Pop Culture's Assault on Reproductive Rights and Cult of Teen Moms

By Mara Gay

Friday, when a Kansas jury took only 37 minutes to convict Scott Roeder of first-degree murder, they affirmed something important about abortions in American life: abortions remain legal, and believing they are a sin does not justify murdering the doctors who perform them. I breathed a huge sigh of relief. I just hope I'm not the only one.

Last May, when Scott Roeder shot and killed Dr. George Tiller, one of the nation's only late-term abortion providers, the war on a woman's right to choose turned violent. But evangelicals are not the only threat to reproductive rights anymore.

In recent years, the procedure has been under assault from some unlikely, but potentially more powerful foe: popular culture.

After a decade of decline, our nation's teen pregnancy rate is actually climbing, and while signs of sex and teen pregnancy are everywhere, abortion seems conspicuously absent from this cultural dance. Bristol Palin, for example, who has served as a somewhat unlikely mascot for abstinence, graced a recent cover of US Weekly Magazine with her mother under a headline that read, "We're Glad We Chose Life."

MTV's hit show "Teen Mom," has done its part to show young women how un-glamorous teenage motherhood can be. But as you watch Amber and Maci struggle to finish their homework while bouncing a baby on their lap, you can't help but wonder if the girls ever considered abortion.

An online interview with the stars of the show is particularly revealing. Amber, one of the teen moms, says, "abortion, adoption-nothing even popped into my mind like that." But then, she says watching the story of Catelynn, the only girl on the show to have given her baby up for adoption, has been eye-opening. "To see her story [on TV] made me realize there were other options," Amber says. Catelynn chimes in. "You didn't have anybody telling you about other options," she offers.

2007's "Knocked Up" may have been the first sign that something was awry. Director Judd Apatow set out to make a summer blockbuster, not a statement about abortion, but "Knocked Up" spoke volumes anyway. In the film, the beautiful Alison Scott (played by Katherine Heigl) becomes pregnant after a one-night stand with the decidedly less attractive Ben Stone (Seth Rogan). Alison decides to keep the baby, despite the fact that she's up for a promotion at work, doesn't seem to be religious, and has no real relationship with the baby's father. More strange than Alison's decision is that the subject of abortion never came up as an option at all. Many critics couldn't help but notice that that the word "abortion" was conspicuously absent from the film altogether. At Slate Magazine, for example, Dana Stevens was disturbed. "Apatow's reticence on the subject seems to spring less from personal conviction than from the fear of offending his audience's sensibilities," she wrote in 2007. "This kind of Trojan horse moralism is maddeningly common in pop-culture representations of abortion, which seem muzzled, invisibly policed, by either the pro-life lobby or the fear of it."

Then, there was Juno. The smart, quirky film about how a snarky 16-year-old and her adorably immature boyfriend deal with her pregnancy is endearing. But its treatment of abortion was no less perplexing than Judd Apatow's in "Knocked Up." In the film, Juno heads to a clinic to terminate her pregnancy, but runs into a classmate protesting outside who tries to stop her by shouting, "Your baby has fingernails, you know!" Juno can't go through with it, and gives the baby up for adoption. In 2007, The Village Voice's Nathan Lee called Juno a "deeply conservative comedy about how totally hilarious and super-sweet it is for a 16-year-old high-school girl not to have an abortion."

Of course, part of a woman's right to choose is her right to choose life as well. And to be sure, abortion is not birth control; it should never be trendy. Still, its peculiar disappearance from popular culture in recent years is disquieting.

It is an odd thing. Many Americans remain fiercely divided over abortion, but the country's young women - a group intimately affected by the state of reproductive rights - seem to be deeply complacent, not passionate, about the place of abortion in their world.

It's not clear yet what affect the great disappearance of abortion from popular culture will have on a woman's right to choose. But one thing is for sure: while young women may have relegated their support for abortion rights to the private sphere, the anti-abortion movement has not. Indeed, 30 years after Roe v. Wade, it has emerged as a powerful force in American culture.

Mara Gay contributes to AOL news and previously worked for The Atlantic.  Her stories have appeared in The Washington Post and The Root.  She lives in New York.