13 Hollywood Storytellers on Bringing Abortion to the Screen, Then and Now

'The Handmaid's Tale' Writer Jacey Heldrich

Season four episode “Milk” (May 2021) of Hulu’s dystopian series flashed back to pre-Gilead times to show Janine (Madeline Brewer), already a mother of one, seeking an abortion and being at first misled to go to a crisis pregnancy center.

So much of what we do with our flashbacks on The Handmaid’s Tale is this invention of: What do our American institutions look like at the cusp of something like a Gilead? How does health care look? How does education look? How does the workplace look? We’ve done a lot of those stories, and it was always really important to us to look at reproductive health care through that lens. But for the abortion flashback, specifically, none of that was invented. Even before Roe was overturned, what Janine [Madeline Brewer] goes through is the experience young women in this country had trying to secure the termination of their pregnancy. We rooted it in this very real thing of the crisis pregnancy center, which is not anything that’s specific to any part of the country or area of the country. It’s all over the place. They outnumber real reproductive health centers by an extraordinary amount and even the most thoughtful woman with the most access can get duped by these places.

They work much like a fast-food chain, where they’ll put themselves next to real reproductive health care centers. They are as insidious as every other part of the anti-choice movement. They are staffed by young women who are trained to think that what they are doing is correct. What they were doing up until now, which they don’t have to do in a lot of states anymore, was gaslight women into thinking they don’t need abortions, like in the scene we saw with Janine, where they will tell you a lot of lies about what happens to your body and the fetus within you when you terminate the pregnancy — and it’s absolutely terrifying. They also run out the clock. In the states that had abortion bans up until 15 or 12 weeks, they would effectively convince the pregnant woman they have plenty of time to make this decision, and they don’t. They run out their clock, and the girls can no longer secure the health care they need. It’s only going to get worse. These places are incredibly well-funded through churches and government, because they masquerade as “health care facilities” by offering things like ultrasounds. One thing that came up again and again, both in my research and in talks about this episode, is just how misinformed people are about what abortion is. These [crisis centers] exist as little misinformation factories where these kind of lies about pregnancy termination are just going to continue to spill out into the culture. That’s going to be our really big fight — combating the enormous tsunami of misinformation that continues to abound around abortion, now that people are going to turn a blind eye a little bit more because it’s so inflammatory.

The scene that we weren’t able to get into the episode [because of COVID-19 production limitations] that I would have liked to have shown is that when you seek abortion care at a legitimate place, they’re not going to make you have an ultrasound. If you go to a crisis pregnancy center, they will. The scene we had written is that they forced Janine to have an ultrasound, gave her a picture of the ultrasound and called it her baby, they call her “the mommy”; they do these things to convince you that a gestating embryo is a real baby, which it’s not. It’s psychological warfare on women. Effectively, the whole show is about a woman’s right to choose. And I really believe that the choice to terminate a pregnancy is one of the strongest choices a woman and a mother can make. For Janine, the choice to terminate a pregnancy to benefit the son she already has and the life she already has is a choice of love and strength and thoughtfulness.

I keep telling people that I spent seven years kind of shrugging my shoulders when people would make Handmaid’s Tale analogies, thinking it’s silly and reductive to say, “This is where we’re heading.” But in the last week I’ve caught myself thinking, “Well, this scene happened, and this scene happened.” My one viral tweet I’ve ever had was on Jan. 6 where I said, “OK, but this is how The Handmaid’s Tale starts.” It’s been a real shift from thinking the story is just an imaginary version. We’re dealing with the rise of religious extremism, and that is the most dangerous thing in the world. — As told to Jackie Strause

'Plan B' Director Natalie Morales

The Hulu film Plan B (May 2021) follows two best friends (Victoria Moroles and Kuhoo Verma) trying to hunt down the morning-after pill in South Dakota within 24 hours.

Contraception and emergency contraception are so important to talk about — especially if you are against abortion. What I knew, and what was proven to me when I was promoting the movie, is that there’s an extreme lack of sexual education. In the movie, the school is not teaching the students anything they need to know, which is a huge problem in America and could prevent so many abortions from happening. If that is your agenda, that is what you should be investing in. Because, as we know, you will never ban abortions. You will only ban safe abortions. In all of the interviews I did afterwards, I can’t tell you how many people thought Plan B was an abortion pill. Grown adults thought it was an abortion pill. I am not here to judge you. Someone should have taught you that in school.

A lot of the stuff I make is slyly educational, while also making fart jokes and showing full-frontal male nudity. I made a point in Plan B that every single time we talked about [Plan B, the pill], we said, “If you don’t take this, you may get pregnant.” Not: “This will stop a pregnancy.” If people aren’t getting this in schools and they aren’t getting this in homes, maybe they can get it on their TV. Plan B is not an abortion pill. It is an emergency contraception pill.

People in movies and TV shows don’t even talk about periods much. We have somehow been ingrained to think these are women’s issues and no one wants to hear about them. There have been movies and TV shows that have talked about reproductive rights and contraception, of course. But I think it was important to have teenagers talk about it frankly — like the fact that Plan B is $50. A thing they come up against in Plan B is the Conscience Clause, which is real in many states, where a pharmacist can deny you contraception based on their own beliefs. The only way to connect with people is not to heighten it, is not to preach to the choir. I’m not talking to the coastal elite left, I’m talking to everybody in this nation that needs it. I don’t need to exaggerate the way things are for teenage girls in this country.

What I would like to see [from Hollywood] is something that speaks to people outside of our own bubble in an earnest and clear way. Plan B is set in South Dakota, not in L.A. and not in New York. It is set there for a reason, because I hadn’t seen a lot of teen movies that are set in places where people aren’t rich and don’t have unlimited means. I am very hopeful, because I have to be. And the role I hope that Hollywood will start to play, and this is on me as much as it is on anyone else, is to talk to these people and to connect with these people. If we feel like we aren’t speaking to everybody, then we are doing a disservice. I grew up indoctrinated into the anti-abortion way of thinking. I was not taught why abortion is needed. All I was taught when I was a child was that abortion was murder. I was not educated on socioeconomic elements, the history of it or the medical aspect of it. Thankfully, I learned at a pretty early age and it changed my mind. But that education is something [Hollywood] can also do and the only way to do that is to not judge people who really don’t know. — As told to Mia Galuppo

'Unpregnant' Director Rachel Lee Goldberg

Based on a book of the same name, the HBO Max buddy comedy (September 2020) follows a Missouri teen (Haley Lu Richardson) who goes on a road trip with her friend (Barbie Ferreira) to get an abortion in New Mexico.

Unpregnant was a stop on the road of my own abortion journey. I got an abortion years ago and didn’t tell almost anyone. I told my mom; I told a couple of friends. I just thought it was something you don’t talk about, even though I was adamantly pro-choice and had always been. Years later, I realized I was like a covert agent for the other side by not talking about my abortion. That’s what anti-abortion advocates want us to do. We need to be saying the word “abortion” and talking about abortion and just being as open about it as possible to destigmatize it. So, I started talking about it. I got an abortion nameplate necklace and started wearing it everywhere. Through that, my agent was aware of [my abortion] as well, and she sent me the manuscript for Unpregnant. It felt like a way to talk about abortion and normalize abortion in a larger way than by wearing my necklace.

Everyone on the movie had their own journey to normalizing the thing that we were working on. [We would be] in a production meeting and the transportation guy would go, “So when she goes to do the thing …” The abortion! The abortion scene! Haley and I were friends, and I knew that this was her project. I had breakfast with her, and she had a lot of questions and concerns about portraying an abortion and how to do it. She took some time to think about it and went on her own journey. It’s not only how you feel about abortion. For an actor, you are becoming the face of it. Coming around to it, she told me that she wanted to portray a choice that someone could make.

In the initial script that I received, there was not an abortion sequence. There was a scene where she goes to get the abortion but not the abortion itself. That was something that became part of the script when my writing partner and I went to a Planned Parenthood to understand a surgical abortion. My abortion was a medication abortion. We were walked through step by step what happened, and I was blown away that I didn’t know any of it. It all felt like a mystery, and that may be intentional. We are meant to think it is scary or difficult, when actually it is such a simple medical procedure. I wanted to be with the character, after her journey of a literal thousand miles, for her last piece of it. Everyone was on board for the mission of the film, and they sort of had to be. We shot with a fake name and we didn’t let places know [what the film was about] except for the location where we shot the actual abortion scene. It was really a security issue. We wanted to keep our crew and cast safe. Our code name was “UFO Road Trip.”

I’m too angry to make Unpregnant now. I have another abortion project in the pipeline that is more expressive of how I feel now. I am, of course, glad it exists and for anyone who wants to make anything that will normalize and destigmatize abortion, it is important. But, for myself, that movie was made with a certain amount of hope, and I am feeling more anger and that is where my work is coming from now. — As told to M.G.

'Shrill' Co-creator Alexandra Rushfield

In the premiere of the Hulu dramedy, “Annie” (March 2019), Annie (Aidy Bryant) goes to a clinic to have an abortion after finding out the morning-after pill is ineffective for women over a certain weight.

Shrill is based on Lindy West’s book. And in her book, the pivotal incident in her life that changed her from feeling bad about herself to feeling like she was, for the first time, taking care of herself was when she got an abortion from a pregnancy with someone who she didn’t feel treated her well. It was also at a time in her life where she wasn’t ready to have children. When I came on, it became important both to Lindy and to me that it be in the first episode because it would really launch the character into not being a doormat anymore. We didn’t want to see her as a sad sack the whole season, and then end with that. Also, it was a way to weed out the girls from the women in terms of networks, to be like, “Will you put an abortion in the first episode?” And I have to say, the people who were interested never blinked at that. There was even a broadcast network that was interested. Abortion as a topic had been done on TV but the pilot piece felt novel.

There were lots of conversations [in our writers room] about it having to be very authentic to reality, and there were conversations with Planned Parenthood and different people who worked in clinics to find out what exactly the language is. I personally had jokes in the scene that I wanted to put in — not jokes about abortion, but Annie sort of nervously chatting. I remember saying, “We could have her being like, ‘Is this like removing a mole or killing a fly? Like, is there a soul involved?'” And Lindy was like, “Do not mention a soul. Stop. Just stop.” Both her and Aidy were like, “It should be a silent scene,” because they wanted you to focus on how serious and meaningful this was to the character. They wanted her to feel the weight of the moment, which is right. And I think silence was the right thing because you could just focus on her face, and not anything else.

If I were doing it now, I’d also try to show the more recent reality, which is someone having to go to a different state and the landmines. Because not everyone in the states that are banning it will have a hard time getting an abortion, but some people will and that should be shown, too. And this [came up on Shrill], but I feel like something that should also be highlighted now is that the morning-after pill doesn’t work for people above a certain weight. If that’s going to be a more prevalent thing, people should know the limitations. — As told to Lacey Rose

'Vida' Creator Tanya Saracho

Season three episode “Emma and Nico” (May 2020) of the Starz series depicted the character Emma (Mishel Prada) taking the abortion pill — and failing to properly follow the clinic’s instructions.

What we wanted to do was normalize the [abortion] process, and modernize the perception in the Latina community. Those in our writers room who’d had abortions, including myself, wanted to be like, “Look, this is how it actually is or can be.” A lot of times abortions have been treated as this traumatic, emotional event where the character is dealing with the damage of it. So, we had Emma go into a clinic that had a really positive vibe, because there are a bunch of those here in L.A. They gave her the two pills and the instructions, which were the same as the ones from Planned Parenthood. Because of character stuff, she didn’t follow the directions, and what she suffered was physical, not emotional. She didn’t have that famous, like, “Should I call him? Should I tell him?” It was her business, we’d decided, and she took care of it as she would any other bodily function, and the drama came from elsewhere.

We worked with Caren Spruch at Planned Parenthood, which we had also done the season before when we dealt with condoms on vibrators. All of us in the room had had the medical [procedure]. We hadn’t used the pill. And Caren was like, “Please, can they use the pill?” We thought that was brilliant because there’s not a lot of information out there about it, so we said yes, and then we stayed in constant contact and showed them scripts to make sure we were saying and doing everything right. If we were doing it now, Jesus, I don’t know. We were trying to combat the stigma, culturally, by normalizing it at the time. But that’s a different battle. It’s so much bigger now. And it’s a different argument, it’s about having control over your own body, and so it would be about that. — As told to L.R.

'Dear White People' Creator Justin Simien

Season two episode “Chapter IV” (May 2018) of the Netflix dramedy followed Winchester University student Coco (Antoinette Robertson) weighing her decision to have an abortion as she imagines her alternate future if she instead had a baby at age 20.

This episode came out of a real room discussion. We had talked about the idea of Coco getting pregnant or dealing with something that hit different because she is a Black woman in a white institution that makes certain demands on her, and her body and her presence. I wanted to let the women in the room lead this conversation, specifically Njeri Brown, who wrote the episode. Because our show is called Dear White People, the last thing we want to do is moralize or preach to people. We didn’t want to say what was morally right or wrong. It was really to explore the predicament that Coco was in and the uniqueness of that predicament because of her being a Black woman and the way in which the decision is weighed: Let’s show Coco really making this difficult, personal, gut-wrenching decision that just so happens to be the right one for her.

We didn’t want to “after school special” it. We didn’t want to relegate it to a quick beat in an episode. We also didn’t want to squeeze the tragedy out of it. A lot of times with Black characters, in particular, you feel a pressure to moralize it, because you don’t have a lot of shots at representation. There is this great pressure to put this character on the screen who represents this universal, totality of the Black women experience — and we really rejected that. We felt like the most honest thing to do is to let this character tell us what is going to happen, and not have the point of the episode be about which way she goes. It was about letting our audience feel seen. This episode is when a lot of people just fall for [Coco].

With Netflix, we were certainly encouraged to say something different. That really was the directive of Netflix at that time. And that was great because that was one of my mantras on the show. We revisit Coco’s choice a few times throughout the series, but if I were in the room now, this would be a classic opportunity for us to regroup and to perhaps say something more pointed. Our show is always going to be anti-fascist, and anti-this sort of white supremacy/patriarchy that keeps spreading like a cancer. I’d want to see a very pro-abortion episode that just goes all-out. I don’t think we could have even fathomed this was a possibility when we did that episode. It wasn’t necessarily a “fighting for a right” mentally, other than for people to feel seen about the choices they were making. Now that the choices are being ripped away — we would have a lot more to say. I doubt we could say it all in one episode without it being a full arc. 

One of the regrets I had going from the movie to the show is that with the movie, we were still pre-Tamir Rice, pre-Black Lives Matter, and I remember when it finally hit theaters, I thought, “God, if I could do it again today, I would make this more radical.” Then when we got the opportunity to do the show, there was certainly more of this tone of revolution and overthrow. We got a lot of shit for it, especially early on, but in no way did it ever feel like it was an overreaction as the years have unfolded. I think that particularly in Hollywood, it’s really time to be bold and break out of the mold and not care about what the “backlash” is going to be. This is peoples’ lives on the line. — As told to J.S.

'Veep' Showrunner David Mandel

Season seven episode “Pledge” (April 2019) sees Amy (Anna Chlumsky) weighing her options after a one-night stand with Dan (Reid Scott) and ultimately going to an Iowa women’s clinic with him, greeted by a group of anti-abortion protestors, to have an abortion.

For me, having been raised in the ‘70s and ‘80s, abortion rarely came up on network television. When it did, it was a “very special episode.” Rarely did anyone on network TV in my lifetime actually have an abortion. If they decided to get the abortion, they usually miscarried before they were going to go through with it. It was always, “Oh, I don’t think we’re going to keep it — oh my God, it was a miscarriage.” It was a different time. Abortion had been a political topic on Veep, deftly and brilliantly, and quotably, handled by Armando [Iannucci, creator] and his team. [Mandel came aboard as showrunner in season five.] Amy was our abortion story [in the final season episode “Pledge,” written by Rachel Axler]. What we thought was important, as we talked about all the different possibilities with Amy, was not that her decision was flippant but that it was no big deal, that there was a matter-of-fact-ness, that if a woman decided this was right for her, she should and could do it. The end. That was the most important thing, which, of course, now, there might be a couple of states that I could be arrested in for having worked on the show. But the point was that it was Amy’s choice, and she made the choice. It was that simple.

That final season was crunched down to seven episodes. In the 10-episode iteration, in the early days of planning, we had as a guest in one of our writers room sessions — an OB-GYN who volunteered and did work at abortion clinics in different parts of states where abortion services were few and far between. She told us about these fake clinics that masqueraded as places that would help you to get an abortion but were actually there to trick you into not getting an abortion. They’d try to inundate you with propaganda; they would bamboozle you. We never wrote it up. But there was an early idea when Amy was going to be in Iowa that she would end up going to one of these crisis centers, or be taken to one not knowing, and would have a confrontation. There was no room in the structure for it. The scene would have been an interesting and good one. In hindsight, I wish we had done it, only in that I wish we could have drawn more attention to all of the pieces that have been setting the stage for the last 20 years that got us to this Supreme Court decision. Just to point out the long game. As everyone is now realizing, this was an unfortunately well-played slow game by the Federalist Society, Republicans, Mitch McConnell. This was a piece-by-piece, baby-step-by-baby-step thing that we, as Democrats and people who support abortion rights, unfortunately were sort of blind to or just kept underestimating.

If we were writing the episode today, I think we’d find a different way to joke about it. I think we’d be joking more, perhaps, about where this country was headed and what these limitations meant. Certainly, if we were doing it right now, it would probably be about Amy in a state where maybe she had an appointment next Thursday and on Friday afternoon, the Supreme Court issues their statement and cut to Monday and her appointment is canceled. Not that it’s a joking matter, but the comedy for what is happening to this country is where we would have gone with it now. But I’m more interested in the larger fight than the specific act. Abortion should not be a big deal. It’s a big deal for the person, but it’s their big deal. It’s not my big deal to tell them or anyone what to do about it. So I do hope shows continue to tell stories in and around the struggle for this country. It’s all the bad jokes; the right for a woman to control her own body has been overturned and supported by a bunch of people who have let guns run wild on the streets of America and who can’t get vaccinated because it’s their own body and their choice. As TV people, all we can do is shine a light on it. I think every little bit helps. As a depressed Democrat, nothing helps. The last couple of years, everyone has said, “We’ve been living in Veep” — which was bad enough — and soon we are going to be living in The Handmaid’s Tale, and that’s much worse. I didn’t think it could get worse than Veep, but it can. — As told to J.S.

'The Morning Show' Showrunner Kerry Ehrin

Season one episode “That Woman” (November 2019) saw morning news anchor Bradley Jackson (Reese Witherspoon) revealing on live television that she got an abortion at age 15. The unplanned moment sparked high school walkouts over state abortion bans.

In 2018, when it was written, the legality of abortion was not in question — nor did we ever imagine it would or could be. So, it was really more of a character moment for Bradley to act out by saying it on her first day as co-anchor. The point we were going for back then is that the corporation that paid for TMS — fictionally, I’m talking about the fictional network, UBA — freaked out because they didn’t want to ruffle mainstream America. Corporations have spent a lot of their lives riding that middle ground, which is getting harder to ride. (See: Disney recently regarding LGBTQ rights.) The Morning Show was always about the bullshit between what corporations say and what they actually want or are trying to accomplish. That is, in large part, profits, which is understandable as they are businesses. But the bullshittery can be very fake and tiresome. It can be very postured, even though most people inside of them want real change and equality. But it’s tough to make the system keep working for you and challenge it at the same time.

In 2018, we were looking at a world that was getting accustomed to more transparency in wake of #MeToo. So, the writing on the wall we were dealing with [then] is that people, such as a popular news anchor, were questioning what their own role in transparency was. I mean, when you look at Hollywood and the whole machine of how we promote and present talent, we are creating a fiction for the world. And social media has begun to crack the fiction because we are seeing them as real and imperfect people. It was a challenging episode for other reasons, but that turn for Bradley actually made the episode better and cleaner to write because it had a real point and a purpose. Apple loved and fully supported that storyline.  

I think if Bradley said that now, it would be much more of a political statement than a statement about the fakery of how we are asked to present [ourselves]. It would be a totally different story. If I was doing it now, I would probably have people start to talk about their own experiences with abortion. I think it’s extremely powerful when people talk about it and acknowledge their own experiences. Especially famous people. So many humans have dealt with it. It still stuns me that this recent overturning is a decision my country made. – As told to L.R.

'GLOW ' Creators Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch

Season one episode “Maybe It’s All the Disco” (June 2017) of the 1980s-set Netflix comedy saw Ruth (Alison Brie), after a brief affair with her best friend’s (Betty Gilpin) husband, getting an abortion at a Planned Parenthood clinic.

'Jane the Virgin' Creator Jennie Snyder Urman

Season three episode “Chapter Forty-Six” (October 2016) of the CW comedy follows Xo (Andrea Navedo), after seeking a medical abortion and sharing her decision with her daughter, Jane (Gina Rodriguez), and devout Catholic mother, Alba (Ivonne Coll).

'You're the Worst' Creator Stephen Falk

Season three episode “Talking to Me, Talking to Me” (November 2016) of the the FXX comedy featured Lindsay (Kether Donohue) casually telling best friend Gretchen (Aya Cash) she was “eating for two for the last time” over lunch and dismissing a protester before getting an abortion.

I grew up in Berkeley, which is a terrible place to grow up If you want to have a well-rounded perspective on the viewpoints of America or the world, because it’s a monoculture. Abortion being part of women’s health care was just normal. I’m also a disciple of Jenji Kohan, so Berkeley and Jenji helped to shape my views on how the topic of abortion is discussed and dramatized. In fact, the first episode of TV I ever wrote that aired was an episode of [Kohan’s Showtime series] Weeds called “Van Nuys.” The title came from Justin Kirk’s character’s code word for abortion, Van Nuys, because that’s where he used to take his girlfriends to get them. And he’s trying to convince Nancy [Mary-Louise Parker’s character] to abort her drug kingpin boyfriend’s baby. They go to an abortion clinic, where the obstetrician-gynecologist is Alanis Morissette. So not only is my You’re the Worst episode not the first time I’ve written about abortion, the very first thing I ever wrote was about abortion.

We could have made a big deal about it, as we made a big deal about almost everything else on You’re the Worst, but it felt like it would have the most impact if we went the other way with it and made it just a thing that Lindsay did. So, in crafting the episode, we had it be a thing that Gretchen took her to and a thing that they’d done before — a ritual of friends supporting friends. And yet, in the episode, we did have Lindsay encounter an anti-abortion picketer and our comedic take on that was that Lindsay was going to not recognize who this person was or what her agenda was and just talk her thoughts out about why she wanted to do this and also why she was wavering, because there was part of her that did want to have a family with Paul [Allan McLeod]. But in describing the mess that her life is, the joke is that even though Gretchen “rescues her from this person posing as a sympathetic ear,” the woman in the end says to Lindsay, “Yeah, there are certain circumstances that I think abortion should be allowed: rape, incest and whatever this is,” and that was a funny way to underline it.

We didn’t have much of a debate about it in the room. It was very much left to the women — Alison Bennett and Eva Anderson, who were the voice of Lindsay, comedically — to lead us and tell us what made sense. For better or for worse, they shared similar political views [with me] on the topic and they very much drove the idea that normalizing it to such a degree would be both funny and make a statement politically. I don’t think FX had any problem with it, either. It was our third season, and by then we’d already dealt with a lot of thorny issues, like mental illness and PTSD. Having Lindsay get an abortion was not a big deal for them. And I think having her husband react badly to her having made that choice without him, which happens in the next episode, was a good thing to do. It showed that there are ramifications and it doesn’t take place in a vacuum, absolutely no dark pun intended.

If we had to revisit that episode today, I think I wouldn’t be so flippant about it. I might write to the complications of it in a more serious way because, to be honest, I never thought it was something that wasn’t decided. If I thought that rights were under attack, if I’d seen the long game happening, I might have made it a little more nuanced, a little more impassioned, a little harder.

I’m not in a room right now, so I haven’t had any sort of lively debates or big group cries about what’s happening. But there’s something I’m working on for Netflix, and my wife is very much pushing for us to have a character almost immediately have an abortion in, like, episode three … just to say “fuck you” to those that would pack our courts and take away our rights. But again, whatever I do in the arena, I think I’ll spend more time having the characters, not agonize over it, but talk about it and talk about the ramifications. I think maybe there’s a smugness to the comfortability that our rights are protected and maybe if we acknowledge that it’s an ongoing fight, those rights can’t be taken away quite as easily while we’re asleep at the wheel. – As told to L.R.

'Crazy Ex-Girlfriend' Co-creator Aline Brosh McKenna

Season two episode “When Will Josh and His Friend Leave Me Alone?” (November 2016) of the CW musical comedy featured married mother of two Paula (Donna Lynne Champlin) getting an abortion so she could continue to pursue her law degree.

Network shows often deal with younger characters and their sort of romantic [entanglements], which of course we had done as well, but we always loved having Paula there to depict the realities of middle age. Abortion is often featured as something that a teen character is dealing with, which is perfectly legitimate, but we’d known a lot of people who had dealt with abortions later in their life — after they’d had their children, when it was not practical or feasible for them to have another child — and we wanted to show that. And we wanted to show it in the context in which we saw it, which was A) medical care and B) no one’s fucking business. And in the context of a loving family, where there are men in the family who fully support what she’s done, so much so that there isn’t really conversation around her decision but rather around making her feel comfortable and letting her rest. Then someone in the writers room pitched a really fabulous line, where she’s lying in bed and recuperating and the doorbell rings and her son says, “Mom, do you want me to get the door since you just had an abortion?” That was our way of showing how very normal it is.

If I were to do it again today, I would not have taken it for granted in the way we clearly did and were then. The whole idea of it was that she understands that this is a choice that she has, and so does everyone around her. If we were doing it now, I think we would’ve done it the same exact way, but we might have felt braver than we did. But listen, I’m very glad we got to do it the way in which we did and we encountered no resistance on the part of CBS or The CW, which didn’t surprise me at all because we’d always been encouraged to make the show we wanted to make. At some point, somebody described us as the most gynecologically accurate show on television. We talked about clitorises, we talked about vaginal infections, we talked about abortion. And again, these are A) very normal things and B) no one’s fucking business. Our show happened to believe that women are fully fledged human beings who are able to make decisions for themselves and, stupidly, we never anticipated that we would be waking up in the dystopia we increasingly find ourselves in. — As told to L.R.

'Obvious Child' Writer-Director Gillian Robespierre

The film (June 2014) follows a stand-up comedian (Jenny Slate) who has a one-night stand that leads to an unplanned pregnancy, which forces her to confront the realities of adulthood and adult relationships.

My co-writers and I were frustrated and a little disenchanted with the way that a young woman’s experience with unplanned pregnancy was being represented in films and television and our culture. There were a lot of movies that we walked out of loving and upon reflection were like, “Wait a second.”  I had really enjoyed that two-and-a-half-hours, but they made a joke out of a word and got embarrassed to say abortion like they were saying “dick-penis-fuck” or something. Upon reflection, we thought, “Why didn’t they have the balls to say the word ‘abortion’?” I don’t want to pinpoint one particular film, [the question] is more about why is abortion not a choice in movies? And when it is a choice in movies, we are left with scary depictions. In my favorite abortion movie, which is Dirty Dancing, [the abortion] was back-alley. It was bloody. She almost died. That might have been realistic to the time, and it was a terrifying depiction for a little girl watching it, myself. When I had my abortion at 19, those images were flashing through my brain. Mine turned out to be a very pleasant one, and it was not a traumatizing experience for many women I know.

These movies in the early 2000s almost felt like a dare. Like, “Why don’t you try it?” You will fail because there is no way a movie — a comedy or even a romantic comedy — that prominently features an abortion as a central narrative could be entertaining. We really set out to tell a story about one woman who easily makes the decision to have an abortion without feeling guilty or traumatized. Obvious Child was made so outside of the studio system. My amazing producer Elisabeth Holm set out to find investors who were never going to try to persuade us or challenge us or strong-arm us to change the ending. Afterward, when we were bought by A24 and went on a press tour, in every interview we were talking about abortion and we said the word “abortion.” During all of the Q&As after the film, women and men would come up to me after and tell me their abortion stories. We were saying a word that usually you would whisper. For it to be on the [movie] poster, it felt like taking a taboo word and making it something that wasn’t so scary to talk about.

I don’t think movies can change people’s political stances. I think we have to continue to make art and tell stories that don’t silence women’s experiences, because silence is the greatest weapon. But I think Obvious Child fell short in some ways because it was one woman’s story and one woman with privilege. She was a white woman, who had the resources to pay for it and lived in New York City, where she had access. We wanted it to start a conversation and hopefully open the floodgates for more marginalized stories to surface. But that didn’t happen. Open the door for more people to tell stories. I don’t invest in movies, but Obvious Child played for 14 weeks in theaters. I would like to see more stories that show characters that are three-dimensional. — As told to M.G.