“Whatever…. I have a human vagina.”
She sure does. But more on the V word later.
Donna Stern, the heroine of coming-to-a-cinema-near-you-movie Obvious Child, starts as she means to go on with an in-your-face reference to the contents of a woman's underpants. Normal everyday effusions that are among the defining characteristics of 51 per cent of the population. You know about them.
And thus the scene is set for an American movie that, like only a handful of movies before, considers the subject of unplanned pregnancy and whisper it (no, shout about it), abortion.
Obvious Child hits Irish cinemas this Friday. Go see it and see what deciding to have an abortion is like in a place that, unlike Ireland, has no problem with a woman having the right to choose what to do with her own body.
There are no judgments in Obvious Child.
Imagine that.
Too much to drink. Rebound. Hot guy. Condom misuse. Donna doesn’t need the radio broadcaster in her head to tell her: “You are dizzy because you played Russian Roulette with your vagina.”
From the moment she feels her “sore boobs”, she knows. She doesn’t need her friend Nellie to read the pregnancy testing kit to tell her that “One line is ‘not pregnant’, two is ‘you are f***ed’ .”
So, as Nellie says: “Let’s talk about your options.”
Options.
See, women in New York have options. They may have to scrape the money together (US$500 for the abortion in this movie) or approach a charity for their beneficence, but they can choose to have an abortion. And they do.
So let’s talk about Donna’s options.
“I’d like an abortion please,” she says. Simples.
Too simple, maybe, even for Donna. “It sounds heartless, as if I’m ordering from a drive-through, but I want an abortion.”
It doesn’t sound heartless, Donna. It sounds like a choice made with the best will in the world.
Not that she’s not worried about the procedure. “Does it hurt?” she asks Nellie, who, like one in three women under 45 in the US, has had an abortion. “No. Just some cramps afterwards. But no worse than period cramps.”
See? Surgical abortion is not that bad. Not when you can snuggle up under a blanket on your own couch a short while after leaving the clinic. Irish women may have to rev up their imagination for this bit.
Was Nellie wracked with regret and guilt about having an abortion? A logical question. “Yes, I feel sad,” says Nellie. “but only for my little teenage self.”
Somewhere in Ireland, a teenager is recovering from a Caesarean section forced on her by the Irish State. A young woman who was raped. A young woman who wanted an abortion. A young woman who had turned to this State for sanctuary. A young woman who was re-violated by the State from which she sought protection. We should all feel sad for her “teenage self”.
We should feel especially sad for this young woman. But we should feel sad for every woman in this State and every woman in the North. If we are going to be wracked with regret about anything it is not about anyone choosing to have an abortion, but that we live on a island that stubbornly refuses to get to grips with the fact that the contents of women’s pants are really only a woman’s business.
Which is why Obvious Child will blow through our cinemas like a breath of fresh air and give us a glimpse of a society that treats women as normal, sentient beings able to make their own decisions.
As if to remind women in the US what they stand to lose from the assaults on their reproductive rights at the hands of the Christian right, Donna’s mother recounts her own experience of illegal abortion on a back-street kitchen table. “Next night I was dancing at your aunt’s sweet 16 party,” she tells Donna with a hug. Not a good start, but a good ending.
This is a movie about choice. About a young woman facing lots of choices. What to do when her employer shuts up shop. What to do about her taxes. How to tell her co-participant in sexual relations about her choice to have an abortion. What movie to watch as she snuggles up at home with him after the procedure.
Obvious Child is not an "abortion comedy", a description director Gillian Robespierre robustly rejects - feeling it makes the movie sound "glib and sarcastic". It is not a film to picket, as some in the US have done. It is a film to enjoy. It is a film that puts a woman and the choices she makes right at the centre.
It is emotional. I defy you to keep a dry eye when Donna shaves her legs. It is not a comedy about abortion , though; it’s about life. Life is funny sometimes and abortion is part of life.
Go see it. You will see how a woman-centred Planned Parenthood clinic works. You will get a glimpse of Donna’s expression as she undergoes a surgical abortion. “Let us know if you feel any discomfort….”
For women in the Republic of Ireland, women who must be judged suicidal to get an abortion in this State, Obvious Child acts as an illustration of how it should, and could, be.
Back from the clinic, Donna and Max snuggle on the couch under a blanket and watch Gone With the Wind. It is a scene the 3,679 Irish women who climbed the steps of a plane in 2013 after their overseas abortion would dearly have loved.
But to paraphrase Mr Rhett Butler… “Frankly my dears, we don’t give a damn.”
* Obvious Child opens on Friday. Read Donald Clarkes’s interview with director Gillian Robespierre and Tara Brady’s review of the film in The Ticket on Friday.
* Anthea McTeirnan is a former chairperson of the Irish Family Planning Association and an Irish Times journalist.