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.
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Americans have become even more prudish and sqeaumish about abortion, sexuality, and foul language since the 70s. I don’t think MAUDE would have been allowed to have an abortion in 2009.
Thanks Melissa for sharing! This is so true, every show – from Desperate Housewives to Glee points toward the increasing shaming of abortion as an option. It’s like the media’s version of Oklahoma’s law that will publish details about those who abort.
Full disclosure: I am a fan of Accidentally On Purpose and recently attended a tweet-up on the set.
They do address the abortion question in the pilot episode of Accidentally On Purpose – Her friend Olivia brings it up and there’s a joke about “asking the hard questions” because she’s a reporter. I don’t think they use the word “abortion” but it’s clearly what they’re talking about.
And she doesn’t have an abortion, or consider it really at all, because her character flat out doesn’t want one – She wants the baby. That’s the motivation behind the title; that she got pregnant “Accidentally On Purpose.”
Shows like “Accidentally on Purpose” or movies like “Knocked-Up” would be over in 15 minutes if the main character decided to have an abortion. The story is all about a seemingly smart woman choosing to raise a child with a doofus babydaddy. No baby, no story.
I strongly disagree with the notion that there cannot be a story if the woman does not want to become a mother. That is the biggest bias in TV: that a woman who doesn’t have children cannot have a story. And in the case of a woman having an abortion, the bias is that we cannot see her being happy or having a life. She kind of goes away and withers away. Or goes to a mental home. There is a story. You know, just as the idea that having a child is transformative, having an abortion is transformative. That near miss could trigger the woman to grab life and make changes in her life. Now, the bias is, we can never see that. A woman deliberately deciding that she does not want to be a mother is inflamatory. It’s not that there is no story or series there, but the feminist issue is that such a woman is not allowed to have a story.
“I strongly disagree with the notion that there cannot be a story if the woman does not want to become a mother. ”
Of course there’s a story, it’s simply not the story the creators wanted to tell here. That may be a topic on its own, but it doesn’t diminish “Accidentally On Purpose” as a fun sitcom about a woman who does want to stay pregnant.
lizriz claims the show “addresses” the question, yet they never even say the word. How can that be considered “addressing the question?”
So many shows deal with unplanned pregnancy, yet since “Maude” in 1972, almost *none* have allowed for the option that is *legal* and often the best for the situation.
• On shows like “Desperate Housewives”, “Sex and the City” and “Army Wives”, professional women with good reason not to have children consider abortion…then opt out, “choosing” motherhood instead, because there’s nothing more important about a woman than her uterus.
• This is still better than “Grey’s Anatomy” where Katherine Heigl’s popular character (a doctor!) got to bully a patient out of choosing the abortion she wanted, even bringing religion into the issue (warning the patient that it would be “between you and your God”). The patient caved.
* And still worse happened on “One Tree Hill”, where a young and vital woman would rather DIE (from a hazardous pregnancy) than have an abortion, and when her husband disagrees, she screams at him that the abortion would make them “murderers”. No abortion, of course.
• The only adult characters allowed to have abortions, apparently, are pathetic victim-creatures under the control of dominating fathers/families, as on “Battlestar Galactica” or “Everwood”. They are not series regulars (the “One Tree Hill” couple, in contrast, are the series’s lead pair), but disposable one-offs. On “Everwood”, the episode was all about the doctor (the series lead) and his “dilemma”…in the end, the abortion was performed by his less-likable assistant who then *went to confession* (!!). Yeah, a legal and safe procedure is a “sin”…right.
• One exception would be the Faith Yokas character on “Third Watch”, who decided she would rather provide for the two children she already had than have the expense of a third. She made her decision, and had the abortion, keeping her strength. And then she got breast cancer…the show never quite pushed the lie that “abortion leads to breast cancer”, but it never debunked it, either.
• Some teenager characters have had abortions. Claire (Lauren Ambrose) on “Six Feet Under” had one, seemed okay…and then years later, while dreaming of dead relatives and friends, saw “the baby she could have had”. Oh, joy.
• Manny on “DeGrassi: The Next Generation” had an abortion, was the target of some slurs at school but otherwise survived. Of course, this was a Canadian-made show…and the abortion episodes were not broadcast in the U.S. “Land of the Free”?? Really??
• And then there’s always the Julia solution: Neve Campbell’s character on “Party of Five” got pregnant, tearfully decided on an abortion…and then fell down a flight of stairs and miscarried, negating the need to actually do the horrible act of “murdering her baby”. Not the only example of this cop-out, but the most memorable.
• Oddly, the best post-1972 treatment was on “General Hospital”: 17-year-old Lulu Spencer (daughter of the famous key couple Luke and Laura) got pregnant (albeit through deceitful, slutty, character-negative acts) and got an abortion. Her body, her decision, her life.
But pretty much never on prime-time. Sigh. And now we CAN’T EVEN SAY THE WORD.