The Abortion Will Not Be Televised
IN 1981, EIGHT YEARS after Roe v. Wade legalized abortion and just a year before her breakout role as pregnant Stacy in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Jennifer Jason Leigh played another apparently knocked-up high schooler, this time in a CBS after-school special called I Think I’m Having a Baby. Leigh is Laurie, a hard-crushing freshman taken for a roll in the leaves by the dreamy senior asshole Peter, who is cheating on his girlfriend, Phoebe, played by a hair-flipping Helen Hunt. Not to spoil it for you, but I’ll spoil it for you: Laurie is not actually having a baby. But the 29-minute near tragedy, aimed at preteens, traces her romantic and existential anguish after she tells Peter about the “pregnancy,” and Peter essentially tells her to deal with it all on her own. It’s a classic “used and discarded” story—a model of the early abortion-centric television genre.
For starters, Laurie becomes sick the day after Peter seduces her after a cookout, as if the mere proximity of sperm and egg conjures up all-day ralphing sessions. Later, she sneaks off to a local abortion clinic, where a kindly nurse offers her, there’s nothing to worry about. The lesson here, I’m assuming, is that contraception could have saved Laurie the bellyache, except nobody specifically mentions condoms or the Pill. Instead, it’s just a ho-hum story of a close call, coupled with some truly traumatizing hair.
