"It's as if there's an 'every conception deserves delivery' policy being observed," says Virginia Rutter, senior scholar at the Council on Contemporary Families, a Chicago-based organization of academics and public health professionals.
To the extent that mainstream movies are a barometer of public opinion, the evidence of America's continued ambivalence about abortion can be found at the multiplex.
"The ground has shifted," says Robert P. George, professor of the philosophy of law at Princeton. "We don't see characters wrestling with the question of abortion as we saw it during the '70s when [television's] Maude weighed the decision whether to keep or terminate her pregnancy."
George, who serves on the President's Council for Bioethics, identifies himself as "pro-life." Yet across the ideological spectrum, scholars and advocates ponder why the procedure that so divides Americans - according to a May Gallup Poll, 49 percent of Americans identify as pro-choice and 45 percent as pro-life - effectively has vanished from the screen.
(According to a related Gallup poll question, 55 per cent of Americans believe that abortion should be legal under certain circumstances, a figure that has held steady since 1975.)
Since the '80s, when characters in Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Dirty Dancing (set in the '60s) sought abortions, the Subject That Must Not Be Named has virtually disappeared from Hollywood features. The Cider House Rules, released in 1999 and focusing on an obstetrician-abortionist and his antiabortion protege during the 1940s, may well have been the last mainstream American movie to utter the A-word.
In Europe it is different: The 2004 indie British drama Vera Drake and the 2007 Romanian film Four Months, Three Weeks, Two Days, which took top honors at Cannes in May, dramatize the peril to women in situations where abortion is not safe and legal.
