How Are We Not Talking About This All the Time?

Victoria Sturtevant reviews Pamela Adlon’s new film “Babes.”

By Victoria SturtevantAugust 20, 2024

• Film

• Gender & Sexuality

• Cultural Studies

FOR MOST OF the 20th century, pregnancy comedies were really about men. Kimberly Williams and Diane Keaton in Father of the Bride Part II (1995) may have been adorable in their matching maternity button-downs, doing prenatal aerobics with Martin Short, but they were just in the movie to be cute. Steve Martin, with his hysterical ambivalence, Steve Martin with his wry voice-over, Steve Martin with his generous sacrifices to make these cute pregnant ladies comfortable, to build a gorgeous nursery and host a gorgeous double baby shower in his gorgeous California house­—he, not the women actually having the babies, was the point of the movie.

It’s a familiar pattern: Dudley Moore is the point of Micki & Maude (1984), Hugh Grant is the point of Nine Months (1995), Kevin Bacon is the point of She’s Having a Baby (1988), and Matthew Perry is the point of Fools Rush In (1997). At least Junior (1994) was honest about its intentions and put Arnold Schwarzenegger at the center of the plot, rather than pretending that pregnancy might have something to do with women.

That cishet men wrote the Hollywood script for pregnancy is not a surprise; cishet men have written the script for everything. In comedies, this fact was exacerbated by generations of producers who assumed that women aren’t funny anyway. This assumption has animated pregnancy comedies for decades and helped perpetuate their father-centered paradigms. In media texts from Father’s Little Dividend (1951) to Due Date (2010) and beyond, men in comedy have experienced women’s pregnancies through a lens of barely concealed hysteria.

As a result, what audiences learned from these movies had less to do with pregnancy than with masculine sacrifice: pregnant women, apparently are moody, behave irrationally, and require a lot of material upkeep. Men should expect to sublimate their own needs, buy a minivan, and be prepared for sudden emergencies like midnight food cravings and the onset of labor. The sensitive father’s role as labor partner proved, in fact, a wonderful cure for his general sense of being left out of the gestation process. Fathers suddenly had an important role to play: driving their partners to the hospital with manly speed and offering Lamaze breathing cues like a tough-but-fair high school gymnastics coach. Labor in these movies is always an emergency, a Keystone Kops–type situation—you’d never know that average first labor lasts 12–24 hours. Instead, popular film and television would have viewers believe that every pregnancy ends with a woman’s water breaking, a mad rush to the hospital, some fussing about whether the woman wants drugs (she does), and a euphoric birth.

It’s the perfect conclusion to a comic plot, so why mess with it? In Nine Months, the birth ends with new father Hugh Grant, other new father Tom Arnold, and obstetrician Robin Williams high-fiving and announcing “We did it!” The moment is a joke, but it’s also the movie saying the quiet part out loud: on-screen, pregnancy has always been about men.

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As the millennium turned, a new generation of popular pregnancy comedies came out: Knocked Up, Juno, and Waitress (all 2007), followed by Baby Mama (2008), Away We Go (2009), What to Expect When You’re Expecting (2012) and Bridget Jones’s Baby (2016). These movies have their flaws, but at least they all center women as the primary agents of childbirth (trans reproduction still being far off the radar of commercial comedy). With the odd exception of Knocked Up, each also features at least one woman in a screenwriting role, a consequential shift in the authorship of pregnancy comedies for the new millennium.

What they still fail to do, however, is display much awareness of racial difference. With the exception of Away We Go, they overwhelmingly feature white parents in white contexts. What to Expect When You’re Expecting, for instance, casts three blonde, white women (Elizabeth Banks, Brooklyn Decker, and Cameron Diaz, who is of Cuban and European descent) as the big-bellied pregnant characters, while a Latino couple, played by Jennifer Lopez and Rodrigo Santoro, pursues adoption. Chris Rock leads a stroller brigade of dads who meet at the park every day and mentor expectant fathers, but his wife is never seen on camera. White childbearing is the film’s featured spectacle, while Black and Brown characters fill in the margins.

There is also something muted about the physical comedy in these millennial pregnancy stories, which are constrained by the logic of romantic or family comedy. As the creative team behind What to Expect When You’re Expecting notes on the DVD extras, the large-cast romantic comedy was only loosely related to its source material because “no one wanted to see a movie about mucus plugs or, you know, leaking boobs.” The idea that the gross aspects of pregnancy are taboo—rather than interesting, deeply human, or potentially hilarious—has limited both the political potential of mainstream comedies and their capacity to provide acknowledgment, community, or even basic information to the audience. Points to What to Expect for its jokes about hemorrhoids and urinary incontinence, and to Knocked Up for its famous crowning scene. The others mostly punted.

And narrative abhors a vacuum. If a pregnant woman’s own experiences are too gross or weird to show on-screen, then the father’s hysteria is always available to fill the gap. By the mid-2010s, when not one but two prospective fathers physically carried a laboring Renée Zellweger into the hospital lobby in Bridget Jones’s Baby and placed her on the counter at check-in as if they were delivering a particularly ungainly package, the spectacle of paternal ambivalence and bafflement had been thoroughly explored on-screen, and the ballet of labor panic that was its climax was collapsing under its own parturient weight.

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The 2016 election and 2017 Women’s March marked a clear turning point in social activism around reproductive rights. The march launched a thousand protest signs that suggested new and more inclusive ways to use wit and anger to recenter the pregnant person in reproductive discourse. In this context, it became clear that these earlier comedies had been carrying a lot of water for a specific view of pregnancy as uncomplicated but irrational, unmentionable and unknowable, ambivalent but restorative—in short, for a host of ideas aligned with anti-choice politics.

Put another way, these fictional depictions have had real consequences—not least of which has been the normalization of ignorance about human reproduction routinely on display in Republican-led halls of government. Why did Todd Akin feel emboldened to suggest that cases of “legitimate rape” rarely lead to pregnancy because women’s bodies have ways to “shut that whole thing down”? Perhaps because generations of pregnancy comedies had insisted, baselessly, that the best way to get pregnant is to “just relax.” It works for Lauren Holly in A Smile Like Yours (1997). It works for Tina Fey in Baby Mama. It works for Elizabeth Banks in What to Expect When You’re Expecting.

Why did Michigan’s Republican Speaker of the House remove Democratic representative Lisa Brown from the House floor in 2012 for using the word “vagina” in her public comments? Perhaps because film and television has defined the discourse, and the discourse is “lady parts,” not “vagina.” Euphemism is a tool of suppression, so anodyne pop-cultural representations of pregnancy don’t exactly help the case for reproductive rights.

And if millennial films are evasive about pregnancy in general, they are downright scared of abortion. Many commentators have pointed out how poorly the vast majority of these comedies handled the topic, treating it as a moral anathema. Regardless of the circumstances of conception and gestation, these movies insist that the pregnant person’s ambivalence will be inevitably resolved by the euphoric birth of a child. I suppose the slightly miserable pregnant women at the heart of Knocked Up and Waitress provide their own sort of backdoor argument for abortion rights, but you have to read against the grain to find it.

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In the last decade, feminist media-makers have begun to push back. Gillian Robespierre’s terrific romantic comedy Obvious Child (2014) was almost a point-by-point reversal of Knocked Up, placing a female slacker at the center of a story about how abortion is actually fine and can peacefully coexist with a happy ending. Meanwhile, Unpregnant (2020) director Rachel Lee Goldenberg has cited the #ShoutYourAbortion movement as a factor in her decision to adapt the YA novel about a pair of teenagers on a road trip across multiple state lines to seek out a legal abortion without parental consent. The abortion clinic in that movie is shot in golden-hour light, an oasis of serenity after a chaotic and dusty journey across the American West. Natalie Morales’s raunchy teen road movie Plan B (2021) similarly traces the barriers women face in accessing emergency contraception in South Dakota, where a state-wide “conscience clause” allows pharmacists to deny the medication to anyone—adult or minor. The film ends happily, as comedies do, but it is unambiguously committed to telling literal truths about how bodies that can become pregnant suffer under legal assaults on reproductive healthcare.

Comedies like these are filling in blanks around abortion, while offering a new set of affective associations with the procedure—ease, relief, amusement, and even joy—that were absent from many earlier, nervously catastrophizing portrayals.

Bringing this same feminist urgency to the subject of pregnancy, Babes (2024) is a comedy of unusual wit, candor, and courage. Directed by Pamela Adlon (Better Things), co-written by Ilana Glazer and Josh Rabinowitz (Broad City), and starring Glazer with Michelle Buteau (Survival of the Thickest), the film features a production team boasting strong backgrounds in women-centered comedy. Carrie Battan notes that Babes “is openly aware of the lineage of pregnancy onscreen,” both acknowledging and revising its inherited conventions. A gross-out comedy that is not scared of abortion, body stuff, or, you know, women, Babes snatches pregnancy back from the paternalist natalism of its predecessors.

Babes begins on the day Dawn (Buteau) goes into labor with her second child. She is meeting childhood friend Eden (Glazer) for an annual Thanksgiving-day movie when she notices that every seat she tries in the theater is mysteriously wet. Realizing that her water has broken, Dawn refuses to rush to the hospital. Remembering that her last labor took 24 hours—and that hospital staff would not let her eat during labor—Dawn suggests the two go out to brunch instead. Dawn drips amniotic fluid on the floor of the restaurant while Eden provides positive commentary on how glorious the whole thing is and scolds the waiter, who is alarmed by the sight of bodily fluids (“It’s like he’s never seen a pregnant person before”). This laboring brunch scene is absurd; it is about pleasure and delay, a refusal to be hurried into the institutional sterility of the hospital.

Dawn’s whole labor is delightfully gross, from Eden’s description of her broken water (“just a light pussy drizzle”) to the actual birth. “Did I just shit on my baby?” Dawn asks in horror, to which Eden replies, “No, it’s more like you babied on your shit,” before rushing outside to vomit into a trash can. The movie rockets from enraptured wonder at the miracle of birth to astonishment at the ludicrous mechanics of pushing a child out of your body.

Glazer told Jon Stewart on The Daily Show that she and Rabinowitz began the writing process with a list of the “most surprising and absurd experiences we were having becoming parents” and that they “couldn’t believe that these things hadn’t been covered in film.” The result pushes the boundaries of both pregnancy representation and woman-centered gross-out comedy, with jokes about pregnant horniness, appetite, the dreaded amniocentesis needle, the silly conventions of seminude pregnancy boudoir photos, and especially the logistics of labor and delivery. In her interview with Stewart, Glazer linked this candor with the ongoing fight for reproductive rights in the United States: “Weirdly, we’re in this time increasingly where our bodies are more and more policed, and it’s just funny what people are like—‘This is a raunch-com! Shocking!’ And I’m like, ‘Girl, have you spoken to a woman lately? You ever laugh with a woman?’” Consciously pushing back against a long line of sanitized pregnancy comedies, Babes’ reclamation of gross body stuff is deeply, viscerally political.

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The film thus begins with one pregnancy ending, and immediately launches into another one beginning, when Eden meets the lovely Claude (Stephan James) on the subway ride home and takes him back to her apartment for video games and sex. Learning that both regularly get tested for STDs, they decide for once to forgo condoms because Eden is having her period and, they assume, cannot get pregnant. Surprised when he doesn’t answer her text messages over the next month, Eden eventually learns that Claude has died from choking on an almond the morning after their one and only date.

There’s something baffling about the way Babes multiplies improbable events, including a sudden death, to create an unpartnered pregnancy that can’t be blamed on either carelessness or abandonment. Charitably, this choice might be meant to reflect how, as mammals, humans rarely exercise complete control of their own fertility. Pregnancy has a sneaky way of happening even under improbable circumstances—another reminder to fight like hell for our imperiled abortion rights.

But in making Eden’s unplanned pregnancy so improbable, Babes dodges the opportunity to dramatize a more typical unplanned or unpartnered pregnancy scenario—a broken condom, an antibiotic that’s reduced the effectiveness of an oral contraceptive, or just a person who seeks out an unpartnered pregnancy for her own reasons. By making Eden a sexually cautious person having unprotected sex for the first time, the movie kinda sorta almost seems to want to scrub her of any stigma around solo parenthood. In doing so, it misses a chance to apply the same fearlessness it has around cervical fluids to the subject of conception, and to affirm that pregnancy has the same neutral moral status regardless of its circumstances.

Once Eden decides to keep the baby, however, the film provides a clear counterpoint to the antiabortion discourse that has so often defined romantic comedies like Knocked Up. When Dawn tells Eden “I have your back no matter what,” she is clearly envisioning supporting her friend through an abortion, a short commitment of a day or so. When Eden takes that commitment and instead applies it to the longer-term project of bearing and raising a child, Dawn is quietly appalled, a reversal of the genre’s usual social condemnation of abortion.

Eden, like many comic predecessors, chooses to carry an unplanned pregnancy to term, but she does so joyfully (giddily, actually) and in a spirit that does not shame abortion as an option. Abortion and pregnancy are not opposites here, but rather fall under the umbrella of reproductive freedom. The movie earns Eden’s joy by giving her a real choice, not a begrudging pretend choice defined by shame.

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Thus, Eden begins to navigate pregnancy at the same time Dawn is dealing with the challenges of second-time new motherhood, struggling with low milk production and postpartum depression. Dawn’s difficulties push back against the idea of Black and Brown women as hyperfertile or natural parents, stereotypes that can be linked to implicit bias among healthcare providers, leading to higher maternal mortality rates among Black women in the United States, even when controlled for economic factors. Dawn’s low milk production does not hurt her baby (she supplements with formula, easily available) but provokes a crisis because it threatens her self-image as a nurturer. In a fantasy sequence in which she and Eden are tripping on hallucinogenic mushrooms, Dawn imagines her breasts spraying milk through her clothing and speaking to her in the voice of Whoopi Goldberg: “Hello Dawn, it’s your titties!” Doja Cat’s song “Mooo!” plays on the soundtrack, insisting “Bitch, I’m a cow! Bitch, I’m a cow!” The fantasy of abundant lactation is coded through the voices of Black women, but Dawn’s body does not actually produce. In scenes like this, Babes acknowledges—however implicitly—that race is a factor in how individuals experience pregnancy and parenting. In the process, it exposes Hollywood’s allegedly race-neutral but overwhelmingly white model of childbearing.

The movie’s climax is, of course, Eden’s labor and delivery sequence, a celebration of both the gross and the sublime aspects of pregnancy. Eden has prepared a “birth plan” with a prom theme, so she and her doula arrive at the hospital in ridiculous prom dresses with balloons, marking the event as a celebration and an act of self-expression. She is prepared to push the baby out, but is startled when the doctor tells her it’s time to deliver the placenta. “They don’t tell you about this part,” notes Dawn—a self-aware crack at earlier films, which indeed redact this step of the labor process. “This is just ridiculous,” Eden marvels.

Finally, Eden holds her newborn daughter in her arms. “How are we not talking about this all the time?” she asks, noting that birth should dominate every nightly news cycle. On her press tour, Glazer has spoken in unabashedly romantic ways about her belief that human reproduction should anchor social and political life. If we centered childbearing in our economic systems, Glazer suggests,

It would end capitalism. If we took more moments to revel in the magical beauty that is our existence, we would stop being “productive” for six billionaires, and we would have to figure out a new way to live […] But instead we live in the world that we live in, and we’re kept from having that time and space to be in awe of each other. How beautiful we all are. We are kept from knowing our bodies. That’s why it continues to be shocking to keep talking about what it takes to have a child.

This idea that childbirth is both grotesque and sublime underscores the film’s aesthetic, creating a decisive break from a host of earlier genre peers. I don’t know if Babes can end capitalism, but I love Glazer’s big swing here, and the way the movie works to rescue pregnancy from a familiar set of banal, conservative, natalist associations.

Ultimately, Babes is a love letter to women’s friendships and to reproductive bodies. It makes a vivid argument that being able to see and celebrate both the weird and wonderful qualities of human gestation places the experience in a new affective register that is profoundly and politically liberatory.