Abortion Travels in Contemporary American Cinema: Parental Consent and the Bumpy Ride to Termination in Eliza Hittman’s Never Rarely Sometimes Always and Rachel Lee Goldenberg’s Unpregnant

Abstract

Abstract Although abortion was legalized in 1973 through the US Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Roe v. Wade, it is state legislatures that have ultimately acted as the final arbiters on the matter ever since. As a result, only over the course of the last decade, more than two hundred abortion restrictions have been enacted nationwide in the United States. As more and more restrictions are put in place in an attempt at policing women’s bodies, the practice that came to be known somewhat inappropriately as ‘abortion tourism’ is becoming increasingly common. More and more women travel across state lines in order to benefit from a safe procedure while evading the legal limits imposed upon them in their home states. This is even more acutely so in the case of young, under-age women, as only a few states do not have parental consent statutes covering abortion provisions. It is against this background that my article discusses two recent movies which tackle the issue of teen pregnancy and ‘abortion mobility,’ Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2020) and Unpregnant (2020). I look at how both travel narratives illustrate, in different genres and manners, the hurdles (young) women have to navigate to gain access to necessary medical care and expose the state-sanctioned obstacles to abortion in two stories about female friendship and empathy above all.