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“Obvious Child”: a movie that scrapes the bottom of the barrel

By Dave Andrusko
Last month NRL News Today posted a critique of “Obvious Child,” a new “abortion-themed romantic comedy.”

Unless you believe (which I don’t) that there is some depth to which pro-abortionists can sink that other pro-abortionists won’t happily defend, you won’t be surprised that Amanda Hess found “Obvious Child” to be “the most honest abortion movie I’ve ever seen. It’s about time.”
Before we tackle Ms. Hess’s tacky, tasteless celebration of the death of a baby depicted as a punch line, a couple of preliminaries for those who may not have any particular feelings on the subject of abortion. (NRL News Today stories are carried by all the major sites that aggregate news stories, such as Google News.)

You have to have an appreciation (I guess that’s the word) for bodily-humor jokes. As we wrote last month, the star is Jenny Slate, formerly a bit player on “Saturday Night Live,” best remembered for dropping the ultimate four-letter obscenity her first night on SNL.
Clearly Slate and Director Gillian Robespierre were made for each other. Both have an affinity for vulgar, sub-adolescent humor, and bodily functions which Robespierre (told The Village Voice) is “obviously something that I need to go to

therapy

about. I can’t not talk about it.”

You also have to believe that this is “the subversive Rom Com you’ve been wanting.” Evidence? How about the set up line? Slate’s character, Donna Stern, a stand-up comic, is looking in the mirror, practicing what she is going “to lead with” when she tells the baby’s father what she intends to do.

“I’m having your abortion. Do you want to share dessert?”

This is “subversive”?

Okay, so why is Ms. Hess so in love in “Obvious Child”?
For starters, it has a “happy ending” which is “long overdue.” A death child and nobody gets all bent out of shape.

Which is an important breakthrough for Hess. She argues that even more modern movies “about modern women” that touch on abortion “fail to regard their hard-earned constitutional right as an unambiguously positive development.”
Worse yet, “pregnancy decisions in movies are now less likely to result in abortions than ever, and that trend’s become particularly pronounced in films produced since 2003. In other words, now that abortion’s safe, women on screen don’t choose it.”

In other words, as many pro-abortionists have put it of late, they have the “wrong ending”: birth. Perhaps what irritates Hess most of all is that too often women in these films clearly SHOULD have aborted but never even considered it! Talking about failing the Sisterhood.
In a back-handed way, Hess will kind of grant you that a film that teams up with NARAL and “features the most charmingly competent Planned Parenthood doctor that a young, sexually active woman has ever seen” perhaps stretches the boundaries of credibility.
But, of course, since this is a celebration of a movie for slaying imaginary dragons, Hess can’t actually admit the obvious because that would undermine her entirely implausible, tiresome argument.
Instead (how’s this for euphemisms?) “the film’s satirical potential is somewhat limited by its unambiguous politics.”
You think?
But after that ever-so-brief contact with reality, Hess concludes

“For too long, Hollywood has been offering up either the tragic abortion narrative or the implausible motherhood story without giving the abortion caper its due. Obvious Child makes this heretofore untold tale look like a piece of cake. The film manages to be revolutionary by treading the most traditional of rom-com territory: A girl meets a boy, and after navigating a series of miscommunications and obstacles, one of which happens to be an abortion, they live happily ever after. Or at least through a snuggly, post-abortive viewing of Gone With the Wind.”

Two quick thoughts. The whole point of so much pro-abortion propaganda these days is to utterly undermine the “compromise” they have always loathed: the bogus pro-abortion assurance (made famous by Bill and Hillary Clinton) that abortion should be “safe, legal and rare.”

Why should abortion be rare, they angrily retort? It’s a rite of passage for many women, a decision that is completely theirs alone to make as often and as late in pregnancy as they wish. Anything that suggests the tiniest moral ambiguity or respect for the child is heresy and must be stamped out.
Second, by grungifying the context in which the child’s death takes place, it all becomes part of one big joke, a kind of “Animal House” for the urban pro-abortion sophisticate.
You do have to ask yourself, who would make a joke out of the end of a child’s life? Only those who are dead set on scraping the bottom of the barrel.

Source: NRLC News