Spoilers Abound

If, like Foucault says, discursive practices do indeed create and reify rather than simply report a society’s ideas about a subject, movies like Juno and Knocked Up are important not only because they model the ultimately positive outcome of an unplanned pregnancy, but also because each movie’s discourse about abortion creates it as something that is morally problematic. In Knocked Up, a friend of the father indirectly mentions it: “I won't say it but it rhymes with shmashmortion.” In Juno, the pregnant character’s step-mother hesitatingly asks “Have you considered, you know, the alternative?” By representing abortion as something so reprehensible that it cannot be named even by those advocating it, these movies not only recount a prevailing attitude toward abortion, but also effectively recreate the stigma and reattach a sense of wrongness to the concept.