Biological Imperative
21 May 2007
Just because we girls can get pregnant, does that mean we have to have babies?!
This is a rhetorical question, one that I considered with disdain after I saw the new-release movie, Waitress.
Set in a small-town America, its Deep South thematic overtones resonated with my Aussie worldview about as well as the antics of the Ya Ya Sisterhood girls.
In other words, if southern women are from Venus, Australian women are from Uranus.
And then if the clash of cultures thing wasn’t enough to make me squirm disquietedly, protagonist Jenna is pregnant to a drongo abusive husband, doesn’t want to be pregnant, and nor does she want to be a mum.
But regardless, she has the baby, and in spite of herself!
Early on, abortion is alluded to by her doctor, but only by way of dismissal since he says something along lines of he doesn’t do those, to which she responds something along lines of that’s okay because she’s going through with the pregnancy.
Presumably our “two-thumbs up” Waitress heroine considers it her duty as a woman to reproduce, whether she wants to or not.
Unhappy, frustrated, and with “an alien growing inside her,” she launches into a lusty affair with her handsome, married doctor - I guess in the effort to drown her sorrows in some romping good sex.
She appears not to have reservations about her infidelity nor her doctors, just like she fails to question her ability to either bring forth life or not bring forth life.
Even though I’m from Uranus, I know Jenna’s behavior isn’t specific to girls from Venus. The biological urge to have sex is a universal imperative just as much as a woman’s capacity to reproduce is a biological predisposition.
If our biology is a directive then exercising choice in order to control what our body is geared for makes sense. After all, if we girls failed to exercise sexual choice we’d be bonking every married or single bloke in sight.
And without reproductive rights: access to birth control and legal abortion … well we know what would happen because our mothers, and our mother’s mothers, have relayed what did happen.
I wish movies like Waitress told the truth, i.e. women, like men, are sexual beings and the consequences for women sometimes mean that abortion needs to be seen as a viable option.
