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Accidentally on Purpose – Why couldn’t she consider abortion?

posted by Women & Hollywood
Monday, October 12, 2009 at 2:29pm CDT

Accidentally on Purpose, the new sitcom on CBS starring Jenna Elfman is based on the real life story and memoir of Mary Pols a film critic who is writing now for Time.

The show is about a woman played by Jenna Elfman who after a one night stand with a younger man discovers she is pregnant and decides to keep the baby and raise it in an unconventional relationship with the baby daddy. I saw the pilot and thought it was too over the top and it annoyed me. I haven’t watched it since.

Pols wrote an interesting piece in XX about how the show left out her real life considerations of whether to have an abortion or not before deciding to keep the baby.

Billie is a movie critic, so she should, in theory, do some critical thinking in regard to her own life. It also seems reasonable to expect that a journalist would be able to use the word “abortion” in relation to her own situation. As in, “Should I have an abortion?” She does not ask that question, at least in this first episode. I, however, most certainly did.

TV and especially movies have gotten extremely skittish about abortion. They’re just too afraid to use the word. They are afraid how people will react if a character even considers it as an option. This continues to blow my mind. TV and movies are so out of touch with the realities of people’s lives. We have come so far on issues like gay rights on TV, yet abortion has become more and more of a taboo.

Do I wish the sitcom version of my life included some scenes like that? I do. Roseanne could have squeezed them in. Chances are there were concerns that a discussion of body politics was too much to try to cram into an already packed 22 minutes of jokes, character introduction, and situational set-up. And that it would scare off some viewers.

Scare off some viewers? Are those the same viewers who love the fact that a single, working woman is having a baby on her own? Are we really to believe that a sitcom would get canceled because the lead character considers whether or not to have an abortion? That’s just bullshit scare tactics. People in entertainment are just so scared. They are scared that they will get letters and protests. I am so tired of this stuff. I really feel the show did miss an opportunity to treat a woman with respect and dignity and to reflect the realities of a 39 year old person in that position (of course, they made her 37). Many things from Mary’s book made it into the sitcom, just not this one important piece of her life. I’m not surprised, but I am disappointed.

The Smashmortion Debate