Paid in Puke S10E1: Abortionpalooza 2024
Grandma (2015); 21 Jump Street: Whose Choice is it Anyway (1988)
It's our Season TEN premiere AND our ONE HUNDREDTH EPISODE! Thank you to all of our listeners! We are thrilled to be back with our third Abortionpalooza, but much less stoked about the fact that thanks to the overturning of Roe V. Wade, uterus-owning Americans currently have less bodily autonomy than they did in Nineteen Hundred and Seventy Three.
We kick things off with a brief history of abortion depiction on television and examine season 3, episode 5 of the teen cop drama, 21 Jump Street, "Whose Choice is it Anyway?". It originally aired on December 11th 1988 on the Fox network. It stars Holly Robinson-Peete, Stacey Edwards, and Dana Ashbrook (Twin Peaks). The teleplay by Michelle Ashford (Masters of Sex, Cat Person), is surprisingly progressive and they even go so far as to make an anti-choice terrorist the villain.
Then we tool around with Lily Tomlin and Julia Garner in 2015's "Grandma", directed by Paul Weitz (American Pie, About a Boy), and co-written by Tomlin, who put a lot of her own voice in it. Garner plays a high school girl who asks her free-wheeling grandmother (Tomlin) to help her scrounge up enough money to make it to an abortion appointment by 5 pm. Judy Greer, Marsha Gay Harden, Laverne Cox, and John Cho round out a fun supporting cast.
We touch on themes such as who *needs* to be involved in deciding what to do about a pregnancy (*spoiler alert* it's pretty much just the person carrying the fetus), where should kids get information about pregnancy and birth control, and why women should be valued for more than just their fertility.
On the Lunchtime Poll, we reveal some information we wish we had never received.
