Infant Aside

I will admit it. Until it became utterly ridiculous in its final season or two, I liked Sex and the City. (I never saw the movies.) Yes, it was crass and materialistic. Its female characters were mostly gays-manqués (well, it beats Albee, anyway). Kim Catrall has the range of an escargot. Etc. I won't bore you with all the caveats. That would take a while. But it was the sort of foofy, innocuous entertainment that plays well in the background when you're cooking or cleaning the house, and on occasion it even managed to be genuinely funny or genuinely sad. I mention this because Ross Douthat, one of the Times' stable of badly bearded homunculi, blithely used the show as an example of "the American entertainment industry"'s discomfort with abortion in a blithe column on "the unborn." It's worth noting that the entertainment industry is not so much uncomfortable with abortion as it is viciously opposed to women, which is why it spends so very much of its time kidnapping, raping, murdering, molesting, humiliating, and hating on them.

The storyline to which Douthat is referring involves Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), an attorney, getting pregnant by her at-the-time ex-lover and ultimately deciding to have the baby. On that brief description it does indeed seem to lend credence to Douthat's paltry thesis. She is a career woman, unmarried, not maternally inclined, and the pregnancy is an accident. Why, if the Industry weren't uncomfortable with abortion, she'd have had the little tumor extirpated ASAP! And indeed, in real life, a comparable, mid-career, unmarried, overworked, unmaternal partner in a Manhattan law firm probably would. Of course, in real life, the cheerleaders would not go padding about the house in their underwear without turning on the lights when a serial killer was on the loose. In other words, the nature of fiction is to have characters make decisions that advance a plot. Every sitcom, drama, and romantic comedy ever written would roll credits within ten seconds of the titles if characters behaved in the most expeditious, open, and honest manner. Narrative is a contrivance.

Miranda's fulfilled pregnancy and her eventual resumption of a relationship with the boy's father is a foil for a couple of other plots. Pertinently, Charlotte (Kristin Davis) has been trying without success to get pregnant with her husband, and Miranda's easy, accidental pregnancy is depicted in dramatic contrast--the inability of Charlotte to get what she so desperately wants is made more poignant. It's hard to stress enough how the demands of plot in serial writing drive these decisions and how little pertinence they have to the question of whether a stable of very gay, very traditionally liberal writers and producers are somehow uncomfortable with abortion. In fact, and this is the significant point, the writers use the occasion of this storyline to have Carrie and Samantha reveal that they have both had an abortion--Samantha at least two, if I remember correctly. Neither of them is especially troubled, although Carrie admits to some minor pang of regret at what might have been. "It was the right thing to do," both agree, matter-of-fact. What troubles Carrie is not that she has had an abortion, but that her boyfriend, if she tells him or if he otherwise finds out, will judge her harshly.

This is a good an unsubtle point about "discomfort" with abortion. What we really mean is that men hate female sexuality and are ever-eager to judge the sluts. Carrie is afraid that her boyfriend will consider her a whore, not that he will cite Catholic injunctions about the sacredness of the unborn. Douthat doesn't care or think deeply about the sacred potentiality of human life. The number of little sacred human potentialities ultimately frozen, discarded, and destroyed by the upper-class fertility industry employed by Melanie Thernstrom's "six failed in vitro cycles, an egg donor and two surrogate mothers, and an untold fortune in expenses" is immense, and yet it goes entirely unremarked and unnoticed, whereas an extracted blastocyst from a woman who, interesting interesting, happens to be poor and lacking "a script for sexual maturity," is definitely a daughter.