“Hey, yeah, um, I…I’m just calling to procure a hasty abortion.”

Juno (2007), revisited

Another episode of Rom Coms Revisited: exploring the good/bad/ugly of early 2000s rom coms.

This time we’ve got a repro rights angle!

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Juno is a 2007 American coming-of-age comedy-drama film directed by Jason Reitman and written by Diablo Cody. Elliot Page^[a] stars as the title character, an independent-minded teenager confronting her unplanned pregnancy and the subsequent events that put pressures of adult life onto her. Michael Cera, Jennifer Garner, Jason Bateman, Allison Janney and J. K. Simmons also star. Filming spanned from early February to March 2007 in Vancouver, British Columbia. It premiered on September 8 at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival, receiving a standing ovation.

I remember seeing Juno in theaters in 2007. I sat with a group of my high school friends and ate Dr. Pepper jellybeans. If my math is correct, the titular character and I were the same age at the time. Now, as a 31 year old pregnant person, Juno seems impossibly young.

There’s a lot to talk about here. To kick us off: I’m reasonably sure this is the first time I saw visiting an abortion clinic depicted in a movie, and possibly the first time I even heard the word abortion on screen. Good, right? No. Rewatching this movie made me big mad.

Now, there were some well-done similarities between Juno’s experience and my own experience of unintended pregnancy as a young person:

• Purchasing/taking a pregnancy test at the gas station

• The vibe of “That little pink plus sign is so unholy”

• Calling your best friend to figure out wtf to do, and them offering to call the clinic for you

And: Juno pretty much immediately decides to get an abortion. In my rewatch, I felt a strong sense of pride and camaraderie watching her make the decision. It mirrored my own. Unfortunately (and like many people), she runs into a lot of challenges to accessing abortion care, including:

• Anti-abortion freaks

• Lots of paperwork

• One of the two clinics nearby being unavailable because they require parental consent for minors

• The giant loser holding an anti-abortion sign and monotonously chanting “All babies want to get borned [sic]” outside the clinic. And it’s someone Juno knows - a fellow high school student. Who continues to yell at her after they discuss homework.

Ultimately, it’s an anti-abortion lie (which is never acknowledged as a lie) about fingernails that causes her to run out of the clinic. The loser peer looks on with faint surprise and calls out, “God appreciates your miracle” (yuck!). Later, Juno tells her friend, “Couldn’t do it Leah. I’ve been thinking I could, like, have this baby, and give it to someone who totally needs it. You, know like a woman with a bum ovary or a couple of nice lesbos”.

At the time of my first viewing, I definitely didn’t understand the dynamics at play here. The stigma! The shame! I remember thinking that this was a beautiful story, even. That choosing to carry the pregnancy to term rather than having an abortion indicated a high level of maturity and even morality on Juno’s part. I’m deeply sad for my younger self’s lack of knowledge about and even judgment for perfectly okay reproductive decisions. I’m embarrassed for my lack of empathy. If an earlier version of you has ever said the phrase “I support other people’s decisions, but I could never have an abortion myself”, you might recognize this shame.

To state the obvious here: adoption is not an alternative to abortion. It is not an alternative to pregnancy. It’s an alternative to parenting.