Last week, I saw a screening of “Obvious Child,” the new rom-com starring Jenny Slate in which the main character gets an abortion and makes some dark jokes about it and, surprise, ends up okay.
A couple of the questions at the Q&A following the screening with Slate and the film’s director Gillian Robespierre were about the anti-choice reaction to the film. A few days before the film hit wide release, there hadn’t been much, except for a few initial whimpers of dissent when the film screened at Sundance.
But that’s starting to change as anti-choice groups get wind of the movie and find it to be promoting “evil” and putting America “beyond redemption.”
Arina Grossu of the Family Research Council told the Heritage Foundation’s Daily Signal this week that she was “appalled that the evil of abortion is now the subject of a ‘romantic comedy.’ “
Arina Grossu, director of the Center for Human Dignity at the Family Research Council, told The Daily Signal that she is “appalled that the evil of abortion is now the subject of a ‘romantic comedy.’
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Grossu, who has not yet seen the film, has a different take.
“The movie attempts to gloss over the gravity of abortion,” she said. “But no amount of acting or short-lived laughs can take away the reality that abortion is a grave moral evil that kills one person and wounds the other.”
Jillian Kay Melchior, writing in the National Review Online, bashes the film for “making such a difficult physical and metaphysical decision into a cheap joke, with dead babies as the punchline.”
Obvious Child is kind of funny sometimes but not that funny — which is not the film’s main problem. Obvious Child is reprehensible because, through tasteless and unsubtle humor, it trivializes something that’s of grave importance for pro-choice and pro-life women alike.
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Robespierre does no favor to women by making such a difficult physical and metaphysical decision into a cheap joke, with dead babies as the punchline. In trivializing abortion so radically, she infantilizes women and undermines the feminism she purports to endorse.
LifeSiteNews went with sarcasm: “Finally, a movie that presents the murder of an innocent as the laugh riot it is!”
“Has Hollywood hit a new low?”asked the Daily Caller.
And Brent Bozell of the Media Research Center took the long view, warning, “If America laughs at this, America is beyond redemption.”
The feminist film critics can exhale now. Someone has finally concocted their dream movie: an "abortion comedy." Because apparently nothing sounds funnier than an unplanned one-night stand and a courageous destruction of God's most beautiful and most innocent creation.
It's called "Obvious Child." Feminist lingo sells this monstrosity.
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Rolling Stone magazine described one scene of allegedly hilarious "empowerment" between female characters. "You're going to kill it," Donna's best friend Nellie says before a standup comedy set the night before her abortion. "Tomorrow I am," Donna replies, and "the two unravel in sheepish giggles.
If America laughs at this, America is beyond redemption.
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Of course, to sell the movie, they oddly claim this abortion-advocating movie doesn't have an agenda. "Our film is not an agenda movie in any way," Slate told Rolling Stone. "The whole point is that women have this procedure, and they should have it safely, and it's a part of life. It doesn't have to be this giant obelisk sticking out." That is not an agenda, no siree.
A little murder is a part of life. A little life matters not at all.
Feminists like these movie-makers don't see a moral dilemma. They see abortion as a natural part of the daily grind. You wake up, you get an abortion, you have a cheeseburger. The critics call this a "refreshing matter-of-factness" about abortion.
It can also be described as feminist nihilism. The selfishness and autonomy of the woman is paramount, and the accidental baby is just cannon fodder. When the murder of the innocents is celebrated as comedy, civil society is destroyed.
Of course, with the exception of Melchior, none of these critics seem to have actually seen the movie that Bozell claims will destroy America.
