THANK YOU, Dana Stevens

For finally talking about some of the more disturbing/irritating elements of Judd Apatow's Knocked Up, which is basically getting showered with unadulterated adoration from critics who (ha, ha) should know better.

As for the alarming tendency of movies to completely gloss over abortion as a feasible option, as evidenced by movies like this, Waitress, and Saved!, all of which are totally critical of our sexual mores and parenthood obsession and otherwise kind of edgy, it's frustrating. I don't think a movie can keep its edge by pretending that something multitudes of women go through in the US alone is nonexistent, or unmentionable. As Stevens says,

This omission [of the a-word] smells of the focus group, and it's a disappointment in a movie that otherwise prides itself on its unsentimental honesty about the realities of unplanned parenthood. It's just not believable that, in Alison and Ben's upper-middle-class, secular L.A. milieu, abortion would not be matter-of-factly discussed as a possibility in the case of a pregnancy this accidental. If she doesn't want one, great—obviously, there'd be no movie if she did—but let's hear about why not. Otherwise, her character becomes a cipher, a foil for Ben's epiphanies about growing up, without being allowed any epiphanies of her own.