Good Girls Avoid Abortion: Difference between revisions

 

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:

# 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]].

# She actually decides to have it done, but somehow things don't turn out as she expects, and her attempted abortion is [[Incredibly Lame Pun|aborted]].

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.

 

 

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 [[Debate and Switch|without answering the underlying question]]. If adoption ''is'' mentioned, it will usually be ruled out with some justification or other.

* An example of only thoroughly messed-up girls getting abortions: in the Dutch movie ''Godforsaken'', the psychotic gangster's [[All Girls Want Bad Boys|girlfriend]] finds out that she's pregnant and then [[Nightmare Fuel|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 [[Rape As Drama|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 [[Mercy Kill|act of mercy]] [[Shoot the Dog|compared to bringing a child who can't be properly cared for into the world.]])

* 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. {{spoiler|Thanks for giving birth to Freddy's new incarnation, Alice. You probably should've just had the abortion.}}

* 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 {{spoiler|Arthur, worried that Janet will die, breaks down confessing to his parents, and they go to rescue her ''just'' in the nick of time. They go home, and the parents of both teenagers have a discussion before agreeing, with Janet's consent, to send her to [[Stigmatic Pregnancy Euphemism|live with her aunt.]] }} 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 {{spoiler|Janet has the abortion after all, and lives through the procedure.}}

 

== Literature ==

* 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''.

* Cersei Lannister reveals to Eddard Stark in ''[[A Song of Ice and Fire|Games of Thrones]]'' that when her husband Robert impregnated her she had the child aborted. In the [[Game of Thrones (TV)|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 ({{spoiler|Petry Baelish}}) 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.

* Averted in ''[[The Red Tent]]''. [[Shrinking Violet|Ruti]] has been suffering at the hands of her husband [[Complete Monster|Laban]], and she does not want to give him any more children, because she does not believe he [[Heir Club for Men|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 [[Mercy Killing|kill]] [[Offing the Offspring|the child]] anyway after it's born. Rachel agrees, and next month (when the women enter the menstruation tent), she gives Ruti an [[I Ate What?|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 (Literature)|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.

** Averted again in the fourth season, we find out that {{spoiler|Prentiss had an abortion when she was fifteen. Though this fact is mentioned in the context of revealing why she's screwed up, the abortion is never treated as the reason; it is instead the negative reaction of her priest which damages not her, but her friend.}} 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 (TV)|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.

* 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 (TV)|Cold Case]]'', which deals with abortion several times.

* 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 [[Recycled Script|using exactly the same reason as Amy]], [[They Just Didn't Care|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.

* 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 (TV)|Arrested Development]]'': Apparently, Lindsay Bluth was pregnant "loads of times"...just never with Maebe. {{spoiler|Except she was.}}

[[Category:Pregnancy Tropes]]

[[Category:Good Girls Avoid Abortion]]