Epistolary Blog

Another Epistolary Blog Public Service Announcement

To my dearest darling readers:

Allow me to direct you to the New York Times, my favorite commie rag.  My brilliant boyfriend Jim is featured in today's Books section.

Love,

Lauren

Epistle to Jamie Lynn Spears

To my dearest darling Jamie Lynn:

Several weeks before word of your pregnancy hit newsstands and gossip blogs, I found myself wondering about celebrity abortions.  The paparazzi manage to capture all manner of embarrassing celebrity activities: drunken make out sessions; drunk driving arrests; pantyless exits from limousines; and sheepish exits from plastic surgeons’ offices.  How is it possible that we’ve never seen a star emerging from an abortion clinic?  Surely in an industry full of sexy people whose livelihood is dependent upon maintaining their sexiness, there must be an awful lot of sex and an awful lot of women who fear that baby weight equals career suicide.  (Let’s face it: of the recent rash of pregnant celebrities, only Gwen Stefani managed glamour throughout all nine months.  Everyone else was caught looking chubby and exhausted on at least one occasion.)  So it must be an industry in which abortions happen.  Is there an undercover abortionist to the stars?  And does he make house calls?

And then I began to wonder if anyone in Hollywood would have the nerve to be a celebrity advocate for abortion.  There are celebrity advocates for abstinence: your sister Britney, for example, who didn’t quite make it to her wedding night; and Jessica Simpson, who did, although rather pointlessly in light of the brevity of her marriage.  But in a world where the average age at time of virginity loss is on the decline and the average age at time of first marriage is on the rise, abstinence is more and more an unrealistic expectation.  And in a world where it is often the woman alone who faces the physical, emotional, and financial burdens of pregnancy, childbirth, childcare, a tarnished reputation, limited educational and professional options, as well as the burden of having every interaction with the child’s father referred to as “baby mama drama” by his friends, it seems outrageous that any man would even feel entitled to an opinion on the subject of abortion or that any woman would want the option to no longer exist.

So what would happen if a celebrity came forward and admitted to an abortion?  What if she admitted to it, stood by her choice matter-of-factly, and encouraged other young women to consider the same decision in the face of unplanned pregnancy?  Would she ever work again?  Would she be box office poison from that point forward?  Is abortion really so taboo?

Maybe it is.  How could actresses ever admit to real life abortions when the characters they play so rarely even consider the option?  Can you think of any film or TV show outside of Dirty Dancing, Sex and the City, Degrassi, and The Sarah Silverman Program that has handled the issue honestly?  I love Judd Apatow, but did he really expect us to believe that Katherine Heigl would have Seth Rogan’s baby?  Really?

And don’t even get me started on Juno, the teen pregnancy flick you oh-so-appropriately saw the day before the news of your pregnancy broke.  I enjoyed Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner’s sparkling performances, Kimya Dawson’s contributions to the soundtrack, and Degrassi bad boy Sean’s bit part, but as my friend Ted so succinctly put it: no one in high school is that cool.  The high school dialogue in this film is so absurdly clever that even the Dawson’s Creek gang and Rory Gilmore would raise a collective eyebrow.  And while the titular heroine’s hipster music and film references and nearly impenetrable glibness establish her early on as the coolest teenage girl ever, she makes several decisions which seem to stand in direct contrast to her character.  She falls in love with a boy who is charmless, gawky, and chicken-legged and aborts her abortion mission after learning that her baby has fingernails.  Yes: fingernails.  For some reason this so humanizes the baby in her mind that she bails on the procedure.  It’s a stretch, and certainly a major chink in her armor of coolness.  Juno’s behavior is nonsensical throughout: she makes no attempt to hide her pregnancy, even telling Dwight Schrute himself; she exhibits no fear of getting fat or experiencing the pain of childbirth; and in fact never exhibits any emotion at all until the very end of the film.  Why can’t someone make a movie in which a girl realizes she’s pregnant, quietly freaks out and berates herself for allowing this to happen, tells no one, gets an abortion, and afterward feels relieved and vaguely annoyed that she had to take time out of her busy day to get this all taken care of?  I suppose it wouldn’t be much of a story, but I think it would set a positive example for girls like you, Jamie Lynn.

I’m never surprised that young girls are dumb enough to get knocked up, but I’m always surprised when they’re dumb enough to be excited about it.  So it’s not your sex life that concerns me, but the fact that you are naively “looking forward to being the best mom [you] can be.”  Who do you think you are?  Lorelai Gilmore?  Have you learned nothing from your sister?  This child will not improve your relationship with your boyfriend, make you glamorous, make you an adult, or give meaning to your vacuous life.  I know you think you have to “act like an adult and take responsibility for what [you] did,” but what on earth gave you the idea that being a responsible adult and having an abortion were mutually exclusive?

So, Jamie Lynn, I guess you’ve missed your window of opportunity to be the celebrity spokesmodel for abortion, although maybe it’s not too late in Canada.  Please keep in mind, as your sister has not, that once you’re a mother you must always put your child’s needs before your own, even when all your friends are making all the selfish choices that childless young people get to make.

Best of luck.

Love,

Lauren