A Diamond in the Raunch: Pro-life Positions Emerge in Knocked Up and Waitress

Knocked Up appears poised to be this summer's Wedding Crashers — a loud, raunchy battle-of-the-sexes film that brings in big box office. Millions of people will flock to this morally reprehensible film, and laugh it up while watching drugged-out, sex-obsessed slackers slouching through extended adolescence do anything to avoid growing up and taking responsibility for their lives. While viewers wallow in profanity, vulgarity, and general tastelessness, they will also see some amazing live ultrasound images of a developing unborn child in the womb — easily enough to give lie to any assertion by abortion rights advocates that what is in the womb is merely a "bunch of cells" or the purposefully vague "products of conception."

Identification of this "pro-life" angle in Knocked Up should in no way be considered an endorsement for the film. Sure, there is a redemptive aspect to the movie, but you have to slog through an awful lot of garbage to get to it. Do not go to see it — is that clear enough? But, that said, millions of people will go see it, laugh, and throughout the film view compelling images of an unborn baby. This same weekend, a PG-13-rated film, Waitress, has also found its way into the box office top ten. It depicts a woman's commitment to her unplanned, unwanted pregnancy and the positive, life-changing effects that follow.

Yes, these films are inappropriate on many levels. But there is no escaping the fact that we are witnessing two Hollywood films in simultaneous release that value unborn life, openly reject the call for abortion, and argue that children can positively affect the lives of those who have them. And that's a far cry from the "kids as parasitic cancers" rhetoric propagated by some in the population control and abortion rights crowd.

Images Matter

Knocked Up is not shy — about anything. The film is about a beautiful, upwardly-mobile woman named Alison who ends up in a drunken one-night stand with an amusing, but homely, pot-smoking unemployed slacker, Ben. As a result of some miscommunication during their inebriated tryst, Alison becomes pregnant. But neither is the film shy about showing the development of an unborn child as an unbroken stream of events beginning with conception and continuing through birth. The first images the audience sees looks like an educational film about conception. We see initial cell division. Then, at eight or nine weeks, we watch an ultrasound technician point to a flickering image on the screen, which he identifies for the couple as the baby's heartbeat. Live ultrasound images continue to serve as benchmarks throughout Alison's pregnancy at sixteen, twenty-four, and twenty-eight weeks, to allow viewers to know just how far along she is.

Knocked Up does not avoid the abortion controversy. Alison's mother strongly argues that Alison get an abortion — claiming that Alison's stepsister aborted, and "now she has a real baby." It seems that Alison's mother does not consider that grandchildren in utero are "real." It appears that she never managed to read this little snippet from an otherwise pro-abortion rights editorial published in California Medicine, September 1970:

"Since the old ethic has not yet been fully displaced it has been necessary to separate the idea of abortion from the idea of killing, which continues to be socially abhorrent. The result has been a curious avoidance of the scientific fact, which everyone really knows, that human life begins at conception and is continuous whether intra- or extra-uterine until death."

Ben's roommates, Jonah and Jay, are split in their advice. Jonah does everything but command Ben to pressure Alison to abort. But Jay is supportive of having the baby. Over lunch, Ben's dad tells him that he is happy. Ben wants to know whether his father's life would have been better had Ben never been born, but his dad just smiles and says, "No — best thing that ever happened to me." Ultimately, Alison announces that she is keeping the baby, and Ben tells her that he was hoping she would.

No rationale is given in the film for her decision to keep her baby, but certainly seeing the evidence of her child's beating heart must have played some role. Images of children in utero can help to overcome our culture's irrational idea that the physical fact and moral worth of the human person that is in a woman's womb from the moment of conception should be determined solely on the basis of whether or not she is happy about her pregnancy at the time. Sure, Alison cries at this first, conclusive evidence of her untimely pregnancy. But it is not long after that she commits to carry her baby. Knocked Up is an outstanding argument for the need for women to see what is going on inside their bodies when they are pregnant. If your local pro-life pregnancy counseling center is not equipped with an ultrasound machine and a licensed technician to run it, help them get both, quick!

Babies Change Things

Another unhappy pregnancy is depicted in Waitress, a movie about a pie maker extraordinaire named Jenna who is in an abusive relationship with her husband, Earl. Jenna is planning to leave him, but discovers that on the one night that he apparently got her drunk and had intercourse with her, she became pregnant. Even though the child is "unwanted" — which everyone should understand is a comment on the parents and not on the baby — Jenna is determined to give birth. Earl wants her to abort because he is afraid that Jenna will love the baby more than him (one wonders how often the decision to abort is made using precisely this kind of selfish reasoning). The toxic relationship between Jenna and Earl makes her ripe for an affair with her doctor, played some places for laughs, but revealing Jenna's desperate desire for tender affection.

All during the pregnancy, Jenna journals letters addressed to her growing, unborn child, in which she honestly expresses her mixed feelings. And when her baby finally is born, this beautiful daughter changes everything. Jenna finds the courage to leave her abusive husband, end her destructive affair, and meaningfully pour her life into her daughter, like filling into a pie crust.

While not all experiences of parenthood under adverse circumstances turn out well, pregnancy counseling centers are full of stories about parents who counseled abortion to their desperate children, only to beam with delight when the new grandchild arrives. And even if life did not turn out so rosy, none would argue that a 3-year-old should die because his or her life is not straight out of a Rockwell painting. Life is better than death. And lacking the capacity to celebrate life is a character flaw that needs remedy, not an argument for the destruction of others. Movies that move us usually show us characters with traits that we wish we had, or hope to develop. Jenna's relationships with men are a mess, but in loving her daughter she depicts an admirable slice of life.

Exposure to Truth

Perhaps as Hollywood filmmakers get older, or as more of them see the horrifying consequences of abortion (or have experienced it themselves) we are beginning to see minor shifts in perspective. Hollywood is not in the business of producing "Christian" films — not even remotely. But it is encouraging to see two films simultaneously occupying the top ten in box office receipts in which the humanity of the unborn child is not lost. Millions of people have seen Knocked Up, and the way it is holding on at the box office, many more will. It will probably do over $100 million in domestic receipts over its summer run — and then on to the DVD. There, in the midst of the raunchiness, audiences are going to be confronted with the truth of the developing child.

Survival mitigates against people living, long-term, like the stoner crowd in Knocked Up. Films such as these are simply what passes for amusement in our decaying culture. But as people mature out of potty humor, and take on more adult responsibilities, perhaps the images of that beautiful, unborn baby will stick in their minds. Maybe it will nudge people in such a way that they will not be able to quickly dismiss the humanity of their unborn children. As the chaff of raunchiness blows away, this single diamond of truth might just shine brightly enough so that some people will turn away from death, toward life.