When the title of a movie has the word “baby” in it, presumably, it’s going to be about… a baby. The new romantic comedy “Bridget Jones’ Baby,” third in the Bridget Jones film series, is scheduled for release on September 16th, and critics have begun publishing their reviews. That includes Laura Goldman, whose review was featured in the Huffington Post. Goldman had a lot of positive things to say about the movie. She praised Renee Zellweger for her portrayal of the title character, and praised the film as funny, saying it was “guaranteed to make you laugh” and promised “a belly laugh a minute.”
But all of that took a backseat to Goldman’s abortion activism. Her movie review focused mostly on complaining that abortion was not featured more; indeed, the title of her review even focused on abortion (“‘Bridget Jones’s Baby’ Misses By Not Discussing Abortion”). Of course, a movie about a woman having a baby wouldn’t make much sense if abortion was a central part of the plot, a fact that Goldman herself acknowledged. But still, she persisted in her point that abortion should have been shoehorned in somewhere.
“There’s one crucial word missing from the Bridget Jones script-abortion. It is absolutely inconceivable that Bridget, a single 43-year-old pregnant woman, never considers terminating her pregnancy even if she eventually rejected it,” Goldman wrote. “The screenwriters of the film should have had her discuss it with her doctor or could have opted for the less in your face route of having Bridget write about it in her diary, which is now an iPad. It is 2016 not 1950. It is okay for a 43-year-old single woman to fear she can’t handle a baby on her own and consider terminating her pregnancy.”
How would putting abortion into the plot of a silly romantic comedy have improved the movie in any way, beyond placating abortion-obsessed activists? Sure, some movies may feature a woman fearing that she can’t handle a baby on her own, and then deciding to bravely keep the baby anyway. But would that make the movie funnier? More poignant? Probably not; it could add unnecessary weight to what’s supposed to be a light-hearted, feel-good movie.
But then, maybe that is actually the issue. Hollywood actually does release quite a few movies featuring abortion, but those movies aren’t funny or whimsical or uplifting. The ironic thing is that Hollywood actually did try to make an abortion-themed romantic comedy, and it was a miserable flop. Americans aren’t really fans of abortion. It’s not something that’s funny or positive to most people, except for the most extreme of abortion supporters. And evidently, that’s the category that Goldman has just placed herself in.
