Juno, Fast Times, and all that stuff.

Judith Timson of the Globe and Mail is bothered by the latent pro-life elements in recent films like Knocked Up and Juno:

But could [these movie plots] also be part of a subtle attitudinal shift against abortion that conservative thinkers like David Frum are calling for? Mr. Frum, in his new book Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again, prescribes “education and persuasion … rather than changes in law” in the continuing fight against abortion.

Sounds creepy. But do these films represent an “attitudinal shift”, “subtle” or otherwise? At least two writers think not. Last week, Michael Currie Schaffer of the New Republic wrote:

Juno’s choices, or non-choices, are nothing new on either the big screen or the little one. Just as Hollywood tends to give its characters unusually large New York apartments or unusually clean suburban kitchens, it manages to give them unusually fertile wombs. Whatever the case may be in the culture at large, abortion has long been a rarity in celluloid life, where all kinds of improbable moms bear all kinds of inconvenient children in order to produce all kinds of plot lines. . . .

In fact, the improbable and inconvenient pregnancy is a staple of popular culture in the post-Roe v. Wade era. Kerns, who as Katherine Heigl’s mother in Knocked Up played a cheerleader for appropriately-timed childbearing, oughta know: She first became famous playing family matriarch Maggie Seaver in Growing Pains. Her character, who had gone back to work as a reporter once her kids were adolescents, suddenly got pregnant late in the series. Ditto Family Ties‘ Elyse Keaton, Roseanne‘s Roseanne, and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air‘s Vivian Banks. In fact, film and TV feature a lot more unlikely pregnancies-would a typical mainstream single Manhattan career gal like Friends‘ Rachel Green really have carried that baby to term?-than terminated ones. There’s a reason that the abortions in Maude or Fast Times at Ridgemont High stand out: They were so unusual.

And two days before that, Joshua Glenn of the Boston Globe charted the rise and fall of pregnancies and miscarriages, spontaneous and otherwise, in pop culture over the past few decades:

Before Roe v. Wade, fictional women who got abortions suffered dire physical, mental, and social consequences; in the following decade, this was no longer the case. However, as single motherhood lost its stigma, women were no longer forced to choose between abortion and adoption. That’s when TV networks and movie studios, perhaps intimidated by the “right-to-life” movement, which was then hitting its stride, developed a meme. . . .

At the height of the Reagan and Bush era, however, the keeping-my-baby meme triumphed. In 1986, Madonna’s “Papa Don’t Preach,” written from the point of view of a teenage girl who’s “keeping my baby,” topped the charts. Then, in the 1988 movie “For Keeps,” Molly Ringwald plays a pregnant high school senior who — well, you figure it out. By 1991, when Candice Bergen decided to raise a child without a father on “Murphy Brown,” the keeping-my-baby meme was already well established. In fact, another fictional middle-aged liberal, the titular protagonist of the NBC dramedy “The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd,” beat Brown to the punch by an entire TV season.

Shortly after the birth of Murphy Brown’s baby, America elected a president who was both pro-choice and a devout Christian. For nearly a decade, TV screenwriters waffled along with Clinton, penning one scenario after another in which a knocked-up character agonizes over whether to have an abortion, then suffers a miscarriage before going through with it. Victims, in chronological order, of this conflicted meme include: Heather Locklear’s Amanda, on “Melrose Place”; Neve Campbell’s Julia, on “Party of Five”; Jennie Garth’s Kelly, on “Beverly Hills 90210”; and Courtney Thorne-Smith’s Alison, on “Melrose Place” again. Even the 1996 film “Citizen Ruth,” which lampoons both sides of the abortion debate, would end with Laura Dern’s miscarriage.

Since the election of the current President Bush, however, the times, they are a-slowin’ down again. On the DVD of “Fast Times,” director Amy Heckerling says that she “could never make that movie now,” because its depiction of guilt-free sex (and, presumably, consequence-free abortion) is “unacceptable in the current political climate.” In recent years, we’ve seen unmarried and unprepared women on shows like “ER,” “Grey’s Anatomy,” and “The O.C.,” choose to keep their babies, no matter what the consequences. It’s enough to make the convenient miscarriage plot seem downright progressive.

Alas, I watch virtually no TV, so I can’t really comment on analyses like these. But I’d be curious to hear what others think.