You probably don’t know this, but Nick Hornby is my favorite fiction writer. If you haven’t read him before, you should. If you’ve seen the movie High Fidelity, he wrote the book it was adapted from.
Anyway, his most recent novel, Slam, is about a teenaged boy (who is obsessed with Tony Hawk and skateboarding) who gets his girlfriend pregnant — that’s a short way of explaining the story. Anyway, Nick Hornby has a blog, and a while back he wrote a blog entry that I thought may be of interest to you.
[Another] article in the Guardian [link] about how movies depicting pregnancy are somehow anti-abortion: after ‘Knocked Up’, it’s the new (and very charming) ‘Juno’ that is in trouble […] “Hollywood heroines who don’t consider abortion are of a generation taking its rights for granted,” is the misleading subtitle of Hadley Freeman’s piece. Actually, sixteen-year-old Juno does consider abortion. She goes to an abortion clinic and then changes her mind. I suspect that considering abortion isn’t enough, though – Juno needs to go through with an abortion, if she’s going to keep columnists off her case.
My book ‘Slam’, which is about a sixteen-year-old father, also got attacked on these grounds in at least one American review, so I have a special interest in this debate. Alicia, the boy’s ex-girlfriend, is determined not to have an abortion because she read pro-life propaganda on the internet, and can’t be persuaded to rethink her decision. I would like Hadley Freeman, my critic and all the others to explain, patiently and carefully, to Judd Apatow (the writer of ‘Knocked Up’, Diablo Cody (‘Juno’) and myself how we can write about pregnancy and unplanned parenthood without causing offence.
Nick Hornby is liberal, and obviously supports abortion, so I couldn’t help being amused by his blog entry. I remember thinking when I read Slam, or saw Knocked Up or Juno that some pro-abortion groups or individuals would take issue with the fact that in each of these stories which involved unintended pregnancies the mother-to-be made the conscious decision to keep the baby. Hadley Freeman, who wrote the Guardian article says, “It is surely no coincidence that these films are emerging from a country that has had eight years of ultra-conservative Republican rule.” Ahh, yes, how Republicans have such an impact on Hollywood!
Continuing in his blog entry, Hornby further refutes Freeman:
Should ‘Slam’, ‘Knocked Up’ and ‘Juno’ all end a third of the way through, with a visit to a clinic? Are these people really saying that you mustn’t write about pregnancy because you’re somehow letting the side down
Now, I’ve recently been reading a lot of fiction, and seeing movies more often than I have in the past. I expect that sometimes books that don’t even have an agenda will have things in them I don’t agree with. I’ve never gotten hot and bothered over a book or a movie because a character had an abortion. Neither of the two movies or the book had an agenda against abortion. Their stories were still entertaining and I don’t see why anyone who is pro-abortion can’t enjoy them just because abortion was not chosen by the characters involved.
If abortion is really about “choice” (as the left says it is) then the choice of life shouldn’t be seen as a setback to the movement be it in life or in entertainment. Though I guess some people think it is. Can the pro-abortion movement not find happiness in the “choice” of life? Apparently not, if they get so worked up over the choice of life in fiction.
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