Abortion In Media, Text Version

 
Intro
[Jaskier song]  
Hi, I’m Natalie! You may remember me from such roles as: “Elite martial artist” and “sticky camera operator” but now I’m getting a whole video to myself! It’s about abortion.
Abortion Receipts
[Play over clip of Diane in BJ horseman talking with mr P in the car] In 2017 I got pregnant. I was always terrible at keeping track of my period but I started to feel tired a lot, I’d gained some weight and my boobs hurt! [Me upstairs] A whole bunch! So eventually I realised I needed to take a test and went with Eric to pick one up on my work break. I took it when I got home and it was positive. I knew that I didn’t want to have a baby at this point in my life. I ended up spending a lot of time over the next couple of weeks at work looking up abortion services and processes, ringing hospitals and crying in the loo and at my desk! The time it took to realise that I was pregnant, on top of finding time to be on hold for half an hour during work hours to receptionists who told me I’d need to ring another number, and another, to find out that I needed to be registered with a GP before I could make an appointment, meant that by the time I was being seen I was about 11 weeks pregnant so I was offered a surgical abortion under anaesthetic. A medication abortion can be used at any stage of pregnancy but after 9 weeks may require more doses or a stay in hospital so a surgical abortion is offered after this point. 
I had an assessment appointment a few days before the procedure. This was actually during that period of time when the NHS was in crisis because a lack of basic cybersecurity and an over reliance on windows XP (for which they paid Microsoft £5 million to maintain support just for them) lead to a successful ransomware attack shutting down huge chunks of their systems. When I went in for my appointment everything was being written on big whiteboards and the nurses were very very stressed. 
I was given the option of having a contraceptive device fitted during the procedure called an Intrauterine-System which is a small device fitted in the uterus which releases progesterone locally to prevent pregnancy. This meant that I got to skip the one downside of the IUS, the potentially painful and invasive fitting, because I was under anaesthetic at the time so I just get to go on about how great they are. No nasty side effects or hormone swings because much less hormone is required since it’s sent just where it needs to be. And it’s reduced my periods to next to nothing! Big recommend! 
They didn’t tell me that lactation is common after abortions [and miscarriages.] I debated whether to talk about this here, because it was something I found upsetting, but that’s exactly why I decided I should, because no-one told me, because no-one talks about abortion.
I felt tense waiting for the operation, but not too afraid. Everyone who dealt with me was super professional and I felt well-taken care of. When I woke up afterwards, my biggest feeling was simply of relief, and gratitude. In the weeks and months and years afterwards, I sometimes felt shame over having allowed myself to get pregnant, over not managing to arrange the abortion sooner, I’ve felt melancholy imagining a different life. But, like 95% of people who terminate pregnancies, I’ve never regretted it. I know that I’d like children at some point and I knew that I didn’t want a child then, and I wasn’t ready for one. 
This was my experience in a place where abortion is free, safe, legal and local. The experience that every person who is capable of getting pregnant should have available to them. Northern Ireland only decriminalised abortion in October 2019, and the Republic of Ireland did so in 2018. The fight for both is now for the local, as pregnant people are continuing to rely on travelling elsewhere to actually find aboriton services, though in Northern Ireland this travel and necessary accommodation is thankfully now funded by the NHS. Still, in the very same hospital that I went to, thanks to the hostile environment policies introduced by Theresa Mayto punish immigration, abortion services, like other “non-urgent” NHS services, are no longer free for everyone. This means that people are forced to wait until they can raise money for this essential procedure, increasing the risk to their physical and mental health and pushing people into more dangerous situations, such as illegally purchasing the prescription medication required and self-administering without proper advice or supervision which becomes increasingly dangerous beyond 9 weeks. Despite maternity care being classed as “urgent”, Barts NHS Trust denied 739 women the free maternity care that their peers take for granted last year, that’s 1 in 20 people requiring care for a safe and healthy pregnancy being denied or put at risk of poverty through bills they cannot afford. The hostile environment turns doctors, nurses, teachers into border police, so even where people won’t be denied medical treatment, it may come with the threat of detention and deportation. This threat, coming from the NHS, ruins lives and kills people. Docs not cops. 
The experience brought me closer to Eric and made us consider our future together, but generally I felt very isolated by it. I had no idea what any individual I met might think of me if they knew. What my colleagues, my friends, my family (who I didn’t tell until a long time afterward), would think. Aside from a family member who I knew had had an abortion, most of the opinions I’d ever heard expressed could be summarised like this: “Of course I’m pro-choice, but I’d never have an abortion.” In fact, if you’d asked me a number of years ago, with zero stakes, I probably would have casually said the same thing. And yet 1 in three people capable of getting pregnant have an abortion at some point and 23% of all pregnancies in Great Britain are terminated. So where does this huge disconnect come from between what we say and what we do?
Now that things are good
Video seg showing Juno walking up to clinic.
Growing up in the 2000s, the stories that I saw featuring abortion had this liberal, comfortable, “now that things are good” approach to abortion. The abortion horror stories were in the distant past, and reserved for historical fiction; now abortion is a legitimate and in some circumstances even expected choice. So the representations of abortion that found me went like this: our protagonist unexpectedly discovers that she is pregnant. Due to the circumstances of the pregnancy, our character is a teenager or the pregnancy was resulting from a one-night-stand, our protagonist is expected to get an abortion. I mean...what if THIS guy got you pregnant?

Abort for sure, right? Yeetus the hell out of that fetus. I’m sorry, Seth Rogan, you have a fine and lovely face, I’m sorry they did this to you.
But then our pregnant protagonist seizes her agency and determines to keep the baby against all odds, setting off on a wacky bittersweet journey through pregnancy. 
While I was working my way down the wikipedia category “Films about abortion” and entering each one into a spreadsheet, and before I realised that ANSIRH had already done it all for me, I came across Bed And Sofa, which is a perfect and even more explicit example of this pattern. Bed and Sofa is a silent movie made in Moscow in 1927 (7 years after the legalisation of abortion there). Liudmila and Kolia live together in a small apartment in Moscow. While Kolia goes out to work in the bustling city, Liudmila spends her time sighing with boredom in the house and doing chores. When Kolia invites his friend Volodia to stay with them on their sofa, Liudmila is unhappy with their even more cramped living conditions, but when Kolia is called away on a work trip, Volodia takes her out on an exciting flight, and they begin an affair. They admit their affair to Kolia who then moves out, but when Liudmila sees him out in the rain she invites him to come back and stay with them on the sofa. They all struggle with the tension of the close quarters love triangle but even with two lovers she is starved of affection and excitement. She discovers that she is pregnant and both the men say that she should have an abortion, as they do not know who the father is and neither want to raise the other’s baby. She arrives at the abortion clinic, but, after seeing children playing outside the window, she decides to keep the baby and leave Kolia and Volodia. [Play clip of them talking to woman at abortoin clinic, “her husband, her husband”] We see her looking hopeful and excited as she leaves Moscow on a train - one of the few scenes that we see her outside of the home. 
It’s easy to see why someone might prefer to make this story to one where our protagonist chooses to terminate, against a background where abortion is available. An abortion is the end of that story. 9 months of struggle and character development vs a relatively quick decision and procedure to keep things the same. This pattern is a reflection of the normalisation of abortion, but, in a context where there are actually so few pieces of media that show an adult choosing to terminate a healthy pregnancy without terrible repercussions  it leaves us with the message that this decision is a test of character, that good, strong, caring people will choose to keep the baby. And of course with the lack of alternative representations of a necessary part of life that ⅓ of the people who are capable of getting pregnant will go through, we are left to internalise the idea that people who have abortions are the opposite. Bad, weak, and careless.
Juno writer, Diablo Cody, describes herself as “as pro choice as a person can possibly be” and has said that, with people interpreting the film to have an anti-abortion message [clip of protestor talking to Juno], she would not have written this story if she known “that the world was going to spiral into this hellish alternate reality that we now seem to be stuck in,” referring to Georgia’s fetal heartbeat bill which restricts abortion to within 6 weeks of pregnancy, before many people even know that they are pregnant. She says that she now feels that she had a responsibilitty to be more explicitly pro-choice and she wasn’t, recounting receiving a letter from Catholic highschool officials thanking her for making a pro-life movie. 
Dear White People plays with and subverts this pattern. Coco discovers that she is pregnant and agonises with Kelsey over what to do next. [clip: “As much as I’m not the girl who just ups and has a baby, I’m also not the girl who just…” “Well, no matter what you decide, I’m the girl who’ll be there for you, every step of the way”] Kelsey accompanies her to the clinic where she stays for a moment before [“fuck this, I wanna leave”]. She tells the father about the pregnancy, before packing her bags and leaving Winchester University. 18 years later, we see Coco rejoycing with her daughter who has been accepted at Winchester. Surrounded by futuristic fashion and higher than usual drone volume, Coco takes her daughter to start her time at Winchester: [Clip: speech to penelope, the sky is too limiting L cut to clinic] and we come back to reality, in the clinic. Coco’s aspirations for her daughter are the dreams she has for herself, and she will not give them up. Her mind is made up.
There is no “kind of girl” who has an abortion, no one expects to have to terminate a pregnancy. It’s a necessary part of life that, once again, one in three people with a womb goes through. But the majority of people who seek an aboriton almost never get represented at all, and that is mothers. Around 2/3rds of the people who terminate a pregnancy already have at least one child and yet we very rarely see stories about abortion involving mothers. 
One brilliant contradictory example is in Crazy Ex Girlfriend. [Clip: Are you sure you want another baby? There are options, you know.” …”Scot, I am a married mother of two. Those options are for teenagers the night after winter formal.” “You know who I think you should talk to, Rebecca. She’s young, I bet she’s had tonnes of options” ] Paula is having to choose between going to law school and having another child. Brendan is trying to prove to her that if she doesn’t want an abortion then she can still have both, but she is resigned to giving up her career ambitions until she realises how much she wants this and decides to go ahead with the abortion.
We see how much the image of abortion as something for other yougner people, certainly not a mother of two, holds Paula back, and even at the end of the episode, surrounded by her caring family who support her decision, shame stops her from telling her friend about what she has been through. 
Most Suprising abortion statistic 
Gloria Feldt, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America has said, “I believe the whole movement has made a terrible mistake,” she said, referring to the pro-choice movement’s decision to avoid talking about mothers’ motives for having abortions, and instead focus “on the less frequent reasons, which are rape and incest or teens who are simply not ready to be parents.”
Perfect victims 
[Show Jessica Jones]
We choose these examples to defend because they represent the utmost cruelty of anti-abortion legislation where people have had to fight for “exceptions” for victims of rape, incest, and people who will be seriously physically harmed by pregnancy, like Savita.  
Saga is one of the stories that initially inspired me to make this video. It’s a superbly fun fantasy space opera about a young family trying to survive war and find friendship, narrated by an edgy baby.
Also this grumpy reclusive author whose writing inspired the protagonists to rebel against the system and track him down only to get the door slammed in their face by a grumpy recluse is definitely 100% based on this guy in field of dreams who inspires the protagonist to rebel against the system and track him down only to get the door slammed in his face by a grumpy recluse.

It’s a really great read and the artwork is gorgeous, and I kinda hated the way it represented abortion. In volume eight…
[ssspppoooiiillllerrrr waaaarrrnnniinnnggggg]
Alana suffers the death of her unborn baby but because she and Marco’s planets are at war, they cannot return to their home planets for a procedure to remove the baby, without which Alana will die, as the infant’s wings and horns would get them caught and arrested on either planet. Instead, they go to an outpost planet under Landfallen control, and travel to Abortion Town, where they seek an “abortion”, pretending that this guy, Sir Robot, is the father and that the procedure is necessary because the offspring would likely suffer unknown “horrific mutations” due to wings and robots being biologically incompatible. They urge for the remains to be discreetly disposed of to protect Alana and Marco’s secret. With Alana being 8 months along in her pregnancy, the Abortion Town Mayor reluctantly refuses because Landfall’s laws forbid third trimester abortions, apparently regardless of the health of the pregnancy. The mayor of Abortion Town tells them to travell to the Badlands, where there are “doctors” who will do anything, no questions asked. 
They travel to the Badlands, and discover on the way that the lost baby is giving Alana magic powers, including the ability to simulate visions of potential futures; the child that they would have had, the brother that their daughter Hazel would have had. When they get to the Badlands, with Alana’s life immediately at stake, they meet the Endwife. Who looks like this:

In desperation they accept the help of the scary monster with hands covered in blood and a table full of bloodied hacksaws and a medical ipod? Alana shares a room with an unconscious patient who the Endwife explains has just been through the abortion of a “viable fetus at thrity weeks”. This spurs a discussion where Marco explains that while he is grateful for the help his wife is receiving, he is uncomfortable with what the Endwife does, explaining that as a pacifist he chooses to believe that the taking of any life should always be avoided to which the Endwife replies, “Mmn, ideologies are lovely...but down here is only reality.” 
“Whose reality? I can’t imagine every woman who comes to you only does so because her own life is in danger.”
“No, like most, my last patient could have easily carried her child to term. [ EASILY IS CARRYING A LOT TO TERM IN THIS SENTENCE] But only days ago, Doctor was able to detect that her unborn had developed most terrible brain defect. Her little one may have survived, but there is no question the child’s life would be short and painful.”
So this conversation is reflective of the extreme reality that in many people have been allowed to die or have been forced to give birth to children that have died or will die shortly, because they refuse to allow even medically necessary abortions. This was the case for Savita Halappanavar who was killed in Ireland in 2012, when University Hospital Galway refused her request for an abortion after a partial miscarraige. 
However, it means that what Saga offers in direct response to the question of whether abortion is morally acceptable is “yes, when it is necessary to save the lives of people with dangerous pregnancies and prevent suffering of unborn children.” It deflects Marco’s question with perfect victims. 
As a story about miscarriage I think it’s done a wonderful job, cathartically teasing out the feelings of guilt and shame [guilty fadeawy dream] that can accompany the loss of a baby. It feels awful and surreal that she is criminalised for losing a baby, but in reality, there are many examples of grieving parents being criminally investigated after a miscarraige. And I think that the device of the magical simulation of the child that they could have had, created through Alana’s longing and grief, is a really wonderful way to corporealise the loss that might be hard for others to see, and find closure for the characters. But they decided to use it to host a superficially controversial abortion “debate” with very little substance, and by superficially controversial with little substance, I mean “edgy”. It’s aesthetically as provocative as possible, but philosophically? Practically? Morally? It’s not provocative at all. Despite all the “fuck the patriarchy” jabs, the Mayor of abortion town calling out the elected men regulating women’s bodies, the band of pro-life bandits who get their commuppence, and the mwah mwah fantastic trans rep, the overall impression that this story leaves you with is, “Of course it’s a woman’s right to choose [SNOWMAN CLIP] but I would never.”  With a huge host of characters and situations being shown, Saga chooses to defend abortion only through the most extreme cases of perfect victims. The “abortion” that our main character is seeking is not even an abortion, she has had a miscarraige. And the only character who is a healthy adult seeking a termination for a presumably healthy pregnancy is shot in the chest by previously mentioned pro-lifers  :) 
Dirty Dancing
Hey did you guys know that Dirty Dancing is great? Like, there’s this fantastic look at class and gender, and the whole thing is set in this incredibly claustrophobic environment, a family holiday resort in 1963, with eyes and judgement around every corner. The sparking conflict of the film is Penny the dance instructor’s unwanted pregnancy. Her friends, the regular staff at the holiday resort, try to help her pay for an abortion but cannot afford it, and the person who got her pregnant and certainly can afford it is a giant asshole [clip]. Baby, without explaining more than that a friend is in need, asks her father for money to pay for it, and learns to dance so that she can replace Penny for an essential performance so that she can go through with the procedure without loosing her whole summer’s pay (because the employers here are assholes [ClLIP]). The performance goes..uh fine...but when they return, Penny’s friends are gathered around her room, concerned. She is suffering after her procedure which was performed unsafely, and so Baby fetches her father, a doctor, to help her. It’s such a powerful image, seeing all these working class friends fighting for Penny to have the abortion that she needs, and all gathered to take care of her when, because she has been forced by economic inequality, to rely on the services of a shoddy practitioner, it causes her pain. We see her later, happy and well, and relieved to learn that she can still have children. The film makes it abundantly clear that this situation is wrong, is the consequence of inequality and prohibitive laws, and that she deserves better. No perfect victim necessary. Good job, I love it. Time for a bad one!
Nocturnal Animals
“Nocturnal Animals” is a story within a story. Susan is an “incredibly privileged” woman, married, with an adult daughter, and a successful art career, but is very unhappy. She receives a book written by her ex husband, Edward, who she divorced 20 years ago. The book is a thriller in which a mother, father and teenage daughter are harassed by a dangerous group of strangers on an empty West Texas road who kidnap them and ultimately rape and murder the wife and daughter. The husband sets out to bring the men to justice and eventually seek revenge.
We see the thriller unfold while Susan reads the novel, alongside her daily life which she finds increasingly dull, shallow, pretentious, and unsatisfying, as she reflects on her relationship with and divorce from Edward. At the end they arrange to meet, she gets dressed up fancy, looking forward to reconnecting with him, and she gets stood up! Ha! Owned! What a bitch!
With Jake Gyllenhall playing both the father in the novel, and Amy Adams’ ex-husband, we read the family as Edward’s sad longing imagining of a life they could have had together, stripped away by villains, and when Susan is stood up at the end of the movie, we realise as she does, that she was not the loving victimised wife in the story, but the villain, and this is Edward’s revenge. Susan’s decision to terminate her pregnancy and leave him for her current husband is, in Edward’s book, represented by the rape and murder of his wife and child. Now I don’t mean to say that this is anti-choice movie, but the abortion is characterised as betrayal, and is used to represent her mistakes. Also: The movie generally kinda hates women. All of the people in this film being used to represent privileged, sterile bougieness and shallow morality are women, queer coded men, and a singular Chad devoid of any personality besides cucking Edward and being a rich Chad. It kinda really hates women actually. 
“Bury your abortions”
[That’s my name for it. If someone else has already named it, I don’t care this is better]
ANSIRH
In a census of American fiction in film and TV, it was found that 15% of abortion plots resulted in the character’s death, either through complications, murder, or suicide. Between 2005 and 2016, 37% of characters who obtained an abortion suffered major medical or psychological consequences, vs just 2.1% of patients who suffer mostly minor health complications in reality This is related to the abundance of storylines involving abortion set in environments where abortion is not yet legal.
These are the “bury your gays” of abortion story lines. In order to garner sympathy for a character doing such a condemned act as terminating a pregnancy, they must be the most perfect victims, or suffer the most brutal consequences, or both, to the point where the suffering and death begins to look a lot like writers exacting narrative karmic retribution on characters seeking abortions, even if they aim to defend their right to do so, leaving us feeling that the people who choose an abortion are doomed to either phisical or emotioinal hardship or tragedy, or that they would in someway be deserving of it.
[Vera Drake, Call the Midwife] While it’s incredibly important to talk about and remember the impact of the unsafe abortions that always result from any restricted access to abortion services, anti-choice activists capitalise on this association which is then made between abortion and pain and death. People vastly overestimate the danger of having an abortion, which is no more dangerous a proceedure than a tooth extraction. In the US this has been used as a wedge to push through legislation that restricts access to abortion through the guise of regulating it’s safety. Right now the Supreme Court in the US is hearing a challenge to the 2014 “Unsafe Abortion Act” in Louisianna which could shut down all 3 abortion clinincs in the state. This image of abortion as unsafe is also capitalised upon by legislators through “informed consent” laws to force doctors to flat out lie to their patients that abortion carries increased risk of cancer, suicide, and infertility.
[Play Bojack clip of Diane and mr P with doc] 
Abortion Horror
[Clip: Because It’s not a site of pain for us? As the Alabama  Senate recently showed, sometimes hearing real graphic testimony...just doesn’t work, and so in order to bring this topic home to those people, I decided to present this, admittedly very macabre fantasy...]  
So showing perfect victims going through unspeakable horrors isn’t enough...ok but what if ALIENS though.
[Play Alien, covenant, fly etc clips]
Abortion horror typically operates as an exaggeration of the “Perfect Victim” trope, often showing the horror of forced pregnancy viscerally with a literal alien invasion of the body. Prometheus approaches this with pretty cruel dramatic irony, as Shaw, who we have seen speaking on her faith as a Catholic and trying to conceive with her husband, is impregnated by her husband while he is infected by alien goo and she is forced to remove the alien from her body herself. In the context of the Alien franchise, in which the alien itself is designed to evoke fear of rape from the outset, and deliberately impose that fear on men, this forced pregnancy is a clear allegory for pregnancy resulting from rape.
These plots can often feel exploitative of people’s fears around pregnancy and the [wink: femenist frq Mystical pregnancy vid] frequency with which female characters undergo briefly traumatic mystical horror pregnancies only to never think of them again in sci-fi and fantasy series is definitely a weird kind of problem. 
An example of abortion horror that I think is pretty great is The Fly. Put simply, it’s a movie about feeling trapped when someone you love changes into something awful and frightening. Geena Davis gets pregnant and we see her have a nightmare that she will give birth to a thing like her partner has become. The change that Jeff Goldblum undergoes could be seen as anything from illness to becoming an abusive partner, and Geena’s consequent decision to have the pregnancy terminated rings really true to life. Though we don’t know that the baby will be like the father is now, the literal bugbabymonster child is not the threat, being tied in to a relationship that is hurting her by a pregnancy that she doesn’t want, is. A+ ten out of ten, this movie, in my opinion, actually validates abortion as a choice outside of the, your pregnancy is going to kill you context.
[Brap brap pew pew aliens inside me, gonna kill it like sigourney]
I binged Witcher over Christmas and I’d describe it as delicious trash. A friend called it BBC Game of Thrones and, yeah, that’s exactly it. Witcher features a couple of mentions of abortion. First in Jaskier’s song and second in the Striga episode. The Striga is a monster that survived in a cursed form after escaping from the body of its mother who died during pregnancy. It is described in the show as “a walking abortion” (show clip <this is an umbilical cord). It is outrageous and ridiculous and obviously not a representation of “abortion” in any way. I’m not going to tell anyone that this is GOOD representation of abortion, but the casual reference to it for comedy and horror, in an aesthetically medeival setting no less,with no intention of “starting a debate” or even trying to defend anyone’s choice, honestly made me feel good, because abortion is a fact of life. I found it kinda freeing.
In Bojack Horseman Diane accidentally tweets from Sextina Akwafina’s account that she is having an abortion leading Sexinta to write this song where she flies around on coat hangers and shoots fetuses in space with lasers. Diane is naturally horrified at the idea that this song is doing harm to the cause and giving forced-birthers ammunition, but then…[play clip]
We should seek to live in a world where abortion is normalised enough that instead of stories of misery and pain made out of desperation, we can get some silly trash that makes us feel visible and strong.
Ok quick fire here’s some of the great stories produced in recent years that thoughtfully show ordinary people having abortions for ordinary reasons with no repurcussions! 
Glow! Sam comes to the clinic to take care of her. Sweet and simple. 
Sex education. Really well handled in a way that really shows how you can just not know how to feel. Massive props for representing a mother also coming in for an abortion which represents the majority of cases.
Obvious Child is a rom com where a first date leads to our protagonist getting pregnant and needing an abortion but also she still really likes the guy. Very funny, extremely sweet. Check it out.
A few months after my abortion, I came across a podcast called The Abortion Diary, where each episode is a new person talking about their experience. Young, old, recent,painful, ok, every background. I cannot tell you how cathartic this was and if you are struggling with this decision or want to learn more about people’s experiences I really recommend it. Stories matter and there is no need for this to be something we never talk about.
Schlock
Olly’s abortion video makes the final argument in the abortion debate: any amount of personhood contained within a fetus does not contradict a pregnant person’s right to bodily autonomy, and I really recommend this video from Shonalika to expand on this idea. The British public agrees, by the way. While 44% of people say that life begins at conception, just 7% want to see abortion banned. But I wanted to make this video after seeing Olly’s because, as a person who has had an abortion, I really want to see more stories where this bodily reality that LITERALLY ⅓ OF THE PEOPLE CAPABLE OF GETTING PREGNANT GO THROUGH is simply not up for debate. 
I grew up thinking, of course it’s a person’s right to choose, but I would never. Because as a young person who’d never been in a relationship before, I literally couldn’t imagine getting pregnant! Many many people who talk casually like this, or say, “well people should have the right but if you’re capable of taking care of a child then it’s wrong,” or even take a pro-life stance, are essentially morally lucky. They’ve never had a pregnancy that they’ve not wanted or been able to care for, yet. But I cannot say this enough, literally ⅓, 1 in 3, 33%, 1.6 Spice Girls, 2 of these old women, will have an abortion. Statistically, one of Marge, Selma and Patty Bouvier have had an abortion, and statistically, IT’S MARGE.  And in the face of that, the subtle shaming and not-so-subtle terrorising of people who don’t want to or can’t keep a pregnancy is ludicrous and hurts us all. We will always be fighting to protect the most vulnerable victims of a vicious system until this reality is acknowledged for everyone. 
Be kind to yourself (ending)
I want to say very cleary that if you decide to have an abortion and you feel sad or scared, before or after, that doesn’t mean that you’ve done something wrong, and if you don’t feel particularly sad, or ashamed, or afraid, that doesn’t mean that there is something wrong with you. Those feelings might come and go at unexpected times. That’s natural for any big life decision. Whatever happens, be kind to yourself.  
CLIP: Diane, you don’t need to explain anything to anyone. 
(Bojack Horseman)
Mommy Long Legs