Popcorn & Pregnancy (again)
By Maybe we’re tired of the picking apart of Knocked Up, 4 Months, and Juno, and the search for messages about abortion in the films.
But, just in case, Howard Wasserman at Prawfsblog has an interesting post up about the change in the portrayal of abortion in popular films, and how this change echoes the anti-abortion/forced pregnancy movement’s expanded control over the social conversation about abortion.
To the extent that Wasserman points to the wingnuts’ winning the abortion rhetoric war, he’s right. This is something I have complained about before, and will continue to complain about. For a long time, we on the “pro-choice” side bought into the “pro-life” vs. “pro-choice” rhetoric. It was a mistake (as Lakoff has argued). We’ve started to try to undo that (reproductive justice, anti-choice, etc.). But we still haven’t figured out the appropriate moniker for the hyperventilating hypocrites on the other side, and we still haven’t been able to move any but the most mindful toward this new way of speaking. Juno and Knocked Up are just one symptom of this.