There’s been a lot of discussion about whether the planned Dirty Dancing remake will keep the abortion subplot from the original. But there’s been surprisingly little speculation about whether a planned Sex and the City prequel will include Carrie and Samantha’s abortions as plot points. The original show had a fairly nuanced perspective on abortion,* embodied most notably by the storyline in the fourth season where Miranda got pregnant accidentally and decided to keep the baby, as Carrie worried about telling Aiden that she’d had an abortion after careless, condomless sex at 22:
We also know that Samantha had one abortion while in college and one later. If the show is an origin story, showing us how the characters met when they were in their early 20s, it would include the years when Samantha and Carrie terminated their pregnancies. I don’t now whether the CW, which is apparently developing the prequel, has the bravery to do this, but it’s important to show heroines not just helping other women get abortions if they need them, but having abortions themselves and moving on to have healthy, fulfilled sexual and emotional lives.
*Relatedly, it drives me insane that Sex and the City is never really in conversations about the revival of television as a medium. I imagine that’s in part because its run mostly overlapped with The Sopranos, which laid down the anti-hero template that’s become so popular in the shows that followed, but I think it’s also because it’s a comedy aimed at women. But it is, for the most part, excellent, and a decent thing for guys to watch if they want to understand the ambitions and anxieties of smart women. Also, I am SO a Miranda despite the whole writer=Carrie thing.
Previous in TP Alyssa
By clicking and submitting a comment I acknowledge the ThinkProgress Privacy Policy and agree to the ThinkProgress Terms of Use. I understand that my comments are also being governed by Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, or Hotmail’s Terms of Use and Privacy Policies as applicable, which can be found here.