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Thursday, May 30, 2019
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
OPINION

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M

y first exposure to abortion 
was the ’80s movie “Dirty 
Dancing” — not a health 
class or a Sunday in church, but a 
movie. If you’ve seen it you know the 
scene. If not, one of the characters finds 
out she’s pregnant. A few scenes and 
exchanges of cash later, she is found sick 
in her bed from some sort of infection 
from a “back-alley doctor.” The word 
“abortion” is never stated; it is simply 
implied. I didn’t even fully grasp what 
had happened to the girl until I watched 
it years later as a teen who could finally 
put the pieces of the puzzle together.
“Dirty Dancing” is set in 1963 — 10 
years before the landmark Supreme 
Court decision Roe v. Wade legalized 
abortion — when back-alley abortions 
like this were the norm in states 
where the procedure was illegal. Fast 
forward to 2019, nearly 50 years after 
Roe v. Wade: Conservative states have 
launched an orchestrated attack on 
abortion, making it a felony, banning 
it after a fetal heartbeat is detected 
(usually around six weeks, before most 
women even know they’re pregnant) 
and even leaving out exceptions for rape 
or incest. 
With a conservative lean on the 
Supreme Court, these restrictive laws 
are looking to put Roe v. Wade back on 
the table and ultimately overturn it. I’m 
not writing to explain why overturning 
the legalization of abortion would be 
disastrous for anyone with a uterus — 
bodily autonomy and freedom from 
government-mandated 
pregnancies 
should not even be a question. Yet 
here we are, on the brink of a return 
to coat hanger abortions and telling 
51 percent of the U.S. population that 
their choice doesn’t matter. But I 

want to talk about pop culture. 
Pop culture is often an individual’s 
first exposure to varying ideas. 
Whether it’s a song, show, movie or 
play, pop culture allows someone to 
look outside the bubble they live in and 
into a world they have not yet seen. 
Prior to and following “Dirty Dancing,” 
abortion has been a plot line or topic 
addressed in a multitude of movies and 
TV shows alike. Despite this exposure, 
abortion is still a taboo word, inciting 
heated debate wherever it is brought 
up. Yet, dancing around the concept of 
abortion — why people choose it, how it 
makes them feel, who gets them — does 
no good for the discussion of it. Abortion 
is treated like a dirty word, not a medical 
procedure that about one quarter of 
women will undergo. To improve the 
conversation about abortion, we must 
normalize it to show, through widely 
consumed media, that abortion is not 
just its myths and falsifications.
Perhaps the first radical portrayal 
of abortion was broadcasted in 1972 
on the CBS show “Maude” starring 
Bea Arthur (“Golden Girls”). After 
discovering she’s pregnant, Maude 
talks with her husband and they decide 
they do not want to raise a child at 
their age. In New York where Maude 
lives, abortion is legal, so she gets the 
procedure; thus inciting over 7,000 
letters of protest to CBS. For its time 
period, the way abortion was depicted 
in “Maude” was revolutionary. It 
features an honest discussion with a 
partner and reasoning for the choice, 
all done a year before abortion was 
nationally legal. More modern media 
like “Juno” and “Knocked Up,” show 
abortion as the option only “bad people” 
choose.

Obviously, I cannot force all media 
creators to cast abortion in a pro-choice 
light, but for those who have or want 
to — like the makers of “Scandal,” 
“Girls,” “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” “Jane 
the Virgin” and others — they should 
at least do it right. And that’s not to say 
those shows haven’t. They’ve shown 
abortion casually, as a difficult choice, 
surgically, medically, as a single woman, 
as a married woman and more. This is 
what abortion is, in reality, and that 
can be expanded. Some of the most 
popular shows in America are medical 
and family shows; shows that have the 
potential to actually make an impact 
and start a conversation. 
And they can do even more. They 
can show more low-income women 
getting abortions, as this is the main 
demographic; or show a devoutly 
religious person getting an abortion — 
as many do — and highlight that religion 
should not inhibit choice; or don’t make 
abortion into such a tragedy, because 
taking control of your body is not tragic 
and most women feel relief after an 
abortion; or show how men benefit 
from abortion, because that seems to be 
necessary when trying to get people 
to care about something; or even 
better, maybe the people of the United 
States can create comprehensive sex 
education for students to prevent 
these unwanted pregnancies and 
talk about abortion loudly instead of 
in hushed whispers. It shouldn’t be 
up to “Dirty Dancing” to teach kids 
about abortion, and it shouldn’t be 
up to the government to decide if you 
can get one.

SAMANTHA DELLA FERA | COLUMN

Samantha Della Fera can be 

reached at samdf@umich.edu.

Abortion will never go away, so let’s talk about it

EMILY CONSIDINE | CONTACT CARTOONIST AT EMCONSID@UMICH.EDU

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