At a screening I went to recently, one of the biggest laughs came when the lead character, a pregnant 16-year-old, asked for an abortion. Now let me say that, despite what the above might suggest, I liked the film. But after Waitress and Knocked Up, Juno (which received a best picture Oscar nomination last week) completes a hat-trick of American comedies in the past 12 months that present abortion as unreasonable, or even unthinkable - a telling social sign.
Each of these films presents situations where women do not consider abortion as a feasible possibility and dismiss it - as something that is portrayed in Knocked Up as the act of selfish women who don't want a swelling belly to impede their clubbing. I don't believe any of these films is consciously designed to be anti-abortion propaganda. But they are a product of a generation that has had the luxury of legal and relatively easy access to abortion. The danger is that one forgets what the alternative really meant, and as a result sentimentalises it.
It is surely no coincidence that these films are emerging from a country that has had eight years of ultra-conservative Republican rule. A report last week showed that abortions in the US have fallen by 25% since 1990, and 2006 saw the largest number of children born for 45 years - but the teenage birth rate also rose for the first time in 15 years.
In the harrowing Vera Drake, the UK (which has the highest teenage birth rate in western Europe) has made its own contribution to the abortion genre. This film is a reminder that not having an abortion doesn't always lead to the happy families of Juno and Knocked Up. As Libby Brooks wrote on these pages, we need to guard against a creeping antipathy to abortion, exemplified by claims that it is linked to breast cancer.
Another new film about abortion - Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days - depicts the horrors women in Romania had to go through to get an abortion when it was still illegal 20 years ago. Its message is stark: choice is not about giving silly young women a lazy form of contraception that destroys families; it is about giving women control over their lives.
hadley.freeman@theguardian.com
