Melissa Harris-Perry loved Beyoncé’s recent televised performance but decided that she thought it would be soooo much more awesome if instead of having a sign behind her saying “Feminism” it said “Abortion” or “birth control.” Y’know what always makes a snappy dance number so much better is talking about killing children. Ain’t nothing like a body count with a sick groove, huh?
But Beyoncé isn’t the only female celebrity to come under fire recently for the sin of not pushing abortion.
Amanda Marcotte, the irascible leftist, wrote at Slate Magazine that Mindy Kaling, the star of the Mindy Project in which she plays an ob-gyn, should have some episodes about abortion.
Dr. Mindy Lahiri, the loveable lead played by Mindy Kaling in the sitcom The Mindy Project, is an OB-GYN. Her job functions as more than background decoration, as Jessica Goldstein of ThinkProgress notes. “One of the most standout things about The Mindy Project is the way its setting has allowed for stories that explicitly deal with women’s health,” she writes, citing storylines about birth control, condom distribution, and even The Talk.
But there’s one aspect of reproductive health care that Kaling has no intention of touching on in the sitcom: abortion. “It would be demeaning to the topic to talk about it in a half-hour sitcom,” she recently said in the October issue of Flare.
Sorry, but that’s total nonsense. Abortion is actually a perfect topic for a half-hour comedy, because it touches on so many themes that comedy writers love to mine for the laughs: sex, relationships, the massive gulf between our best intentions and our actual life choices. That’s why comedy writers circle back to unintended pregnancy time and time again in hit movies like Knocked Up and Juno. And as the movie Obvious Child demonstrated, you can mine those same themes with a character who decides against carrying the pregnancy to term as with someone who has the baby. In fact, Prachi Gupta at Salon has helpfully listed all the half-hour sitcoms, going back to Maude in 1972, that have discussed abortion. Girls alone showed how easy it is, if you let go of the fear of getting letters from anti-choice nuts, to make some really funny jokes about abortion.
Nothing like a punchline about dismembered humans, right? Take my baby please!
Abortion is the centerpiece of their ideology and must be the center around which all others orbit. Failure to do so makes one a target.
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