Good Girls Avoid Abortion

""Abortion exists only as a faux option -- something to choose against.""

- Bright Lights Film Journal

When a female character has an unexpected and/or unwanted pregnancy, someone may allude to the possibility of abortion (usually without saying the 'A' word). However, she will likely not have an abortion for one of three reasons:
 * 1) She dismisses it immediately because of her religious/spiritual beliefs or upbringing, or because she distrusts the procedure (especially if it would involve a Back-Alley Doctor).
 * 2) She thinks it over for a while, then decides that, no, she's going to keep the baby. This may be followed by a Convenient Miscarriage.
 * 3) She actually decides to have it done, but somehow things don't turn out as she expects, and her attempted abortion is aborted.

If she actually goes through with the abortion, and doesn't suffer gruesome complications from the procedure, it's usually to show that she's a deeply damaged, screwed-up individual. If this happens, but it is played for laughs, it's a Black Comedy.

Part of the reason for this is to both avoid the wrath of the Moral Guardians, and as well as avoid polarizing the audience (though this can happen anyway if her decision not to abort is made in a hamfisted manner), but it's mostly because if the character had an abortion and everyone went home happy, it would make for an uninteresting and/or short story. However, if the character decides to keep the child, a large avenue of potential plot lines opens up for the writer to exploit. For example, new Characters, all manner of Character Development and Wedding and Engagement Tropes, etc.

The other 'a' word (adoption) hardly ever enters into consideration even if abortion itself is ruled out. There are several reasons for this. In serial media such as television and comic books, a baby given up for adoption can be seen as a dangling plot thread that the audience will expect to be picked up some day. Also, adoption requires carrying the baby to term. If the woman merely needs to figure out what to do with the baby, this is irrelevant, but if she wants to conceal the fact that she was ever pregnant to begin with, it may not suffice. And abortion can be counted on to get a stronger reaction from the audience than adoption. Similar story logic applies to why we rarely see women taking advantage of the safe-haven laws that exist in all 50 states and simply allow them to "surrender" a child to the state without even contacting an adoption agency.

Most importantly, however, is that this trope turns upon the false Begging the Question choice between responsibility and personal freedom. From a narrative standpoint, adoption is a kind of a cheat since it allows the woman to have both, thus allowing the author to resolve the conflict without answering the underlying question. If adoption is mentioned, it will usually be ruled out with some justification or other.

Anime and Manga

 * A fourth reason was used to justify Hinako giving birth to her second pregnancy in Bitter Virgin (her first was miscarried before she even realized she was pregnant)- the doctor told her that if Hinako went through with an abortion, her body wouldn't be able to take it and she might never be able to bear children again in the future. As a result she was made to carry the baby to term and gave it up for adoption.
 * Fumio in Chibi Vampire went with reason 2, and carried the baby (Kenta) to term against her family's wishes.
 * Later we see Kenta's father with another woman, who is pregnant and demands him to pay for an abortion. He gets a little pissed off by that.
 * In Nana becomes pregnant with  child and thinks about getting an abortion because she and her boyfriend  aren't able to support a child. However she decided against it when . Though  had asked her to get an abortion she would have gone through with it.
 * Played straight in Now and Then Here and There..
 * Averted in manga Wild Adapter. Pregnant teenager Saori runs away from home and befriends series leads Kubota and Tokitoh. They're investigating the mysterious drug W•A; she's looking for her missing boyfriend.  In love with her boyfriend but ambivalent about her pregnancy, Saori is strongly implied to have had an abortion by the end of the story. Kubota offers sympathetic acknowledgment: "women are strong, aren't they? Look at us men, we're hopeless."
 * Late in the School Days anime, Makoto gets Sekai pregnant, and alternates between claiming the baby can't possibly be his and pressuring her to get an abortion. This is used to drive home that Makoto's a Jerkass, as his main concern is that nobody else is willing to sleep with him after how he publicly rejected Sekai. However, it's also left up in the air whether Sekai was actually pregnant or not. Being School Days, it didn't end well.
 * Averted in Eternal Sabbath - when Yuri's mother finds out she's pregnant just as she's starting to rebuild her relationship with her daughter, she opts to abort, out of equal parts a desire to concentrate on Yuri and a fear she'll love the new child to the point she can't accept the one she has. The story is entirely on her side.
 * This seems to be  opinion in Black Butler.   actually kills and mutilates   who had an abortion and don't feel remotely bad about it. This is explained by the fact.
 * In Akkan Baby, just about everybody suggests that Shigeru and Yuki may want to give up their child. "I don't want to kill the baby!" are practically Arc Words.

Comic Books
"Leslie Dean: You're not going to keep it, are you? Janet Stein: Of course I am. What do you take me for, some kind of monster?"
 * Snow White in Fables dismisses abortion because of a magical (possibly dangerous) pregnancy without even considering it. She's very old-fashioned.
 * This seems to be the case with the Fables in general. In one issue it's implied that Frau Totenkinder ('Mrs Dead Children'), who used to get her magical powers from sacrificing a newborn baby annually instead makes use of the Mundy abortions for the same effect, and it's mentioned that the entire Fable community might turn against her if they found out.
 * The Sandman averts the trope in one conversation, where a woman mentions having had an abortion in a way that makes it clear it didn't mess her up (though it's not a casual reference either).
 * One of the first storylines in Milestone Comics' Icon had the teenage sidekick, Rocket, discovering that she was pregnant. Everyone she asks for advice -- including the socially conservative Icon himself -- is sympathetic to her situation, and offer no objection to the possibility of her aborting. Rocket eventually decides that she was really fishing for a trusted authority figure to tell her to do what she wanted to do anyway -- carry the baby to term.
 * Somewhat averted in Exiles: Nocturne and Thunderbird begin a relationship while dimension-hopping and Nocturne gets pregnant, but Thunderbird is effectively rendered brain dead by a Heroic Sacrifice and is unable to jump with the rest of the team. Nocturne tells the team that she had a miscarriage at some point in their travails, but a later issue showing her reflecting on her relationship with Thunderbird implies she had an abortion (or used her powers to induce it herself) because she couldn't handle raising the baby alone.
 * Runaways takes this one step further by implying that even evil girls avoid abortion, as well as Hypocritical Humor since both are about to take part in a ritual that involves killing an innocent youth. It is part of a super villain plot to wipe out all of humanity in exchange for twenty years of unlimited wealth and power and a fifty-fifty shot at immortality.


 * Chick Tracts, obviously.
 * Stephanie Brown (The Spoiler) is against abortion from the very beginning. At first it looks like it's also going to be Good Girls Avoid Adoption, but she changes her mind after realizing her life is not a suitable place for a child.
 * Cindy of Barbara Slate's Angel Love comic book series decides to get an abortion when she gets pregnant from a night with her boyfriend, and although her friend Angel is opposed to the idea, she nonetheless accompanies Cindy to the abortion clinic where she ends up having a change of heart and mind and decides not to go through with it, but instead will marry her boyfriend so that her child will not be without a father.

Fanfiction

 * The Pokémon Black and White fanfic Darkest Night involves Hilda getting pregnant after being raped by Grimsley. She decides not to get an abortion, for reasons that are discussed but never fully explained (what makes the situation even weirder is that the author wrote another fanfic for the same exact fandom that actually featured morning-after pills).
 * There are hundred's of fics written in the iCarly community, with a Fandom Specific Plot being Sam(antha) becoming pregnant to Freddie unplanned, and usually as a result of a drunken one-night stand that isn't part of an ongoing relationship. There's probably a bare handful that even discuss abortion, let alone actually have Sam do it.
 * Abortion is referenced vaguely in this Avatar: The Last Airbender fic, in which Mai becomes unexpectedly pregnant. Mai's mother suggests that she get an abortion since at this point she and Zuko aren't married yet, making Mai's position in the royal court somewhat uncertain. Mai firmly asserts that she considered the option, but is going to keep the baby. A Justified Trope in this case, as the main plot--a conspiracy to usurp the throne--revolves around the baby's (eventually legitimate) birth.
 * Horrifyingly averted in this Dragonball Z fanfic, which Topless Robot found so disturbing that they refused to provide running commentary on it..

Film

 * In Dirty Dancing, the dancing instructor tries to have an abortion, but because it's The Sixties and they're illegal, it goes horribly wrong. Fortunately the heroine's father is a doctor, so he manages to save her, although it does make a major misunderstanding. In this case the girl is still considered "good" both by the audience and the characters, and the blame is rightly placed on the rich snob who knocked her up and dumped her.
 * The Life Before Her Eyes: she gets the abortion, but the film treats it as a very bad decision with lasting consequences.
 * In Fools Rush In, the father actually implies he would prefer an abortion (that is as long as the mother is choosing it so he doesn't have to take any moral responsibility for the decision). The mother responds that she is going to keep the baby. While not explicitly justified, the fact that the mother is a devout Catholic probably justifies the no abortion aspect of the movie.
 * In The Fly, abortion is still depicted with a negative aspect, but the heroine's decision to get an abortion is given the defense that her baby might not be human. In the sequel, she didn't, and it wasn't, but he got better.
 * Dogma has the protagonist working at an abortion clinic, but that doesn't stop her from getting "tapped" to do God's work. It's revealed in the deleted scenes that she chose that career because a botched abortion in her youth caused an infection, left her infertile, and led to her husband leaving her.
 * In Juno, the main character goes to an abortion clinic but doesn't like the place when she gets there. After a protester tells her that fetuses have fingernails (which isn't actually true at that stage in the pregnancy, in case you were wondering), she decides she'll be putting her baby up for adoption. Her exact reason for deciding against abortion isn't specified, and is pretty much left up to the imagination of the viewer. The slightly more obvious meta-reason she didn't get one is that if she got the abortion, there'd be no plot, and much of the movie can be considered a love-song to adoption and non-biological parents (particularly adoptive- and step-mothers).
 * In Breakfast On Pluto, Patrick "Kitten" Braden's childhood friend Charlie travels to London to have an abortion. Kitten accompanies Charlie to the clinic, assuring her that she's making the right decision, fearing the child might end up a "disaster" like Kitten herself. Charlie decides against it at the last second - turns out she wouldn't mind at all if the child ended up like Kitten.
 * Averted in Murdoch Mysteries: reveals that she had an abortion and suffered severe complications, which, and has no regrets.
 * In Knocked Up, the female lead's sister mentions the possibility of abortion, but she decides to bring the baby to term. This was a bone of contention for many critics of the film, who pointed out that a) the father was a schlub she had no previous history with and appeared to be a less-than-suitable father figure b) she had no apparent religious convictions or pre-stated beliefs as to why she might keep the baby, c) she was an anchor at E! who was rather devoted to climbing the corporate ladder and d) the sister who suggested it and Jonah Hill were portrayed very unsympathetically, and the avoidance of the actual word "abortion" - Hill's character refers to it as a "shmushmortion." One unstated by possible reason she decided not to get one is because of the potential fallout of the public finding out she had an abortion, though the film never goes into this.
 * Averted in The Godfather Part II. Kay supposedly aborts her second son because she knows the kid is just gonna grow up to be a mafioso like all the other men in the family. This is what leads to her and Michael's final split when he finds out that she had the abortion. It's never really made clear whether we're supposed to root for her or not, which is just as it should be. There is also a possibility Kay was lying to Michael about the abortion and really did have a miscarriage.
 * Averted in Baby Boy, when Yvette aborts what would have been her second child with Jody. She has sympathy on her side, however, since she's heartbroken over the procedure and her boyfriend Jody is an irresponsible Jerkass who has another child with another woman.
 * The Romanian film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days averts this trope, as the main focus is on a woman trying to get an abortion. And, since it's set in Ceausescu's Romania, it avoids the whole "neat abortion = no drama" bit, seeing as abortion is illegal and carries a hefty penalty.
 * Averted in the horror film Pin. Leon's sister, Ursula, discovers that she's pregnant as a result of constantly having unprotected sex. She immediately chooses to have an abortion, which is successful. Afterward, she cleans up her life and the incident is never mentioned again.
 * Averted in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Stacy Hamilton is not bad girl (though not entirely pure) and gets pregnant by Mike Damone. An abortion is quickly decided. The drama revolves not on the controversy or ill effects of the abortion, but on Damone flaking on paying his half, and failing to provide a promised ride.
 * The movie Bella is all about a (recently unemployed) single woman dealing with the knowledge that she is pregnant and making a decision of what to do about it. Abortion is certainly considered, with her saying things like 'I said I was pregnant; I didn't say I was having a baby.' In the end, Whether or not she is a 'good girl' depends on definitions, but she is certainly portrayed as a sympathetic character with good intentions.
 * Played straight in Saved!. It doesn't even occur to the main character to have an abortion when she falls pregnant, though this is in-character as a born-again Christian who lives in a very conservative neighborhood and attends a private religious school. The subject of abortion is only brought up twice, and never actually named, both times by the rebellious Cassandra; only once to Mary's face, and by then, it's "too late."
 * Averted in Fame, at least in the 1980 version. The ballet dancer has to have an abortion in order to pursue her career. She's somewhat awkward about it, but realistically not devastated.
 * In High Fidelity, before the story takes place, Laura gets an abortion when Rob gets her pregnant, keeping it a secret from him until a long time later. On one hand, he finds out when he mentions having kids and she starts crying, indicating that she's not happy about it; on the other hand, Rob admits that it was probably the right decision.
 * In the movie Detective Story, Kirk Douglas plays Jim McLeod, a police officer with a jones to bust an abortionist (which, being in the '50s, is a criminal offense). The doctor assumes McLeod is out to get him because the doc once performed an abortion of Mrs. McLeod. Not so! McLeod didn't know about that at all. When McLeod finds out, he's more upset because his wife had the abortion before they met.
 * In an example of extreme Values Dissonance, the head of the Hays Commission tried to rain down hellfire on the film, saying that abortion was such an evil that you couldn't even discuss it in a film, even if you were portraying it in a fairly negative fashion.
 * In Manny And Lo, the delinquent teen figures she's just getting fat from her diet of convenience store junk food. When she finally goes into the clinic to "get it done," the doctor informs her she's too far along to get an abortion. Solution? Kidnap a baby store clerk.
 * An example of only thoroughly messed-up girls getting abortions: in the Dutch movie Godforsaken, the psychotic gangster's girlfriend finds out that she's pregnant and then does her own dirty work with a clothes hanger.
 * Vera Drake is about a kind, loving 1950 London housewife who secretly performs illegal abortions. The film is entirely sympathetic toward Vera and presents multiple perspectives on the issue, both with realistic patients (including a careless floozy, an exhausted housewife who couldn't afford to raise another child, and a victim of date rape) and with her family when they find out the truth (her husband vows to stay by her side for better or worse, her son believes it's "killing innocent babies," and her daughter's fiance thinks it's an act of mercy compared to bringing a child who can't be properly cared for into the world.)
 * Similar to Fast Times at Ridgemont High (above), this trope is averted in the the schizophrenic if poignant 1982 film The Last American Virgin. Smooth Operator Rick gets titular good-girl Karen pregnant then dumps her. Protagonist Gary sells his stereo and takes heat from Nurse Rached to get Karen an abortion, and that's all that's heard regarding pregnancy and procedure. This film is based on the Israeli film Eskimo Limon which features the same pregnancy-abortion plot point.
 * Subverted in A Nightmare On Elm Street 5 The Dream Child. Protagonist Alice knows she's pregnant. Alice has magic dream powers that let her dream while awake and affect reality through dreams, but she too can be affected. Alice soon realizes that her unborn son Jacob is exercising the same powers. Freddy Krueger can ordinarily only kill people in dreams, but he can use Jacob's dreams to start murdering Alice's friends pretty much whenever he pleases. one of Alice's friends suggests that she stop Freddy by having an abortion, which would end Jacob's dreams. Alice refuses to do so because she wants to keep the baby and thinks she can destroy Freddy through other means. Alice's other means aren't entirely successful and ultimately her unborn son Jacob has to destroy Freddy in the dream world by copying Freddy's powers. The film's final scene shows Alice and her father cooing over the baby. As the camera pans back, we see girls in old-fashioned white dresses playing jump-rope and singing a song that always heralds Freddy's reappearance in a Nightmare on Elm Street film.
 * Played with in Blue Denim: After a teenaged couple, Janet and Arthur, find themselves expecting a baby, they seek help to pay for an abortion, and find a doctor willing to perform the procedure; however, because it takes place in the 1950's, there is some worry over the safety of the procedure itself and in the end  The characters constantly skate around the word "abortion", but the euphemisms, and the characters' worry about the procedure, makes it pretty clear to the audience as to what it is they're planning to do. In play
 * Enforced in the Lifetime Movie of the Week The Devil's Child, where a woman pregnant with the Antichrist tries to get an abortion, but a mysterious explosion kills everyone in the hospital.
 * In Garage Days, Kate gets pregnant by Joe, decides to have an abortion, and then changes her mind. However, it's not clear how set she was on the abortion to begin with (the characters were in a bad patch.)
 * The film version of I Dont Know How She Does It has an assistant - who's single, working all hours at her job, and has sworn not to have kids - considering an abortion when she gets pregnant from a one-night stand. Kate simply plants her hands on her shoulders and tells her, "You are going to have this baby." She agrees.

Literature

 * The Phantom's Phantom, a modern novel retroactively set in The Fifties, has a Back-Alley Doctor referring his poor patients to a prostitution ring in lieu of cash payment. And between the illegal abortion and the prostitution, blackmail opportunities abounded.
 * Katie Nolan gets pregnant three months after the birth of her first child in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn but declines the abortifacient the the midwife offers her.
 * Bizarrely averted in one of Karen Traviss' Wess'har books, where the protagonist's God Mode is so strong that she can't have a normal abortion, so she has to cut the fetus out and blow it up with a grenade.
 * Completely averted in Lynn Margulis's Luminous Fish, where René, one of the main characters, . Note that Margulis is the biologist who made symbiogenesis a mainstream evolutionary theory, and therefore doesn't fail biology forever.
 * In the final book of the Twilight series, Bella refuses to end her vampire/human hybrid pregnancy even though it seems very likely to kill her. Even when she's vomiting blood and the baby breaks her spine. Of course, every.single.female in the book is baby-obsessed; and no one is child-free in Forks, apparently. Also keep in mind that Meyer is Mormon. What's somewhat ironic is that a pregnancy that threatens the life of the mother is one of the few situations where Mormonism condones abortion (the other two being incest and rape, though the latter can be fuzzy depending on where you are and who you ask). The logic is usually that a.) if the mother dies, the baby dies anyway, and b.) odds are good the woman already has other kids, who would be left without a mother.
 * Similarly, in The Whitby Child, Nelda, one of a race of magical Fisher Folk, refuses a magical herb that will end her pregnancy, and the character who offers it to her is presented as evil for even suggesting it. This is even though 1) Nelda's people are under a curse that causes all laboring women and almost all their babies to die slow and agonizing deaths and 2)we're told that at in human terms Nelda's approximately eight years old. Got that? Good girls are willing to die to avoid abortion even if they're minors and there's no realistic prospect the baby will even survive.
 * Averted by in Ursula Vernon's Black Dogs. She is impregnated by The Dragon in an attempt to create a powerful and long-lived bloodline, and in a Heroic Sacrifice she uses a brand of magic to both abort the pregnancy and sterilize herself to prevent this plan from ever being carried through.
 * In The Sword of Truth Kahlan considers having an abortion due to having been told by a semi-reliable source that the child would be male, and the last time male Confessors were allowed to live past infancy they turned out to be Always Chaotic Evil; since then male Confessor children have always been killed at birth. She eventually decides against it...two minutes before she's beaten very nearly to death, causing a miscarriage anyway.
 * Averted in Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower, when main character Charlie escorts his sister to the abortion clinic after discovering she is knocked up by her abusive Jerkass boyfriend.
 * While never stated directly, Ernest Hemingway's short story "Hills Like White Elephants" is about a couple discussing whether or not the woman should have an abortion: he wants her to, she doesn't but eventually agrees, saying she's willing to always do anything he wants. Nearly the entire story is dialogue without mentions of tone, gestures or thoughts, leaving the possibility for a lot of Alternative Character Interpretation (whether or not she's being angry or sarcastic at the end, for example).
 * Averted in Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years with Rosie, Adrian's teenage sister. While she's not exactly a "good girl", she's portrayed as being rather naive in some ways and thinks she wants to keep the baby. Adrian, in a rare moment of maturity, persuades her to spend a week taking care of a baby doll of the sort used to demonstrate the realities of baby-care to teenagers in school. After caring (after a fashion; at one point she chucks it out the window) for the doll for a week, Rosie opts to have an abortion. It's portrayed as being a good choice for her.
 * In The Pale King, a teenaged Lane Dean secretly hopes that his Christian girlfriend will break up with him, but still keep their unborn child.
 * Inverted in Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga novel Barrayar, when an assassination attempt nearly kills Cordelia Vorkosigan, and does severe, permanent damage to her unborn child. Pretty much everybody thinks she should abort and start over. She doesn't.
 * Cersei Lannister reveals to Eddard Stark in Games of Thrones that when her husband Robert impregnated her she had the child aborted. In the TV series the child died shortly after birth due to a fever.
 * And Lysa Arryn, nee Tully, is revealed to have had an abortion when she was young when she was impregnated by a man she was not married to and was below her station which resulted in her father making her drink "moon tea" to abort the child. Worse, Lysa says that she would've gladly born the child and didn't even know what they were giving her until it was too late. It's also implied that her later issues with multiple miscarriages once she is married might be a result of this, though it's not certain since this was also said to have happened to Lysa's mother as well.
 * Youth in Sexual Ecstasy takes a strong Pro-Life stance, the protagonist of the novel mentions the abortion as one of the main reasons for youngsters having sex freely, then after watching The Silent Scream he has a My God, What Have I Done? moment when he remembers breaking up with his pregnant girlfriend (who pleaded and begged to him for their baby) and then giving her the money for aborting his child.
 * Averted in The Red Tent. Ruti has been suffering at the hands of her husband Laban, and she does not want to give him any more children, because she does not believe he deserves the honor of more sons and she knows he will molest a daughter, so she asks Rachel to help her terminate the pregnancy, threatening to kill the child anyway after it's born. Rachel agrees, and next month (when the women enter the menstruation tent), she gives Ruti an unidentified black brew that induces a miscarriage. The women are all supportive of Ruti's choice, on the grounds that they don't much care for Laban or the way he treats her either.
 * Built into the way healing works in Tales of Kolmar. Magical healers can cause a deformed embryo which wouldn't survive long out of the womb, if it got that far, to abort, same with most pregnancies that the body fights against, but this technique won't work against a healthy embryo. When Lanen's half-dragon twins are threatening to get her killed they are not themselves sick enough for this to work, and she's furious at the suggestion that it should.

Live-Action TV
"Jesus: No abortions! J.D.: What if the parents are both drug addicts who'd neglect and abuse the child? Jesus: Oh, in that case it would be OK. J.D.: Really? Jesus: NO abortions! How are you people not getting this?!"
 * Averted in the very first TV abortion, that of the 47-year-old protagonist of Maude. No complications are referred to, and her family supports her choice. Her daughter's encouragement included explaining why a 47-year-old shouldn't have a baby, and Adrienne Barbeau played the daughter. Ironically, the episode aired before Roe v. Wade became law, but abortion had recently been made legal in New York, which was one of only four states to have abortion on request, with no reason required. Some people interpreted the episode as a subtle PSA regarding this fact.
 * In the first series of The OC, Ryan gets a girl pregnant, and she says she's not going to have an abortion. It's quite probably not his, but he won't even consider this, despite the fact that it seems like his ex-girlfriend is trying to force him back into a relationship after her boyfriend - the probable actual father of her child - dumped her. But then, in the next season, she said she had Convenient Miscarriage off-screen and drops off the face of the Earth, only for it to revealed later that she faked the miscarriage and has the kid, who wasn't his anyway.
 * Scrubs
 * Jordan mentioned having an abortion, and although she probably doesn't fall under the category of "good girl", it's notable that though she's shown to feel quite sad about it when talking to her young child about it, she says it was the most reasonable decision she could have made at the time, as she told the couple asking for advice. This is one of the few instances where the choice of abortion is shown sympathetically and realistically. However the problem comes at the end of the conversation when they decide to play the trope straight. When Jordan tells them to go with their gut and they'll know the right decision, they ask "what if we don't feel anything?" She tells them that might be their answer. Jordan's advice and all logic suggests the decision of abortion (they had only been on a single date together) but they decide to have the kid anyway.
 * When J.D. gets his girlfriend pregnant, he has one of his daydreams where he discusses abortions with Jesus:

""Lucas, if you want to talk about it, call it what it is...an abortion!""
 * In Sex and the City, Miranda got pregnant and went for an abortion, but decided to keep the baby at the last minute, though it is mentioned in the same episode that Carrie and Samantha have both had abortions in the past.
 * In the Star Trek the Next Generation episode "The Child", After Troi gets pregnant by mysterious means, Worf suggests as a precaution that the pregnancy be terminated. But then Troi shoots that idea down: "I am having this baby."
 * Averted in Six Feet Under. Claire gets pregnant from her cheating sleazy boyfriend, and ends up having an abortion. There are no ill side effects, but she does end up seeing her baby in the arms of Nate's dead wife in a hallucination/trip to the afterlife/whatever the hell that was.
 * In Frontline, hard-nosed bitch reporter Brooke finds out she's pregnant, and wants to keep the baby. However, she's not married and the producers blackmail her with mentions that she's being considered for the star of a new show - but that would be impossible if she was pregnant on-air. They mention that she could discreetly deal with the problem and call the absence a family emergency. At the end of the episode, she's absent for a day due to "a grandmother's funeral."
 * In the UK mini-series The Duchess of Duke Street, Louisa Trotter becomes pregnant by her lover, Charlie Tyrrell, in 1903. When she and Charlie discuss what to do they both dismiss abortion out of hand because of the very real danger of infection. The decision not to abort was justifiable given the time frame, but the decision to have the character become pregnant was less defensible given that she was Very Loosely Based on a True Story on a historical individual who never had a child and probably never slept with a man.
 * Famously averted on All My Children in 1973, where a young Erica Kane has an abortion. She did, however, gain a life-threatening infection from the procedure. This was later infamously Ret Coned decades later into the abortion doctor harvesting Erica's fetus and implanting it in his own wife, resulting in the character of Josh Madden. Never mind that that's not even possible now, let alone in the seventies!
 * On Malcolm in the Middle, the entire family is utterly horrified when Lois becomes pregnant with her fifth child, as their resources are stretched to the snapping point taking care of the kids they already have, but the possibility of abortion is never even brought up. The family are implied to be Roman Catholic, albeit heavily lapsed, and given how strictly many Catholic adhere to this trope, consciously or not, it may well be Truth in Television. In this case the pregnancy plot was created because the actress playing Lois really was pregnant, so it would've been very difficult to hide the pregnancy in the later months.
 * Criminal Minds.
 * Season two's "Aftermath" has a serial rapist that is attacking girls at a religious school, then switches to an older demographic when one of the religious girls "chooses the sin of suicide over the sin of abortion."
 * Averted in a third season episode, a stalking victim admits to having had an abortion about a year earlier, and though her fiancé is upset when he finds out, it does not seriously damage her or her relationship with him.
 * Averted again in the fourth season, we find out that In neither of these cases does the character revealing the abortion or the character hearing about it imply that abortion is an immoral act.
 * Frequently subverted in House, usually when there are medical implications. In "Babies And Bathwater", the mother died before she could have the abortion that would allow her to receive cancer treatment; in the very next episode, the pregnancy was the underlying cause of the Patient Of The Week's condition; and in "One Day, One Room", House's patient (after much persuading) adheres to the one exception - that abortion seems to be okay when the pregnancy resulted from rape.
 * Played straight(ish) in "Fetal Position". Where a women refuses to terminate a live threatening pregnancy, forcing House to perform a risky operation on the fetus in a Shout-Out Samuel Armas. He maintains that they took an unacceptable risk to their patient, but starts using the word 'baby' over 'it' from then on.
 * The trope is toyed with in an early episode of Third Watch. Officer Yokas gets pregnant, but given her family's financial difficulties and the stresses of her job, decides she wants an abortion. Her husband encourages her to keep it. During a foot chase, a thug hits her in the stomach with a pipe, which, she tells her husband, caused a Convenient Miscarriage. She's later shown getting an abortion. The moral issue in this case seemed to be presented not as the abortion itself, but that she lied to her husband in order to avoid having to talk or argue about it.
 * Averted in Cold Case, which deals with abortion several times.
 * One first season episode centers on an underground abortion service during the 1960s. Both of the (highly sympathetic) victims worked for the service and two other sympathetic witnesses in the case also had.
 * One third season episode involved a high school couple who decide not to get an abortion after seeing photos given to them by a militantly pro-life (and hypocritical) nurse. It ruins both their lives (Anvilicious, but on the other side).
 * One sixth season episode involved a character who had suffered through a botched abortion (the episode was again set in the 1960s - in both cases the botched abortions highlighted the trouble illegalizing abortion could cause, rather than serving to punish the characters).
 * The West Wing Season Five episode "The Supremes" averts this a scene in which two of the White House staff are interviewing a potential candidate for the Supreme Court. When asked whether she has done anything that would make her confirmation difficult, she offhandedly replies that she stole a book, bought a marijuana plant for her roomie, and had an abortion. Cue minor Heroic BSOD. Important to note that they were only worried about the political implications. None of the protagonists thinks any less of her for it, and they subsequent do nominate her.
 * One plot line on South of Nowhere involved Chelsea getting pregnant to Clay and going for an abortion. At the last minute, she opts out and keeps the baby, which she later loses in a car crash.
 * In a Russian teen TV series Kadetstvo, a Good Girl ponders over the option of abortion, decides to go through with it and sticks to that decision. Her Good Boy boyfriend objects to that, and she promptly breaks up with him. Considering how common abortion is in Russia, around 2.7 million annually, this could be Values Dissonance.
 * In Eastenders erstwhile single-mother Michelle matter-of-factly aborted her husband's baby, after rejecting abortion while she was pregnant the first time. The difference was partly that she loved the father of the first child, the notorious Dirty Den, and didn't actually love her husband, weedy Lofty. Sadly, Lofty had wanted the baby, and this led to the break-up of their marriage (and arguably a better future for all concerned).
 * Stacey also aborted Bradley's kid, and the show dealt with it unusually: instead of getting over it and everybody forgetting what had happened, Stacey was never comfortable with what she had done.
 * On a Gilmore Girls flashback episode, when Lorelai was pregnant with Rory, Chris's father (who had been established as a jerk in a previous episode) tacitly suggests to the other parents that Lorelai simply "get rid" of the baby. This leads to a rather stunned silence, which makes some sense, since both sets of parents are upper-class conservatives.
 * From the audience's perspective, his behavior is shocking, not because he suggests an abortion, but because he never shows a moment's interest in what Lorelai wants.
 * Played with in Mad Men, naturally. Joan gives a blink-and-you-miss it reference in the first season (roughly, "Are you late again? Do you need to see Doctor Emerson?"), and later Bear in mind that we're in the early 60s here. In the fourth season, Joan reveals that she's had two abortions (or "procedures" as she calls them) and that she's concerned that she might not be able to get pregnant with her husband because of them.  However,  In this case they pay lip-service to past abortions, but
 * Played with in Roseanne, of all places. Jackie has an unexpected pregnancy and is considering abortion, which her mother is strongly against, only to find out that her and Roseanne's grandmother had two, long, long before they were legal. In the end Jackie opts to keep the baby, though her mother is still horrified that she has no plans to marry the father. (For the record, she eventually does after the baby's born, though even then they eventually divorce.)
 * Used in Murphy Brown: Murphy mulls her options after getting pregnant, abortion clearly being one of them. Eventually she decides against it. It's implied that the father assumed she would abort. In a pointed fantasy sequence, she considers aborting the child, only to turn and find the entire Supreme Court wagging their fingers at her in disapproval.
 * Averted in the second season of The Real World when roommate Tammy decided to undergo the procedure after finding out she's pregnant. When she returned to the house, the producers asked her if she wanted all references to her pregnancy edited out, but she gave them her blessing to keep it in since it was something young people could learn from. MTV showed both sides of the issue without being polarizing: another roommate thought what Tammy did was wrong, but knew that wasn't what she needed to hear and stood by her as a friend.
 * Quinn of Glee is briefly asked whether she's going to get an abortion, but she promptly says no without a single thought. This fits into her character, who has been set up as a very devoted Christian, canoodling aside.
 * On Private Practice when Maya her pro-life OB-GYN mother tries to force her to have an abortion. Addison offers to perform the abortion, but once inside the exam room,.
 * Averted on Spenser For Hire, as Susan Silverman has an abortion in spite of Spenser's opposition.
 * Abortion was alluded to three times on Desperate Housewives and avoided every time:
 * Gabrielle becomes pregnant in season 1 (due to her birth control pills being tampered with) and remains that way until a Convenient Miscarriage midway through season 2. She dismisses the question by saying that she and her husband are good Catholics.
 * Danielle becomes pregnant in season 3. When she tells Austin (the father) about it, he tells her that he "knows of this clinic," but she immediately dismisses it with "Absolutely not!" She goes through with the pregnancy and gives birth to a son, Benjamin, in early season 4.
 * Lynette becomes pregnant with twins at the end of season 5. Early in season 6, she becomes depressed when she sees them on the ultrasound, telling Tom that she doesn't love them like she loved her other kids and doesn't want them. She has a change of heart after having a talk with Susan about it.
 * On The Facts of Life, Blair's mother visits her and tells her that she's pregnant, but not going to go through with it. Blair is very disappointed with her mother's decision and how little thought she put into it (this was very true-to-life for Lisa Whelchel, as she was a devout born-again Christian). Blair eventually talks her mother into going through with the pregnancy, and the baby (a girl) is born later in the season in a Christmas Episode.
 * Charlie Kelly's mother on Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia had an abortion.
 * Averted twice on Nip Tuck: in season 2, Liz had one when she finds out that the baby she's carrying would be born with Down's Syndrome. In season 6, Kimber has one when Jerkass Christian tells her that she could either choose between keeping him as her boyfriend or receive child support checks but lose him completely as he already has 3 kids and does not want another. There are some complications during the procedure and afterward Kimber is told that she can't have kids anymore.
 * The third season of Dexter has discover that she's pregnant and -- despite coming to the conclusion that having the child would be a stressful, near-unmanageable complication to an already complex situation -- she decides to have the child.
 * Twin Peaks. Dick wants Lucy to abort their supposed child, and she is disgusted.
 * Skins averts this trope with.
 * Degrassi High subverted this when decided to have an abortion and went through with it. This lead to the repeats of Degrassi either cutting episodes 101, 102, and 103 ('A New Start' Parts 1 and 2, and 'Breaking Up is Hard to Do') or changing episode 101 so that  was never pregnant.
 * Degrassi the Next Generation averted this with Manny (leading to a similar incident of the above: the episode in question didn't air in the states for years, and any references to Manny being moody afterwards was treated like she was just depressed over her messy break-up with Craig), but played it straight with Liberty--when JT suggests the possibility of abortion, she says she doesn't want to want to even think about it. However, she is three months along by the time she works up the courage to tell JT, so she's had enough time to think her options through.
 * And when Spike was pregnant with Emma on Degrassi Junior High, she did briefly consider abortion, even at the protest of her boyfriend, but (obviously, or else there'd be no Next Generation) decided to have the baby.
 * Averted on Friday Night Lights, where a minor female character falls pregnant from a one-night stand, and spends an episode considering all her options before ultimately going through with it. The episode does a pretty amazing job of never making the story a political issue, and keeping it focused on the characters that are affected.
 * Used in One Tree Hill, where Peyton chooses to continue a pregnancy against medical orders and is seemly quite willing to sacrifice her own life in spartan martyrdom if it saves the life of her unborn child. It's painful not so much because of her reasoning but rather her reaction when Lucas tells her he would rather lose his unborn baby than lose her.


 * On Stargate Universe, when T.J. tells Colonel Young that she's pregnant with his child, preempts any mention of abortion with the statement "I'm keeping it." In this case, performing an abortion would have been rather tricky given their limited medical supplies, even if a doctor could have been brought in via the stones.
 * Played somewhat straight on Angel. Darla says that she tried to have an abortion when she discovered she was pregnant. It didn't work. Turns out the baby was mystically protected while in her womb. However, Darla is about as far as one can get from being a "good girl".
 * In The Secret Life of the American Teenager, at first it was Amy. To be fair, she considered abortion to the point of going to the abortion clinic, but ultimately realized that she couldn't go through with it and it wasn't the best choice for her. This example was far more prominent later in the series, when bad girl, Adrian becomes pregnant and goes through with the pregnancy using exactly the same reason as Amy, word for word.
 * Laura from Emily of New Moon is horrified at the very idea of abortion, yet has little qualms about whoring herself out to the cruel factory overseer.
 * The first episode of That's My Bush has an highly fictionalized George W. Bush trying to unite both sides of the abortion issue in a summit. It fails spectacularly with the pro choice spokeswoman (a stereotypical Straw Feminist) gets mistaken for a stripper and the pro life spokesmen (an survived aborted fetus, which has happened in real life) getting drag off by a dog. Laura Bush comforts him by telling him that those who believe that the unborn have a right to life and those who believe that a women has final say on her body will never see eye to eye as because at the end of the day they are both sort of right.
 * In series three of Big Love, Sarah discovers she's pregnant to her ex-boyfriend. She initially decides to put the baby up for adoption, then decides to keep it and raise it with her best friend Heather while she's at college in Arizona. However, she suffers a Convenient Miscarriage soon after.
 * Arrested Development: Apparently, Lindsay Bluth was pregnant "loads of times"...just never with Maebe.
 * GOB cautions George Michael that if a religious girl gets pregnant, "she stays pregnant." "When GOB was in high school, he had sex with these women. These women got pregnant. This one had a baby."
 * Arlene of True Blood finds herself pregnant with, which she decidedly doesn't want. However, she's against abortion, and instead tries to get a witch to do a magical abortion (which she, for some reason, considers OK)..
 * Fringe has having some sort of illness that eventually almost certainly kills both the mother and the child (her sister had the same syndrome and died from it). So, for her, abortion is the only way out, and she's definitely doing it (even if the term itself, as usual, is never named). However, before she can go through with it, she's kidnapped and her pregnancy is accelerated.
 * Being Human plays this straight in the third season. Nina gets pregnant after she and George have sex (the pill wasn't designed with werewolves in mind, apparently) and decides to abort despite George's objections. She changes her mind after meeting Sasha, a young female zombie whose body is rapidly succumbing to decay. Sasha tells them that her greatest regret was that she didn't do more with her life, like starting a family, because she assumed she'd always have time.
 * On The Sarah Silverman Show, Sarah's non-moral (not amoral), and not too bright, character, admits to having had several previous abortions, oblivious to the fact that this is a hot topic, and people may judge her for this. Later, she makes friends with a group of fundamentalist Christian women she meets at a clinic, and they're very nice to her, even though she has had abortions, because they believe she regrets them, and will be a mouthpiece for their cause, talking about how traumatic the experience was. It takes a while for this to dawn on Sarah, who at one point says that not only does she not regret having abortions, but doesn't think she's done having them. Her new "friends" drop her like a hot potato, but she's not too upset, because she's pretty happy-go-lucky. By the end of the episode.
 * Both played straight and averted hard in Deadwood. It's made clear that Doc Cochran is the Gem's abortionist-in-residence, and Trixie mentions that she's had several abortions. But when widowed Alma Garrett becomes pregnant by a married man, she decides to keep the pregnancy. Ellsworth generously offers to marry her, and it's only after this marriage that the pregnancy fails and she has to have an abortion to save her life.
 * At the beginning of Roz's unplanned pregnancy arc in Season 5 of Frasier, the possibility of abortion is brought up only very briefly and indirectly by Frasier. Roz makes it clear that she never contemplated abortion as an option.
 * Somewhat averted in season seven of How I Met Your Mother, when hints that she will probably have an abortion if her pregnancy scare turns out to be real, which distresses, the potential father. However, it never actually comes to a head because she turns out not to be pregnant after all.
 * In season five of Stromberg, Jennifer gets pregnant by Stromberg. It was unwanted and she seriously considers the option of abortion, but then decides against it, after some persuasion by Ernie. Then she miscarries.
 * In the 2012 Upstairs, Downstairs, Lady Persie insists upon an (illegal) abortion and does go through with it; this is played as another sign of what an infinitely petty and morally bankrupt individual she is.
 * Awake plays this perfectly straight... except with adoption. By the time the pregnancy in question is known to the protagonists, it's five months along, too late for an abortion.

Music

 * "Oasis" by Amanda Palmer is a cheery little number about a girl who gets raped, ends up getting pregnant, and gets an abortion with absolutely no regrets. Mind you, she is a bit more focused on the fact that Oasis wrote back to her...
 * There's also "Mandy Goes To Med School", by Palmer with her band The Dresden Dolls, a slinky, jazzy tune about operating a back-alley abortion clinic in an SUV. Both could be considered satirical Protest Songs.
 * Aaand then again there's "Sex Changes" by the Dresden Dolls, which reads as a bitter song about having disappointing sex and getting an abortion ("You get more than you're asking for without the right protection", "the knife is nearing", "this little feat of engineering"...). Comes across as more of a straight-up Protest Song than Oasis, for sure (the video for which includes "annoying fundamentalist Christians" protesting with signs that read "Jesus Hates You").
 * A subverted-inversion in Vienna Teng's jarringly upbeat Shasta. To all intents and purposes, it looks like the girl is on her way to get an abortion, until she remembers turning away at the heed of a protester standing outside the clinic doors. At least, that is the most probable interpretation, but it is not made clear whether or not she went through with it.

Printed Media

 * Mad Magazine had one article about telling the difference between a Drama, a Comedy, and a Reality Show (which was useful with shows like Laguna Beach: The Real OC and The Hills, when you couldn't tell what was scripted and what wasn't). One of the examples was pregnancy. If it's a comedy, she'll keep it and have lots of wacky jokes about pregnancy and henpecked husbands (citing Friends); If it's a drama, she'll abort it and be scarred for life (possibly referencing The OC or Law and Order); if it's a reality show, there will be cameras there to film it either way.

Theatre

 * In A Raisin in the Sun, the first thing the wife does when she finds out she's pregnant again is put a down payment on an abortion. They don't go through with it since they wind up with a bigger house and money to raise the child. Note that the play was written in 1959, before Roe v. Wade.
 * In the musical Spring Awakening, Wendla gets an abortion though it's implied she does not want to; her mother takes her to get one by force, . This is even sadder in the original play on which the musical is based because
 * In Cabaret, Sally gets an abortion as part of her character's downward spiral.
 * Older Than Television: In Sidney Howard's play They Knew What They Wanted, Amy finds out that she's become pregnant from her extramarital relations with Joe. As she wonders what to do about it, Joe suggests one possible course of action, but she rejects it out of hand: "Them kind of doctors is no good... I'm too far gone anyway... I know... and anyway... doing that... It's worse than the other."
 * The Girl Who Never Was is a play about a woman who aborted a baby she wanted to keep (her boyfriend convinced her to) and is driven insane by guilt/ the ghost of the baby girl. Although the message is more "don't be persuaded to do anything you don't want to" than "good girls avoid abortion."

Video Games

 * At some point in Nagisa's pregnancy in Clannad After Story, the possibility of abortion is brought up out of concern for her health, but Nagisa refuses, as she really wants to have the baby.
 * Played with in Ef: A Fairy Tale of the Two.. gets pregnant, and is so adamant on having an abortion that she pulls out a knife and attempts to stab herself in the uterus before her boyfriend has to physically restrain her. He eventually calms her down and persuades her that keeping the baby wouldn't be the end of the world. They also bring up how they likely couldn't afford to pay for an abortion, which results in massive Fridge Logic about how they expect to afford the baby if they can't afford a one-time payment on the procedure.
 * You learn fairly early that Rokushiki in Kara no Shoujo in large part targeted women who were uncomfortable about their pregnancies and either had abortions or might have been considering one. This also makes up part of the motive of the first serial killer.
 * In The Elder Scrolls, a book series that has appeared since Daggerfall entitled "The Real Barenziah" suggests within Part 3 that Barenziah carried on an intimate affair with Tiber Septim in which she eventually got pregnant. Barenziah wanted to keep the child. As a bastard child from a Dunmer mistress would be very inconvenient for the Emperor, he basically forced his healer to magically abort it against her will. This became a plot point in the story as the story implied she also had trouble conceiving later in life due to the limited fertility of Dunmer and the trauma of the event. As the canonicity of any of the books in the games is deliberately unclear, it's not known whether or not the real Barenziah went through this.

Webcomics

 * The first strip of Something Positive has Davan sending a wire hanger to an old girlfriend who's having a baby shower. A later series of strips would have him escorting another old girlfriend to an abortion clinic. (For the record, neither child has any chance of being his.)
 * Anders Loves Maria brings this up several times, with Maria and Tina both having abortions in the back story. Tina is also going in for an abortion when.
 * Aiko of Red String casually announces she "had that little problem taken care of" and giggles when Reika mentions her pregnancy. Aiko is also very slutty and is caught trying to seduce her fiance's younger brother while both of their love interests are in the next room.
 * Sil'lice implies in Drowtales that her sister Snadhya'rune has had abortions, specifically referring to how she "murders her own children while they are still in the womb" which to a drow, who place a high value on motherhood and directly connect social status to how many children one has, would be an absurd concept, and Snadhya's rejection of this part of drow culture is seen as scandalous and shameful. However this trope is later twisted on its head when it's revealed
 * Inverted in Moon Over June, with Hatsuki, she choose to keep her child in order to do pregnancy photoshoots and to hide the kid from her parents.

Western Animation
"Kang: (pretending to be Bob Dole) Abortions for all! [crowd boos] Kang: Very well, no abortions for anyone! [crowd boos] Kang: Hmm. Abortions for some, miniature American flags for others! [crowd cheers and waves miniature American flags]"
 * Foxxy Love in Drawn Together apparently gets them on a regular basis, but considering what type of show it is that's not very surprising.
 * In Family Guy, Peter tells a story about how he and Lois had gone to get an abortion when she was pregnant with Meg, but backed out, when they arrived at the clinic and found out the abortionist had one arm. Another time he mentioned that he could find the black market as an actual store, just like the back alley abortionist, then said that he was glad she changed her mind but the important thing was that he found the guy.
 * In an another episode, when Meg thinks she's pregnant, she refuses to have an abortion. Lois suggests Meg consider drinking and smoking a lot to cause a miscarriage, but not to "wimp out halfway through", because Lois ended up with Chris.
 * There is an episode of Family Guy where Lois agrees to be a surrogate mother for another couple, however, the couple dies and she must decide whether or not to get an abortion. The episode was finished but it was banned from airing on FOX, however, it is available on DVD and it is not known if it will air on Adult Swim.
 * Peter's mother tried to get an abortion when she had Peter because it was from an affair. Because it was in Mexico, the abortion process involved hanging from a bar and being beaten like a pinata by a bunch of kids. As she was already full term when she decided to abort, Peter is born full size and healthy. When she sees him, she falls in love and keeps him. Though knowing Peter, he may very well have gotten brain damage from the procedure.
 * Also spoofed in a quick gag when the family is watching Murder, She Wrote and Jessica casually mentions that she once had an abortion. "Aha!" says Peter, "So she's the murderer!"
 * Skewered by The Simpsons.


 * In South Park, one of Cartman's students is pregnant and refuses to have an abortion and go to a university, he (who's teaching them how to cheat in exams) convinces her that abortion is the ultimate form of cheating and thus she must do it.
 * On another episode he convinces a woman who wanted her baby to get an abortion so the stem cells could be used to save Kenny's life. Except
 * Though this one could be debated, as he didn't come up with that plan until long after he started getting stem cells to help Kenny.
 * The episode where Mr. Garrison gets his sex-change operation has him excited to be pregnant, just so that he can get an abortion. He's then devastated to find out transsexuals can't get pregnant. As with Cartman, this is probably meant to show that he's sort of messed up.
 * An episode has Cartman's mother contemplating getting an abortion... of Cartman... years after his birth. She goes on a crusade to get fortieth-trimester abortion legalized, only to finally realize she was getting it mixed up with adoption.
 * In the Woodland Critter Christmas Episode, Stan has to get three lion cubs trained to do an abortion, but in their defense, the abortion is to prevent the birth of the Anti Christ.
 * In the Adult Party Cartoon spinoff of The Ren and Stimpy Show, one of the episodes involves Stimpy believing he's pregnant with Ren. After Ren is told about it, he immediately pulls out a hanger and starts approaching Stimpy with it. Thankfully, he's promptly persuaded not to do it.