“I’m pregnant! Having a scan soon to find out if it’s a girl or an abortion.” You might have seen this post before; it’s been doing the rounds on X since at least 2020. If not, you might well see it again, among the exhibits which in a few years’ time could be used to justify scrapping a woman’s right to terminate at all. This would be not only a victory for evangelical and populist pressure, but a punishment for the crime of feminist flippancy.
For American Gen Zers, edgy abortion jokes are an attempt at defiance in the face of ever-eroding rights: Roe v. Wade was repealed in the US in 2022. Britain, on the other hand, seems to be at a high point of reproductive laissez-faire. Last month, Parliament banned the investigation or prosecution of those who terminate their own pregnancies, regardless of how far along they are. But opening up the abortion debate in Britain risks providing ammunition for an insurgent Right, given that Nigel Farage had already pledged to restrict terminations to under the present 24-week limit. The Conservative father-of-the-House, Sir Edward Leigh, told the debate that “sex-selective abortion” could be an unintended consequence of the amendment, while another MP, Rebecca Smith, warned that the legislation would be used to “further… expand abortion time limits”. The arguments that toppled Roe in America are closing in here.
Edginess and complacency are a gift to anti-abortion campaigners, flattering the delusion that women want the right to choose because of pure selfishness. This month, the singer Lily Allen recalled on her podcast, Miss Me, that she used to “get pregnant all the time”, adding a line that Frank Sinatra did not sing: “Abortions, I’ve had a few. But then again, I can’t remember exactly how many.” Her braggadocio assumes that her audience is on board with bodily autonomy at all costs — unfortunately for Allen, a self-styled Mockney everywoman, she has for once rather misjudged things. Writing in The Spectator, Melanie McDonagh said we should be “outraged” by Allen’s comments. The right to choose is no longer untouchable, so Allen’s flippancy seems, at the very least, in poor taste. And carelessness about getting pregnant at all — needless to say repeatedly — may, in years to come, have very different consequences.
Abortion is one of those issues in which both sides feel that they are forever losing. For many conservatives, unable to discriminate between a clump of white cells and a kicking, screaming baby, the situation is one of mass, government-sanctioned genocide. For observant feminists, the gains of the Sixties and Seventies are forever teetering on the edge of extinction in the face of successive populist potentates desperate for an electoral wildcard. The archetypal patient in each scenario is by now fixed: for many conservatives, she is a selfish and promiscuous party girl who uses abortion as a form of contraception; for defenders of the right to choose, the model example cowers at the other extreme, a victim of rape or domestic abuse, or of a medical condition which will kill her or her baby. The attendant arguments on both sides are by now so well rehearsed, not only by politicians but all children who take religious studies or do school debating clubs, that the in-betweens — those pregnancies determined by pure desire or the frailty of relationships — fall through the cracks. These everyday scenarios are important because they are the ones where choice is the most at risk.
“The in-betweens — those pregnancies determined by pure desire or the frailty of relationships — fall through the cracks.”
For the television writer Lena Dunham at least, who made the move from New York to London and wrote a show about it — Too Much — those precise scenarios still deserve scrutiny. “It’s like her Rosebud,” she says of the moment the protagonist relives the circumstances of her own termination. For Jessica the memory is the equivalent of Citizen Kane’s watchword and the foundation of every subsequent dysfunction in her life. The scene plays out with excruciating, deadpan horror: “OK, well, I’m pregnant, so I guess I’ll go get an abortion or something,” she floats. The blithe response? “Yeah, that’s probably the right idea.” Jessica cries through her abortion, then adopts a rescue dog and a suspicion of men.
Casually devastating moments like these are Dunham’s bread and butter. The most provocative questions of young womanhood — fatness, nakedness, promiscuity and maternity — arrive in deceptively naive dialogue (like this, whatever that). The writing of these issues may be superficially straightforward, but their message is not: fans of Girls, Dunham’s HBO masterpiece, will remember similarly flippant dialogue from an antagonist, Mimi Rose, who mentions it in conversation with her boyfriend Adam. “Nah… I can’t go for a run today because I had an abortion yesterday,” she rattles off. Later, she rolls her eyes at his shocked response: “It was a ball of cells. It was smaller than a seed pearl.” In this moment, Mimi Rose is the villain: Girls may be a monument to Millennial feminism, but it is fully alive to the fact that when women have every choice available to them, these choices retain their emotional consequences.
Writers — particularly female ones — cannot dramatise abortion without these scenes becoming mission statements. Eleanor Bergstein’s 1987 romcom Dirty Dancing may be best remembered for a dance move, but it contains a secondary plot point about an accidental pregnancy. Even in the sleepy Catskills resort of the film’s 1963 setting, pre-Roe politics invades, and the character Penny goes through an illegal and dangerous backstreet termination. Years later, Bergstein said: “The studio came to me and said, ‘OK, Eleanor, we’ll pay for you to go back into the editing room and take the abortion out.’” She did not.
Battle though she did to keep the scene in, one reason why she succeeded may be that the abortion was shown as traumatic and dangerous. Researchers for Abortion Onscreen found that on American television from 2005 to 2016, a character having an abortion had a 5% chance of dying — more than 10,000 times the documented rate for legal abortions. The taboo around depicting the procedure makes this conspicuous suffering necessary: dealt with too casually or easily, and suddenly all terminations are the products of a mutant feminism which has destroyed maternal empathy. But too weepy or traumatic, and you undermine the character’s right to choose at all.
The first time I saw abortion on screen was watching Alfie (1966) as a young teenager; in it, Alfie’s many dalliances result in an unplanned pregnancy with a married woman, and then a backstreet abortion. When he returns to his lover’s flat after the abortionist has left, he sees the foetus in the kitchen and weeps. The film was banned for violating the Hays Code over the depiction — “explicitly or by inference” — of the procedure; the production company then won an appeal against the board. A story on that appeal in The New York Times that year explained the exemption as an acknowledgement that “what the film trade calls ‘sincere, adult films’” kept winning such battles, and so undermined the code as a whole. “It must never be treated lightly, or made the subject of comedy,” the rule said. It is easy to see why the film won the appeal on these grounds: like Jessica’s “Rosebud” moment in Dunham’s Too Much, the abortion is the sharp point on which the narrative of Alfie turns. “I murdered him!” Alfie later tells a friend. The foetus was a “helpless little thing”, he says; years later the star Michael Caine himself described the “anti-abortion theme” as “one of the main reasons I wanted to do the movie”, adding: “I thought it was about time that the horror of these backstreet abortions was exposed.”
But what I like about this scene, in a film about the carelessness of a likeable young man, is that it shows something Caine might not have realised — that male empathy in questions of abortion so often comes only from identification with the foetus, in this case another male, which wakes him up to his otherwise entirely unremarkable cruelty towards the woman he has got pregnant. For some audiences, it might also show the inherent cruelty of abortions in general; for others still, it shows the even greater cruelty of a system which forces women to undergo illegal and unsafe procedures when humane and safe ones, with consensus-based, rational limitations, should be available instead. This latter message is, by the way, borne out by the real-world consequences of banning abortion in several states in the US, where a study last month showed that women there were more than twice as likely to have abortions later in pregnancy.
The multivalence of Alfie’s moral message is not only why the film was able to navigate censors, but why it is good art: like in Dunham’s writing, shades of victimhood and villainy play Alfie’s face, his every decision. Filmmakers are no longer bound by the Hays Code; power struggles within the Motion Picture Association of America and rule-flouting by various films in the late Sixties put paid to it in 1968, two years after Alfie was released. But in the question of abortion, at least, something vestigial of the code remains: it is still shocking to see it used as a plot point on television, and the sense of moral gravity in its depiction is perhaps greater than any other progressive cause of the Sixties and Seventies. In the 2004 remake of Alfie starring Jude Law, the abortion was taken out.
There is wisdom in avoiding being flippant about abortion. If Farage hopes to scale back abortion rights in the UK, then it will once again become the responsibility of feminists to make our case; those staid arguments of school debating competitions will be replaced, once more, by real women and their unfree bodies. A self-aware, credible feminism is one which handles this question with moral curiosity and empathy, rather than dangling our rights as rage bait, ready to be snatched away, or bragging about countless procedures as though they were pedicures. Evangelists and populists salivate over this complacency, understanding better than most how poorly it can go down with the public. Very soon, British women may be asked again to defend our right to choose; when we do, we’ll only succeed if we approach abortion not as a joke, or as a provocation, but as a serious and essential pillar of liberty.
