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To: Borges
I don't think there ever has been a golden age of pro-abortion films. There did seem to be some pro-abortion propaganda on TV in the seventies. There was the infamous Maude episode where she took advantage of New York's liberal abortion law to dispose of an unintended pregnancy. Though she at first struggled with her "choice", she eventually concluded that abortion was the logical thing to do and her daughter was the most strident character on the show, pushing abortion like it was nothing more consequential than having your tonsils removed.

Apparently soap operas in the seventies, during the years immediately post-Roe, featured a lot of abortions. From what I've been told (I never watched 'em) the woman would struggle over her "choice" but in the end decide the abortion was best for all concerned. I don't know if that still goes on today or not.

Some movies in the seventies and eighties began to drop abortions into their storylines, sort of casually. They weren't major parts of the plot. There's a scene in the movie Coma where some med students go into an operating theater to observe an operation. They're casually told it's going to be an abortion, and they don't seem to mind a bit. The woman in question decided to abort rather casually as well.

In Fast Times at Ridgemont High, one of the lead female characters gets pregnant, casually gets an abortion, and just shrugs it off. In Dirty Dancing a character gets an abortion and pays for it by lying to someone to get the money. In this case, the girl who had the abortion suffers because the abortion was botched, but since the film was set in the years before abortion was legal this was designed to make us sympathize with legality.

49 posted on 01/09/2008 4:34:37 AM PST by puroresu (Enjoy ASIAN CINEMA? See my Freeper page for recommendations (updated!).)
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To: puroresu

And Coma was written and directed by apparent conservative Michael Crichton (based on the Robin Cook novel). I don’t know anything about soap operas but the films you mentioned are decades apart in many cases. It’s not exactly a plethora. In the case of Coma (and The Cider House Rules and probably ‘Fast Times’ as well) it was a case of the source material having that material to begin with.


50 posted on 01/09/2008 7:45:16 AM PST by Borges
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