A Small, Quiet Abortion
The revolution in abortion storytelling led to a perfect episode of Sex Education
Here are some of the things I vaguely believed when I was a teen growing up in Texas in the 2000s:
That the N*Sync song/lyric “God must’ve spent a little more time on you” was the most romantic thing I had ever heard. (WHAT IS HAPPENING IN THIS VIDEO, the subject of a different newsletter)
That my whole life would change if I somehow got to go out-of-state for college, where I would inevitably meet someone handsome and nice who wanted to make out with me and that we would get married when I was 24, or if I was really dragging my feet winning my first joint Nobel/Pulitzer, 25.
That if you had pre-marital sex, you were probably going to hell.
That abortion was, for reasons I hadn’t really looked into or considered, shameful and wrong because good girls don’t get pregnant.
I’ve been thinking about those half-formed, evangelically-tinged Young Me thoughts in light of everything that’s happened in the last month and lamenting that the people who have muscled their way to power appear no more sophisticated than an idiot 15-year-old who had her brain addled by purity rings and Joel Osteen reruns. My parents are Muslim and far more progressive than I gave them credit for but we had never talked about this so I was left to pick up cues from the Culture and the Culture in the 2000s was fucked.
The teens these days seem a lot wiser, with an intuitive understanding of bodily autonomy and misogyny, and they have far better pop culture examples, thanks to a revolution in abortion storytelling. I’m thinking specifically of the gorgeous episode of Sex Education, in which one of the main characters, 17-year-old Maeve, resisting the pull of shame and stigma, has a small, quiet abortion that allows the rest of her life to unfurl.
In Sex Education, reluctant “sex savant” Otis and Cool/Tough Girl Maeve team up to give sex therapy to their classmates, in the absence of the adults in their lives dispensing much useful information. Otis, cribbing material from his actual sex therapist mother (a fierce Gillian Anderson) and despite his own inexperience, turns out to be very good at answering teens’ gamut of outrageous sex questions (how much masturbation is too much masturbation? is my orgasm face weird?) in his own bumbling, earnest way. Maeve, in need of cash, turns their minor’s clinic into a business.
In only the third episode, Maeve finds herself unexpectedly pregnant after a tryst with Jackson, a high school Golden Boy. We don’t know much about Meave at this point except that she’s a social outcast with pink highlights and smudged eyeliner, and that she lives alone in a trailer park, with no family to be seen. Maeve promptly schedules a consultation at an abortion clinic. Asked by the intake nurse if she’s considered adoption, Maeve answers breezily, “I don’t think anybody would want a pregnant 17-year-old.”
The only hitch is that the clinic requires someone to escort her home after the procedure. After a few halting attempts to ask Jackson and a girlfriend, Maeve asks Otis to meet her after school at an unspecified address to do an unspecified favor. Otis, thinking he’s being asked on some sort of date, shows up to a nondescript office park in a suit, only to be harangued by a pair of anti-abortion protestors. Shenanigans ensue.
Up until about a decade ago, abortion, when it was discussed or shown on television at all, dramatized The Choice, acceding to the right-wing framing of it as always a moral question. Characters agonized about their decision. Sometimes, they felt the irresistible draw of motherhood and had a baby, as Miranda did on Sex and the City, complete with a dramatic walkout of an abortion clinic. Other times, they avoided one by a well-timed miscarriage. Cristina Yang was scheduled to have an abortion in the second season of Grey’s Anatomy but, under pressure from ABC’s Standards and Practices, Shonda Rhimes gave her an ectopic pregnancy instead (at least it resulted in one of my favorite Grey’s scenes).
Things only began to change six years later, when Rhimes had amassed enough power to tell the story she wanted: Scandal’s Olivia Pope has an abortion on network television, making the decision on her own with no input from anyone else, not even the would-be father, the president of the United States. Rhimes even showed the outpatient procedure in a medically accurate way–no sweaty brows, no faces scrunched in pain, no ominous clanking of surgical instruments. This watershed moment heralded a new age of abortion plotlines: low-keys ones that showed 1) how minor the procedure is in the first trimester, when 92 percent of abortions take place and 2) how the possibilities in a person’s life could open up after an abortion; how it empowered instead of diminished them.
Still, people getting or considering abortions on television tend to be younger, whiter and have no other children. Sex Education addresses this deftly: when Maeve gets to the clinic, she meets Sara, a chatty middle-aged woman and mother of three, who announces that it’s not her first time there. Maeve is initially annoyed by the loudmouth antics but softens as she persists in lightening the mood. As they’re waiting to be called into the surgical room, Sara reassures Maeve and another patient that it’s all going to be fine; she grabs their hands and makes them do the wave. Maeve’s procedure, under sedation, is shown to be brief and matter-of-fact, about as big of a deal as a root canal.
Otis, meanwhile, waits outside for Maeve with the anti-abortion protestors–a boy and a girl–who are in a bizarre religious fanatic lover’s spat about, naturally, the meaning of penetration. He goes to the market across the street to pick out a post-abortion get-well present for Maeve. After some thought, he decides on flowers and a sandwich.
The entire episode radiates incredible tenderness and compassion for people who have abortions and their reasons for doing so. It’s not blind to the judgment that can dog someone’s valid reproductive choices. You see it in Maeve’s hesitation in asking someone to pick her up from the abortion clinic, and in the cruel way a nurse tells Sara as she’s recovering that there’s no chocolate pudding left, but maybe there will be the next time she’s back. But Sex Education allows Maeve and Sara to care for each other in a moment when they are intensely vulnerable. Maeve gifts Sara her chocolate pudding; Sara tells Maeve that she feels way more guilty about the kids she had than the ones she didn’t. “I bet your kids really love you,” Maeve answers.
Later, in a scene that I now find the most romantic thing in the world, Otis walks Maeve home to her trailer park, not asking her a single question about the circumstances that led to their abortion date. Maeve’s abortion is never mentioned again and she continues to live her life, trying her best to rise above her less-than-ideal circumstances.
I wish I had this kind of template in my young idiot days. What did I know then about anything? About falling in or out of love, or catastrophic life-altering accidents. About the mysterious workings of a body, about miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies and fetal abnormalities. About how no amount of good girl-ing can gird you from life’s vicious knocks. Those reckonings would all come later, but I wish the first thing I had learned was a little compassion, for myself and for others trying to live the best version of their lives.
My hope is that even in these unbearably grim times, we care for each other in every way we know how, that we never abandon one another, even as the state has taken a turn toward the murderous. May we all be able to have the small, quiet abortions we deserve.
Recent good things:
Did you know you can start the process of getting abortion pills RIGHT NOW, even if you are not currently pregnant, from Aid Access, to keep in the cabinet for yourself or perhaps someone else in need (they are prioritizing pregnant people first but should get back to you in a few weeks)?
I’ve been adding a big dollop of Greek yogurt to my oatmeal and oh my god, what a hack, it’s so good.
This video of Jennifer Garner washing her cat, Ben Affleck is a fool.