Sherry Colb's latest Findlaw essay opens this way:
Unlike popular movies in the U.S. such as "Waitress," "Knocked Up," and "Juno," all of which are fun to watch, screenwriter and director Cristian Mungiu's film does not treat unplanned pregnancy as a happily inescapable event. In this respect, the film helps educate viewers not only about reproductive rights in 1987 Romania, but about our current political standoff on abortion as well.
The film referenced was excellent and should have been nominated for an Academy Award (if not more than one). All the same, the other movies do not "treat unplanned pregnancy as a happily inescapable event." It is true that -- I did not see Knocked Up, so will leave it aside -- the end results of the pregnancies were happy. Nonetheless, they were not "inescapable." The girl and woman involved chose to carry them to term based on moral and practical reasons. They had the choice to do this, even if the woman in Waitress* thought it "inescapable" on a personal morality level.
I did comment on how they fit the mold of movies that suggest abortion is a non-choice, but abortion was not illegal ala Romania. In fact, both movies made it a point to comment that a choice was being made, in Waitress not a very "happy" one early on. To move on, the essay wonders if "a person be pro-life and pro-choice at the same time." Yes. A person can think prohibition is practicably dangerous or (as in many issues of religion and morality) ultimately a private choice, but one that might be quite clear-cut on that level. Or, a bad policy for some other reason. Hard as it is for some to accept.
Meanwhile, another regular source of abortion analysis discusses an attempt to label Plan B as abortion. True enough in its denunciation of the extremes of the anti-abortion forces, including its anti-women aspects, but this concerns me:
And yes, I know, there are some people out there who will argue that if an egg is fertilized, anything that prevents the continuation of a pregnancy produces an abortion. But (1) technically, pregnancy doesn't even begin until the embryo implants and starts to generate the hormones that sustain a pregnancy and (2) lest we forget, about 1/2 of fertilized eggs don't implant anyway.
The term "technically" suggests a weakness -- it implies that colloquially "pregnancy" might be defined in a somewhat different fashion. After all, I do think "abortion" implies aborting something that was implanted. But, it could mean "aborting" the process of implantation (deemed by many as part of "conception," Plan B thus deemed "contraception"), and a few seem to so think. Also, many implanted eggs and embryos naturally miscarry too. Does this mean RU-486 (the abortion pill) does not really matter? Who knows when a natural miscarriage would have occurred?
As with "human life" (the term for many isn't just a human zygote but one of a certain stage of development) or "personhood" science only takes you so far here. Certain moral and religious meanings are given to these processes too, even if they are a result of looking at the science of it all. It is quite proper not to treat Plan B use as "abortion," and it simply is not a normal understanding of the term. In fact, regular birth control use very well can have the same effects (Plan B is basically a birth control pill of special strength), and even some who don't like Plan B are not aiming to attack it. Who hears of pharmacists not wanting to sell birth control?
[Update: Yes, one should be careful to assume too much sanity here, but in general, the arbitrary limitation of the arguments -- especially since birth control pills often act the same way at the end of the day -- is apparent. Quite tellingly.]
All the same, it is not always patently obvious that the pro-choice side is correct via use of definitions alone. The meanings sometimes require a bit more work.
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* This choice was not discussed on the DVD commentary (the director was involved in some of the special features, but the commentary was done after her death; the commentary involved the star and a producer). Since I referenced the movie last time, let me say that overall the commentary / features were good, the DVD having a handful of "making of" sort of deals. Again, gem of a movie.
Interestingly, none of the three movies referenced had "deleted scenes," which is a bit strange since most DVDs with extras have them.