<em>Knocked Up</em> and the American Impulse to Edit Out Abortion
Early in Knocked Up, Ben Stone (played by Seth Rogen) tells his friends that a one-night stand has ended in pregnancy. Ben’s friend Jonah (Jonah Hill) offers him advice on the matter. “It rhymes with shma-shmortion,” Jonah says. “I’m just saying … you should get a shma-shmortion at the shma-shmortion clinic.”
Knocked Up is now 15 years old. It premiered in 2007, a product of raunch culture and one of its bards, the director Judd Apatow. The movie tells the story of Alison (Katherine Heigl), an up-and-coming entertainment reporter, and the charming slacker Ben, who have an encounter and then, in short order, a baby. The film is a fairy tale, of sorts—a romanticized account of how a night came to last a lifetime. I mention it because last week, a leaked draft Supreme Court opinion hinted that Roe v. Wade will soon fall—and because yesterday, Senate Republicans blocked a bill meant to safeguard Roe’s protections. Combined, the two events augur a rollback of rights that will give today’s women less say over their bodies than their grandmothers had.
, which processes an unintended pregnancy as world. Alison’s life is not threatened by her pregnancy, nor is her livelihood. She lives in California, one of the bluest of the blue states. She has a community of people who are willing and able to support her. She has none of the vulnerabilities that can, for so many, turn a pregnancy into a catastrophe. Her genre, and therefore her situation, is comedy. But comedy, in the assumptions it makes about what is laughable and what is not, can be revealing. “Shma-shmortion” alone is revealing. is a self-consciously edgy movie that declines, again and again, to say the word out loud. It has much to say about ’s looming tragedy—precisely because, so often, it opts to say nothing at all.
