Read Life Moves Pretty Fast: The lessons we learned from eighties movies (and why we don't learn them from movies any more) for Free Online

Whereas Fame ’s Hilary has an abortion to pursue her dreams as a ballet dancer, twenty-two-year-old Alison in Knocked Up recoils in disgust at the thought of putting her burgeoning career ahead of an unexpected, unwanted pregnancy. In the 2007 film Juno , the eponymous teenager is dissuaded from having an abortion after an anti-choice protester tells her that her baby will have fingernails, and she then goes into a clinic that appears to have been dreamed up by the Westboro Baptist Church’s press office. In 2012’s Bachelorette , a character reveals that she had an abortion as a teenager and this, the film intimates, is why she’s such a promiscuous druggy mess as an adult.
    What makes the movie industry’s increasing conservatism especially bizarre is that roughly the same percentage of Americans support the legalisation of abortion as they did in the 1980s. In fact, today’s audiences actively like seeing honest depictions of abortion onscreen, in the very few movies that show them. The indie film Obvious Child , about a woman who decides to get an abortion, was released only in 202 theatres in the States, and yet it made a very impressive $25,772 per theatre in its opening weekend. By contrast, the unpleasantly misogynistic 2014 comedy The Other Woman , in which the female characters are two-dimensional jealous, sexualised harpies, was released in over 3,000 theatres and made only $7,727 per theatre in its opening weekend. So much for audiences not liking complex female themes.
    Teen abortion rates in the US are at a historic low, having declined by 64 per cent between 1990 and 2010 thanks to the commendable work by sex education workers who have so effectively taught young people about the importance of contraception. Therefore why movies should be so fearful of discussing them seems bizarre. Whereas in the eighties there were movies that were both pro- and anti-choice, Hollywood speaks with one voice on the issue today.
    ‘The entertainment industry has elected to silence the discussion on abortion,’ said Robert Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University in New York. ‘It’s an issue fraught with moral and ethical challenges and Hollywood has been almost silent on it for the past 20 years. It has been the one controversial subject matter that has not only not progressed, but has totally retreated from popular culture. If you’d watch TV or films in this country, you’d never guess that abortion is such a big issue.’
    Bergstein says:
I used to say, oh maybe Dirty Dancing was ahead of its time and that’s why I had to do talk about abortion in this covert way. But if you look what’s happened since, that’s not really true. I would have thought all these movies like Juno and Knocked Up and Waitress would take its place, but in those movies the girls don’t have the abortion: at the last minute they take what looks to be the moral choice and they don’t do it, and they end up with the guy all happy. So it’s presented now as a moral decision not to have the abortion and you have a cute little baby and it’s fine. I don’t know, maybe that’s what you can get financed from studios these days.
    When I ask Judd Apatow why there was no discussion of abortion in Knocked Up , he replies that there was, originally, but it ended up on the cutting floor. ‘Anyway, I’m as pro-choice as you can get, but the movie would have been ten minutes long if she’d had an abortion.’
    Diablo Cody, the writer of Juno , is even more dismissive of objections to the depiction of abortion in her movie: ‘Any feminist out there who doesn’t support me gets a big boo because you’ve got one person out there who is advocating for women in Hollywood and you’re going to slag that person? If you’re a feminist, you should be up my butt.’
    But Juno ’s star, the very thoughtful and engaged Ellen Page, is a little more open to the issue, and less concerned with