and the television show Maude, where a middle-aged woman with grown children decides she cannot go back to that earlier stage of her life. I cannot imagine either situation being shown today.

Even if the pro-life movement has not succeeded (yet) in overturning Roe (something Jack Balkin has argued the Republican powers-that-be do not really want anyway), it has succeeded in taking abortion out of the popular culture. This is not to suggest that real women are making real-world choices based on what they see in either a movie with Judge Reinhold or one with Seth Rogen. But a society's popular culture reflects the societal narrative, which in turn affects the conversations, if not the actual actions, occurring in that society. To the extent abortion is less a part of the societal conversation, even though it remains a legal option, that is a victory for the pro-life movement--although perhaps not yet a tangible one or the one they really wanted.