There’s a terrific moment in the very funny independent film Obvious Child when the protagonist, Donna, tells her mother that she is going to have an abortion.

“Oh, is that all?” her mother laughs, relieved. “I thought you were going to tell me you’re moving to Los Angeles!” Funny, right? But also shocking. Not because it’s shocking to see a mother be so blasé about her daughter deciding to terminate a pregnancy. After all, 35pc of women of reproductive age in the US, England and Wales will have an abortion by the time they’re 45, so it would be almost stranger if the mother was downright astonished. But it is shocking to hear a character be pro-choice in an American movie.

Just as tabloid papers seem to operate in some weird parallel universe where people are ABSOLUTELY HORRIFIED at the idea of a famous person taking drugs, so Hollywood has, for the past 25 years, resided on a strange planet where film audiences would be simply outraged at the idea of a film character having an abortion.

In Juno, a pregnant teenager decides against having an abortion after encountering a scaremongering anti-abortion protester outside the clinic. In Knocked Up, anyone who suggests that the 22-year-old protagonist could have an abortion after an awkward one night stand is derided as heartless. In both cases, deciding not to have an abortion is presented as the moral choice. In 2011’s Bachelorette, a character reveals that she had an abortion as a teenager, and this, the film intimates, is why she’s now a promiscuous mess with a drug problem.

It would be derivative to describe Obvious Child — which was funded, zeitgeistishly, through Kickstarter donations — as the response to these films, but it could be seen as the long-awaited and, by many, much longed-for reaction to them. Contrary to Hollywood studios’ belief that audiences are repulsed by abortions, Obvious Child made a hugely respectable $26,000 per screen on its opening weekend in the US.

There are two things that make Hollywood’s fear of abortions so weird. The first is that this was not always the situation. Come with me back to a magical time, a time of yore, a time called — the 1980s. Yup, the decade of conservatism, Reaganism and Just Say No. But in terms of attitudes towards abortion on film, at least, that era looks pretty darn liberal compared with the one in which we now live.

Teenage girls in Fame (1980) and Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) get abortions and in neither case is this depicted as a big deal or moral issue. The whole plot of Dirty Dancing (1987) is set in motion when a female character needs an abortion and the only person who is criticised is the thoughtless dude who got her pregnant and abandoned her. Even Fatal Attraction, that ultimate example of the backlash against feminism in 80s cinema, was strikingly pro-choice. Michael Douglas (the good guy in the movie, remember) begs his former mistress, Glenn Close (the evil woman), to have an abortion. Her refusal to do so is taken as yet another indication that she is a selfish person.

The second weird thing about this switch is that, according to America’s Guttmacher Institute, roughly the same number of Americans are pro-choice now as in the 80s. Moreover, the abortion rate is at a record low, which makes Hollywood’s scaremongering look even more unhinged.

I am writing a book about the creeping conservatism of Hollywood, looking at why movies don’t talk about abortion — among other fairly common experiences — anymore. Back in the 80s, international markets accounted for about 20pc of a movie’s profits. They now account for 80pc, and this then makes studios extra paranoid about showing what they think are sensitive issues on screen — one of those issues, of course, being abortion. Violence, explosions and body counts are A-OK. But abortion? Way too shocking.

Film producers I have spoken to have said that the increasingly vocal anti-choice pressure groups in the US also affect what studios feel they can show. Meanwhile, the American political system has also moved to the right, with the Republican party focusing on socially conservative issues as opposed to just economic ones. Studios are not interested in making the kind of mid-size films they made in the 80s: they now make “tentpoles”, or blockbusters, and that means they need to have mass appeal, which means nothing that scares the conservative horses. In seeking to appeal to all audiences, Hollywood blands down its movies so that they feel “meh” to everybody, and deeply misrepresent the lives of many.

Personally, I wish that the abortion in Obvious Child wasn’t treated as the biggest deal in, well, the movie. Real progress will come when a character in a film can choose to have an abortion and it just be part of a movie, not the whole movie — and by “progress” I mean take us back to the 1980s. Having an abortion is no woman’s idea of a good time, but we don’t need to look very far this week to find news stories illustrating why they are important, and why attaching moral judgement to them is actually immoral. And hell, they’re preferable to moving to Los Angeles.

—By arrangement with the Guardian

Published in Dawn, August 23rd, 2014