Cole saw something which claimed that Juno was a big anti-abortion ad. She disagreed and thought that rather than abortion, it was really all about adoption politics (reactionary ones). I read a review from an online friend on a message board claiming the same. And said "friend" knows women's reproductive politics and history like the back of her hand.
I could see their points. I'd argue that while Juno isn't necessarily directly anti-abortion propaganda, it certainly serves (purposefully or not) an anti-abortion agenda.
And yet, I have to agree with Cole that it is more overtly about adoption politics.
Let's think about what the creators of this fictive piece had to and didn't have to do to make narrative sense. Well, to tell a story about a teenager having a baby and placing it for adoption, they sort of had to address why she didn't get an abortion. Not addressing it would have definitely seemed anti-abortion--as if there were a working-middle-class white community in the Midwest in which the pregnant teenagers don't even vet the possibility of abortion. That would be fairly unrealistic. Nothing about the way Juno, as a character was set up would lead a viewer to assume abortion would be automatically off the table for her. So why doesn't she get one? Needs explanation.
Fingernails? A pretty anti-abortion argument, to be sure (in that sentimentality takes the place of a logical discussion of what is really philosophically meaningful or ethically important or medically, socially or psychologically healthy for Juno). But whatever. It gets the "why" out of the way.
The simplistic dismissal of the question of abortion versus carrying a pregnancy to term was indeed annoying. But of course, what really bugged me the most was the rhetoric around adoption.
A) The Penny Saver? Those prospective adoptive parent profiles are bad enough, if you ask me. "Dear Birthmother we are exactly like every other couple in this pile of profiles because we were told exactly what to write and how to write it in order to persuade you to give us your baby." Yuck. But the Penny Saver represented as the go-to place to find an adoptive family was pretty appalling.
B) Private adoption complete with attorney to represent the adoptive couple and a blind-sided dad to represent Juno? Juno gets no notice of her options or rights, so that, learning for the very first time about open adoption hastily dismisses it out of hand, all but begging for an "old school adoption" like in the "good old days when it was quick and dirty." Hey baby boomer birth moms! You remember those crazy good old days? I know you wish you could get those back again!
C) And it wasn't closed anyway, because she was hanging out at their house all the time.
D) Happy bike-riding, guitar-playing, love-song ending? It seems that in spite of what folks who've been there say, Juno happily returns to life before the baby. At least as far as we know.
Now I have heard it argued around the Internets, and I suppose I can grudgingly agree, that this was not necessarily an unrealistic portrayal of a teenaged birth mother in the midst of and soon after the pregnancy, birth and placement. She might well think that closed adoption is best (she might have even chosen this if she had given it further thought--some folks do and that's their right). She might well feel relieved to have it all over with and hey, maybe she didn't need an episiotemy and got right back up on that bike the week after the birth!
But what online friend and Cole and I all said was "I'd like to see the sequel of Juno in ten years."
And yet, as with the first movie, the second would be a fictional work of someone's imagination and just as subject to wish-fulfillment rather than realism in its storytelling tactics.
Now of course we ask "whose wish is being fulfilled?"
I thought the portrayal of the adoptive mother was both realistic and satisfying. As for the would-be father, I should have seen the foreshadowing like a ton of Hollywood bricks, but missed it because his attitude at the first meeting and in the nursery painting scene were so in sync with what I've read around the blogosphere about women's experiences of their husbands while waiting for adoption. I know not all men are so distant and disinterested, but enough are (and turn out to be enthusiastic dads in the end) that I just took Mark's attitude in stride and was actually surprised when he left Vanessa.
But back to Vanessa (whose wishes--and the wishes of those who might identify with her--are being fulfilled in this film). She is "born to be a mother." She's nervous about coming across as perfect, but in a charming way that is further set aside when we see her playing in the mall with the children of her friends and when she's on her knees, pretty much praying to Juno's uterus. Any danger that her "born to be a mother" status might be sullied by multiple claims to the motherhood of this baby are dismissed easily by Juno's disinterest, refusal to see him after birth and her benediction-like, voiced-over pronouncement that the baby was "really [Vanessa's] all along." ("Born in my heart" anybody?")
Isn't this the sort of thing many adoptive mothers want to hear? Want to believe about their children, about their children's first mothers?
And as charming as Juno, the character, was, and as artfully made as the movie was, and as hip as its soundtrack is (might even buy it), this movie might have quite easily served a more powerful, progressive agenda. In the beginning, I was rooting for Juno to have an abortion. (I wanted to save her the pain and trouble of the pregnancy and placement, even as I knew the premise of the film.) The more pregnant she got and the nicer her family was revealed to be, the more I started rooting for her to keep the baby (I was convinced it could have worked swimmingly, even as I knew the premise of the film), then, when she had the baby and Vanessa came in to pick him up, I rooted for Juno and Vanessa to have a mountaintop moment, a mutual change of heart and arrange for Juno to be the live-in childcare for Vanessa--a new single mom--and parent the baby as a mom-team.
Those were my wishes. As a result, I left the theatre bitterly disappointed and not feeling good at all in spite of the movie's obvious attempt to place itself firmly in the "feel-good" genre niche.
Though one might say the movie was not "unrealistic" (Juno's lack of legal or other representation, her isolation from others who share her experience, her detachment from grief after placement), neither did the film problematize any of this or suggest any alternate versions of the story.
In the end, the film heartily endorsed the agenda of a return to the bad-old "baby-scoop" days and thus yes, a return the days (if they are indeed over) of women's sexuality being shameful and not within women's own control. And thus yes, a return to the days (if they are indeed over) when abortion was not readily or safely available.
If you knew nothing about adoption going into the film, you'd learn that adoption is sweet and birth mothers have no issues. If you had fairly mainstream knowledge of adoption, you'd leave with nothing new. But if you know about adoption from any part of its the insides, you might well judge, like me, that it does a terrible disservice to the field.
P.S. I'll leave it to the Killer Ladybugs to discuss the "In China they load babies into tee-shirt guns and shoot them into crowds of waiting parents" comment, not to mention the racist Asian caricature Su Chin with her anti-abortion sign and bad English grammar.
P.P.S. For more about what Juno didn't tell you about adoption, see this post.