[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdu7xoHU9DA]

I know I enjoy a good walk down memory lane so whilst you are enjoying this clip from the 1973 cult classic The Rocky Horror Picture Show, let me discuss today’s news. Today Judith Timson in The Globe and Mail writes an article called The unthinkable shmashmortion: When did abortion become a dirty word again? It’s another article despairing that Hollywood has not put enough effort into glamorizing “women’s choices” (read abortion) and has made movies like Juno and Knocked Up, showing other options. To quote:

When I was a teenager in the mid-sixties, an unwanted pregnancy was a nightmare. One girl I knew who did not want to tell her parents travelled secretly to a small town to visit a semi-competent abortionist. Another 17-year-old friend had an abortion performed on her family’s kitchen table by two women who injected a saline solution into her as her wealthy mother stood by. She delivered a fetus into the frilly wastebasket in her bedroom.

She also touches on the gritty 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, a film about an abortion in communist Romania, which had Timson “protectively pressing my legs together, thinking back to those comparatively benign but still bad old days in Canada.”

Someone send this woman a history book: Comparing communist Romania with Canada in any fashion is hopelessly naive and historically untenable. Did I say “hopelessly naive”? Back to the topic at hand.

Abortion has not become a dirty word “again.” It was always a dirty word. She’s cheering the normalization of death that never happened, the women’s right that never materialized, because whether into a wastebasket or a sterilized hospital dish, women, girls, none of us, are comfortable with delivering our unborn children–dead.

Timson says she feels like she’s living in a time warp. How to put this delicately-that’s because she is. Her own 1970s time warp. Since then, time has shown the supposed liberation of abortion to be nothing more than science fiction–a cast of eccentric characters dancing over graves. The modern and hip know how abysmal the whole affair is.