Cultural Choices

A film starring a painfully pregnant women use to be one of the more unpleasant parts of sixth grade health class, not something to be enjoyed with a bucket of popcorn and Milk Duds. Today Movies spoofing pregnancy, fertility and abortion are bigger than ever in Hollywood, proving to be an advantage for the industry and the actresses who star in them. In the movie "Knocked Up," Judd Apatow's comical look at a one-night-stand gone wrong, was one of last summer's most buzzed about blockbusters, raking in $31 million in its opening weekend and transforming "Grey's Anatomy's" Katherine Heigl into an authentic movie star. The latest delivery of pregnancy movies all have one or more things in common: They're mostly comedies. The humorous take on a subject matter that engages a key group of consumers has helped the entire recent entries rake in box office revenues. These movies have a very strong appeal to women. They make a lot of decisions about what movies are going to be seen, and when they get behind a movie, as we'll see with the 'Sex and the City' movie, they really boost the box office. That's a big part of why they've been so successful. ( Dergarabedian, 2007). "A lot of the movies have to do with nontraditional types of pregnancy such as: Having a surrogate mother in the move “Baby Mama”; having a one night stand in the movie “Knocked Up”; and having a teenage pregnancy in “Juno”. None of these movies were the mother’s and father’s plan to get pregnant. If that was the case, the movie would not have been as interesting. A reasonable amount of women flocking to these flicks drag male companions along with them. Which appear as sign that society has become tolerable to the gory details of pregnancy than the fact that the sight of a big-bellied woman in stirrups can make guys laugh rather than flee the theater screaming.

The conception that one can introduce varieties in family arrangements and talk about every stage of family formation, without being worried...