Fuck you very, very much: What Paula Irmschler says about pop culture and abortion

taketonews

“Instagram has been blocking posts that mention abortion”

“Delete your period tracking app. That’s a goldmine of information they’ll be lining up to sell to Republicans.”

“A 10-year-old girl is raped. The State forces her to remain pregnant and tells her to consider it an ‘opportunity’.”

These were just normal viral tweets from the last week. While we are becoming more and more used to men shooting around with guns, women’s rights to physical self-determination were once again being negotiated – to their disadvantage, of course. But I, for example, don’t really feel like explaining and begging and crying anymore at the moment. So first watch this firework of anger and declaration of war before continuing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fpc40dmPlVM

“Abort the court!” is the slogan, at the latest since June 24, 2022. That was the day on which the Supreme Court actually overturned Roe vs. Wade. It was to be expected, and sadly it was nowhere near the case before, that all women in the United States would have access to safe abortions. The disappearance of places where you can easily have an abortion started much earlier (by the way, there are fewer and fewer places outside of the cities in Germany, too).

The Netflix documentary Reversing Roe (2018) summarizes well what the case was about, how the relationship between Republicans and Democrats on abortion has changed, how this fundamental right of women has been used again and again as a pawn for campaign promises and of course what role religious interest groups play in this:

At least in the pop world, there seemed to be a pretty good consensus that this is some friggin’ direction we’re headed.

Billie Joe Armstrong (Green Day) announced that he would give up his citizenship and move to London, ranting as nicely as we probably all did privately in our living rooms when we heard the verdict. Fucking America and stuff.

Taylor Swift didn’t like it either:

And perhaps the nicest thing was this reaction from Danny DeVito, who doesn’t usually post too much:

Cindy Lauper even re-recorded her abortion-themed song “Sally’s Pigeons.”

Here is the new edition:

Like many others, Stephen King stated the following:

And that’s why I watched the series, I woke up after four seasons and I have to say: No! I find the comparison inappropriate. Because what is shown as a dystopia (!) in “The Handmaid’s Tale” has already happened to many women and is still happening in a similar way. Only they were/are not, like the main character in the series, white blonde women, but, for example, black women in the USA, Afghan women under the Taliban, Jewish women during the Holocaust and so on. Being on the alert now, after and next to everything that was and is, this King’s selective excitement activism, which only knows a series as a reference and not THE HISTORY or OTHER PARTS OF THE WORLD, doesn’t do that much.

Of course, popular culture on the subject itself – including The Handmaid’s Tale – is mostly aware of the story. I already wrote about “Dirty Dancing” in this column that it is worth looking at again from today’s point of view. Screenwriter Eleanor Bergstein included an illegal abortion scene in the film to remind us of what it was like before Roe vs. Wade and to warn of what it would be like once Roe vs. Wade was gone.

A nice new movie I saw the other day was called Unpregnant, in which two teenagers have to drive halfway across the country (USA!) so one of them can have an abortion. I especially liked the fact that there is no big fuss about the decision of the pregnant woman. She doesn’t want to be pregnant, so here we go. At no time does she doubt her decision, it’s so beneficial. Afterwards she is just: relieved.

You can find more representations of abortions in films and series on https://www.instagram.com/abortion.tv respectively http://abortion-tv.info/.

The podcast world is also currently focusing on the topic again. In my favorite podcast “1000 First Dates” was recently about the story of Lisawhich tells of a one-night stand that led to a pregnancy despite the morning-after pill:

The magical Dolly reported on Deutschlandfunkhow difficult it was for her to have an abortion in the West German 1960s and how that made her a feminist.

And because often ignored: There is also this contribution from Deutschlandfunk about the far more progressive abortion regulations in the former GDR.

What pretty much every abortion story I hear has in common: the women say they were relieved afterwards. This is also consistent with the studies. If women have decided to do this themselves, they usually feel relieved and even empowered. After all, they themselves determined their path in life, did not have to surrender to any fate (that of pregnancy or even a child). However, the myth still persists that abortions cause depression and are otherwise harmful to health. Pregnancies are many times more risky – and on the way to having a healthy child, so much can go wrong anyway that an abortion is not always a no to children, but to the state of being pregnant. With the many myths and debates about pregnancy is the subject of Erica Millar in her study “Happy Abortions” and I heartily recommend it to everyone.

And something else to read: The very clever Jia Tolentino (“Trick Mirror”) wrote down herewhat the verdict means for the future of abortion in the US. She paints a very bleak picture and calls for more radicalism from feminists. Can have her!!!

But because I still feel a little helpless, I first did what I always do, namely made a playlist. This time about songs that deal directly or indirectly with the topic of abortion or physical self-determination, with very different approaches and thoughts, sometimes emotionally charged, sometimes very pragmatic, sometimes angry, sometimes funny. But the main thing is that while listening to it, you think about how to get the pigs.



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