I really liked this article about pregnancy and specifically how it is portrayed in contemporary film. The article details all of the ways that pregnancy, womanhood, and abortion are portrayed mostly inaccurately in Hollywood films. Pregnancy is portrayed as an excess, and abortion is almost never a viable plot option. Films often co-opt the rhetoric of pro-choice movements about a woman's right to choose in order to give the female character the right to choose to keep the baby. This made me think, I wonder what a successful Hollywood film that portrays and woman choosing to have an abortion would look like? I wonder if it is even possible, now or in the near future.
I really like the way she commented on race and how the racial make-up of the women who are portrayed in these films is directly related to social anxieties about race. Hollywood and Hollywood executives specifically are made up of primarily white males, so of course using pregnancy as a the main plot of a film is a crucial move towards gender-inclusivity, it is still blatantly obvious how whiteness permeates these sort of stories about accidental pregnancies. She states that, "In this context, Hollywood's preference for middle-class white women choosing to have babies rather than abortions, could be interpreted as a racist anxiety over the 'browning of America'." These portrayals are inaccurate because white women are actually choosing not to have children more frequently, and also abortion is more accessible to those who can afford it. I definitely agree that choosing not to portray an accurate image of the racial make-up of American pregnancies points to a sort of fear by some of the continued mixing and changing of the racial make-up of America as a whole. To portray stories about women of color experiencing unplanned pregnancies would indeed carry a lot of political and cultural context that I doubt older white men, who normally direct and produce these films, would be able to portray accurately and compellingly.
Hi Kelsey! I think that women of color are portrayed as experiencing unplanned pregnancy the problem is how they are portrayed. When a white women experiences an unplanned pregnancy the movie typically ends off on a happy note. Whereas, when a woman of color experiences an unplanned pregnancy the movie usually ends on a negative note. I wonder how this impacts young black women as they learn about pregnancy. It seems that we are being told that pregnancy will be a burden to us and we will have no support systems. Perhaps, this is a way to prevent "the browning of America".
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