Women On Fire - Juno, Pregnancy, and Narrative Problems

A few days ago and I finally saw Juno. We both really liked it. One of the things we had heard about it from other people was that the movie didn't do a particularly good job of handling Juno's decision not to terminate the pregnancy. Having seen it, I have this to say: No, it doesn't, particularly. However, I think that conditions in the US being what they are, it would be almost impossible for a film like this to actually solve the narrative problem created by that decision. In the discussion of this problem behind this cut tag, there will be some spoilers for Juno.



Here's the problem that the writers of Juno were faced with as they tried to work out this plot: In a country where abortion on demand has been widely available for the past 30 years, but where abortion has also never ceased to be a radically polarizing issue, how do you explain a teenager's decision not to end an unwanted pregnancy without appealing to pro-life rhetoric and/or ideology?

They can't have Juno saying, flat-out, that she's not aborting the baby because it's wrong. From a practical standpoint, that would give the film an overt anti-choice message which would drastically limit its commercial appeal. From a character standpoint, it would be inconsistent to give Juno that kind of certitude about anything--at the beginning of the film, which is when she has to make the decision, she's still trying to figure out who she is from moment to moment. And from what we can figure out about her character there's absolutely nothing that would indicate that she's strongly religious or that she would find anything appealing about pro-life culture or its adherents.

So, then, if Juno's not making this decision on moral or ideological grounds...where does it come from? And this is where, I would say, the writers kind of got stumped. The answer they come up with is that Juno basically is overcome with an unexplained and never fully articulated revulsion when she enters the clinic environment. The representation of that environment is, IMHO, fairly disingenuous. There's only one protestor, she's someone who's completely nonthreatening as far as Juno is concerned, and inside the clinic there's no evidence that anyone on the other side has even that much commitment to what they're doing; the clinic's stated feminist mission is ironized by the apathy of the receptionist.

Instead, for Juno, the clinic embodies what she is afraid people will see when they look at her--the set of implications and connotations evoked by the catchphrase "sexually active." Which, based on the way she reacts to the term, seems to her to indicate both sexual promiscuity and the kind of blase attitude about sex and its potential consequences that she chides her best friend for expressing when she first tells her the news. Although Juno often performs that kind of flippancy about her own pregnancy, just as she spends a lot of time denying that sex with Bleeker meant anything to her emotionally, it's fairly clear early on that this doesn't actually reflect her emotions.

In other words, what the clinic represents to Juno is lack of commitment--a refusal to take her, her sexuality, and her pregnancy seriously. And for someone with Juno's adolescent intensity--for a kid with her personality at her age, everything that happens to her matters greatly, and every major decision has to be considered in light of the fundamental question of her own relationship to the cosmos--that in itself is highly offensive. So I could certainly accept that as a motivation for Juno's decision to have the baby: it's her way of honoring her own conviction that what is happening to her is important, and of making her first sexual experience transformative not just for her but for everyone around her.

But the film doesn't make that explicit. Instead, it confuses the question with the detail about the fetus's fingernails, which suggests either that Juno doesn't know pro-life bullshit when she sees it, or that there is actually something to this pro-life bullshit. What's bullshit about that gambit in particular is that it's manipulative and, in its evasiveness, dishonest--the question of whether terminating a pregnancy is or is not morally right doesn't have a hell of a lot to do with whether it has fingernails. Like the ultrasound images that are being used at pro-life "clinics" for much the same purpose, the fingernails line short-circuits the moral/philosophical/political line of argument, appealing directly to the gut: don't kill it, it looks just like you.

Anyway. My point is that the reading I just did of Juno's motivations--that she doesn't want to treat this pregnancy like an embarrassing illness that she'll get over and never speak of again, that she wants to honor the baby as a positive part of the experience of having sex with a boy that she eventually figures out she loves--is extremely difficult to articulate under prevailing cultural conditions. From the pro-life point of view it's far too sex-positive--unless Juno plans to retroactively legitimate that experience by marrying Bleeker and raising the baby with him, which is an option that the film, to its credit, ultimately rejects as a happy ending. But from the pro-choice point of view, it's very hard to come up with a good reason for Juno to have that baby that doesn't involve acknowledging the possibility that in fact, fetuses are human--or at least suggesting that allowing fetuses to become human is basically the right thing to do. And from the point of view of American "common sense," it's equally difficult to explain why a teenager who clearly doesn't want to raise her baby and who is clearly not only able to have an abortion but tacitly encouraged by her society and even her parents to do so would choose to do things the hard way unless she had a clearer, simpler, and stronger motivation than the one I just elaborated. And I find all of these things very interesting.

Because to be pro-choice implies that you want a world in which women are free to choose abortion--which necessarily implies the freedom not to choose it. And yet, there are a million narratives out there to explain the choice to terminate an unwanted pregnancy, whereas it's a real struggle to find a single credible narrative that would explain the choice not to. Most of the available narratives assume that a woman carries an unwanted pregnancy to term only because for some reason she doesn't have a choice--because abortion is not available in her time and place, because she can't afford it, because she doesn't realize until it's too late, because she's unable or unwilling to ask for help, because she doesn't have enough agency to take advantage of the option.


Anyway. I don't have time to go on with this, though the whole line of inquiry could be extended to take in Vanessa's situation, and her determination to have a child despite the fact that her own biology refuses to cooperate--and the way in which the film handles her character. It occurs to me, for instance, that there may be a split between Vanessa's characterization in the script and the way she and her enviornment are realized by the director and producers. But I have to get back to work.