“I had an abortion yesterday.”
“Nah … I can’t go for a run today because I had an abortion yesterday.”
Thus begins an extraordinary scene from the 2015 HBO series, “Girls.” Mimi-Rose (Gillian Jacobs) stuns her lover, Adam (Adam Driver) and the audience with her casual, throw-away line.
She continues to her shocked boyfriend,
“I can’t go for a run, and I can’t take a bath or use a tampon or have intercourse for like a week.”
She sits up, her head cocked in defiance, as Adam’s mind swirls. He sputters,
“Are you, uh … WHAT?”
Mimi-Rose ducks the moral implications, focusing on the here and now:
“Yeah … just a couple of things I can’t do, because I had an abortion yesterday.”
After a pregnant pause, Adam asks the obvious question:
“Was it mine?”
Mimi-Rose:
“Yeah … of course it was yours.”
We pause at this point to acknowledge that a majority of women seeking abortions in unplanned pregnancies were pressured into it, often by their unmarried boyfriends. This scene from “Girls” dramatizes an alternative scenario that, too, plays out in real life.
Mimi-Rose continues:
“I didn’t want to talk about it beforehand. I just wanted to do it. But I haven’t shared with boyfriends in the past. I’m trying to be more open with you.”
Adam withdraws, asking the obvious questions:
“You’re trying to be open with me? How many abortions have you had?”
Mimi-Rose has clearly implied she has had more than one. She quickly shuts the door on her desire to be ‘more open’ with Adam:
“I’m not going to share that with you, because that is private. I’m not going to ask how many girls you’ve gotten pregnant.”
Adam:
“None! It’s not private. I’ve got no girls pregnant except for you now.”
The pause that follows speaks volumes, leading up to Adam knocking items off the table behind him in disgust, while Mimi-Rose watches unsympathetically.
Adam: “Who aborted you?”
Mimi-Rose: “A doctor named Gunita. She did the procedure. She delivered my cousin’s baby.”
The script writers the HBO series Girls did a good job in this scene. Mimi-Rose uses the antiseptic language of Planned Parenthood, characterizing the killing of her daughter or son as a mere ‘procedure.’ Then to gloss over it even more, she suggests it’s the moral equivalent of a birth, since she used the same baby doctor as her cousin, who did give birth.
Adam isn’t deflected:
“Was it a boy or girl?”
He understands the humanity of his offspring, even though not yet born.
Again, Mimi-Rose intentionally deflects:
“My cousin’s baby is a girl.”
Adam: “NO … OURS!”
Mimi-Rose: “It was a ball of cells. It was smaller than a seed pearl. It didn’t have a penis or a vagina.”
Adam: “Isn’t this a decision that people typically make together?”
Mimi-Rose: “So you wanted a baby?”
Adam: “Maybe.”
Mimi-Rose: “That’s kind of absurd.”
***
We can learn much from this 97 second scene from the HBO series Girls:
- Was Mimi-Rose using artificial contraception? Probably, because half the women who seek abortions were contracepting at the time they conceived. Contraception fails. It is immoral to use that as an excuse to kill your own child in the womb.
- The size of a human being does not define his or her humanity, even if he/she is the size of a ‘seed pearl.’ In fact this ‘ball’ of cells has its own DNA distinct from the mother and father, meaning that it is a unique person. As the embryo grows, it develops a heartbeat (22 days after fertilization), its own circulatory system, and its own organs. From fertilization, it is a new organism that is alive and will continue to grow and develop as long as nutrition is provided and its life is not ended through violence or illness. In a sense, this new human is more alive than ever, as cell growth and replication takes place at a torrid pace, more so than at any other time in his/her existence.
- Whether the baby was wanted or not is irrelevant. Your dignity is intrinsic, not contingent on someone else. By engaging in sexual intercourse with Adam, Mimi-Rose AND Adam both had a moral obligation to care for the child THEY brought into the world by their choice. If they didn’t want to raise her/him themselves, thousands of couples are standing in line waiting to adopt their baby.
Killing the child because she’s small, inconvenient, male or female, black or white, straight or gay … or whatever … is immoral.
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