Why can't America say the "a" word?

Why does America have such as problem with abortion? In the film, What To Expect When You’re Expecting, five women become mothers at roughly the same time. One of the women, who works on a food truck, gets pregnant after a drunken one-night stand with a man she hasn’t seen since high school. And not once does she consider having an abortion. Really. But, not to worry, the woman miscarries, an experience which leaves her devastated. Of course.

Like the film Knocked Up in which a beautiful successful woman finds herself impregnated by a fat schleb with poor social skills, the word abortion is never even mentioned. The closest it gets is when one of the characters suggests the heroine should have a procedure that rhymes with “shmashmortion.”

Why is it that in Hollywood movies women confronted with an unplanned pregnancy almost always choose to keep the baby? One theory is that film producers, anxious to maximise box office receipts, don’t want to alienate the vocal and socially conservative Christian right. I find this odd as the big studios are happy to churn out films that depict harrowing scenes of violence for mainstream audiences. So it’s okay to show, for example, a guy getting shot in the eye in gruesome detail, but it’s not okay to show a scene where a woman chooses to have an abortion - even if the procedure itself isn‘t shown.

Earlier this year Rush Limbaugh caused a media storm when he called a Georgetown University law school student a “slut” and a “prostitute” for daring to speak in favour of the new rule requiring employers to offer health insurance plans that cover birth control. Thereafter we had a number of men weighing in on a subject that doesn’t affect them and they could not possible have any experience of. And Limbaugh only apologised to the student after his sponsors started deserting him. More recently we have seen several US states amending their abortion laws, making it that much more difficult for women to seek terminations. 

Given that American women have made so many strides in so many areas, just why is a woman’s right to choose such a hot button topic in the US? Nowhere else in the developed world is the subject of free birth control for women an issue. In any civilised society, it is taken as a given. Perhaps it is precisely because American women lead the way that the establishment is seeking to claw back some of its position. It’s difficult not to see the furore surrounding the debate as a backlash against women in general.

And until we see more women in positions of power in Hollywood, a woman’s right to choose will never be intelligently featured on the big screen.