Hollywood's year of the accidental mother

COLLEEN CARROLL CAMPBELL

Much ink has been spilled over the unplanned pregnancies of starlets Jamie Lynn Spears and Nicole Richie. But more culturally significant are the onscreen pregnancies that made 2007 Hollywood's year of the accidental mother.

Ellen Page star of Juno

The trend started last spring with Waitress, a quirky comedy about Jenna, an unhappily married waitress who finds herself pregnant by the abusive husband she had been planning to leave. Although crestfallen at the news, Jenna reflexively rejects abortion, announcing with grim determination: "I respect this little baby's right to thrive." In the ensuing nine months, Jenna strikes up an affair with her married gynecologist, endures more abuse from her husband and warms to motherhood excruciatingly slowly, after months of dread. Yet the film's end finds Jenna exulting in her new daughter, whose birth inspires her to leave her abuser, end her affair and realize her dream of opening her own pie shop.

An unplanned pregnancy also is the unlikely avenue of redemption in last summer's crude hit comedy, Knocked Up. After a drunken one-night stand leaves responsible rising star Alison pregnant with the child of juvenile slacker Ben, she ignores her mother's thinly veiled suggestion that she should abort the child and have "a real baby" later. Alison embarks, instead, on the awkward adventure of getting to know Ben for the sake of the unborn child they have agreed to raise together. Despite the predictable complications, the film concludes with the pair celebrating the first birthday of the daughter whose life has become the catalyst for their love and initiation into adulthood.

Juno, released this month, offers yet another twist on the pro-natal theme. The eponymous heroine of this coarse and bittersweet comedy is a wise-cracking 16-year-old who faces an unplanned pregnancy after a sexual encounter with her dorky best friend. Initially phoning for what she describes as "a hasty abortion" from the local clinic, Juno reconsiders after encountering a plaintive pro-life classmate outside the clinic and a creepy, condom-pushing receptionist inside. Fleeing the clinic's seedy sterility, she opts for adoption instead.

In a season in which billions celebrate the redemptive promise that began with an unwed teenager's unexpected pregnancy two millennia ago, these films are an unconventional reminder that fertility is a blessing, even amid brokenness. And that life, for all its messy complexity, is a gift worth welcoming.

The film does not airbrush the costs of Juno's decision. But its depiction of her deepening maturity and the heartache of infertility experienced by her baby's would-be adoptive mother ultimately affirms her selfless choice. It is noteworthy that the writers and directors behind these three films — like those behind Bella, a more overtly pro-life film also released this year — are Gen Xers raised in the wake of the sexual revolution and the legalization of abortion. Under the cover of crudeness, their comedies pointedly mock the hollow values of their postmodern upbringing: the clinical soullessness of their sex education classes, the simplistic assumption that sex is just another contact sport for which condoms offer sufficient preparation and protection and the puerile fear of commitment and disregard for human life that feed our astronomical abortion rates.

Abortion-rights activists have decried these films for "glorifying" unplanned pregnancies and denigrating abortion. But the potty humor and compromised characters that dominate these stories hardly qualify them as family-values propaganda. And the scores of movies celebrating sex without strings surely deserve more blame for unplanned pregnancies than the handful depicting the consequences that follow from all that copulating.

Still, there is no mistaking the pro-life theme running through these stories and the cultural shift they signify. In a season in which billions celebrate the redemptive promise that began with an unwed teenager's unexpected pregnancy two millennia ago, these films are an unconventional reminder that fertility is a blessing, even amid brokenness. And that life, for all its messy complexity, is a gift worth welcoming.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Colleen Carroll Campbell. "Hollywood's year of the accidental mother." St. Louis Post-Dispatch. (December 27, 2007).

Reprinted with permission of the author, Colleen Carroll Campbell.

THE AUTHOR

Colleen Carroll Campbell, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., is a St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist, a former speechwriter to President George W. Bush, and author of The New Faithful: Why Young Adults Are Embracing Christian Orthodoxy. She writes for a wide variety of national publications, speaks to audiences across America, and hosts her own television show, "Faith & Culture," on EWTN, the world's largest religious media network. Her website is here.