“Rory doesn’t have to keep the baby. There are choices that she can make.” So said Gilmore Girls creator Amy Sherman-Palladino in an interview with TVLine, following the revelation that the show's long-awaited final four words were Rory telling Lorelai that she’s pregnant. In an interview with Buzzfeed, Sherman-Palladino expanded: “I think that somebody as smart as Rory is going to take a step back and look at all the angles, and then make her decision, because it’s too important a job to make the wrong decision when it comes to kids.”
Salon hailed Palladino’s “acknowledgement of Rory’s right to choose” as a huge step forward for television, pointing out how far the medium has come since the days when abortion was too taboo to even be named on screen. The latter part is true — Olivia Pope herself had an abortion on primetime television last year. But Gilmore Girls: A Year In The Life didn't mention abortion; an interview given after the fact mentioned abortion. Really, the Netflix revival could have aired during those taboo days, because at no point does it come close to mentioning abortion. And throughout its original seven-year run on The WB, Gilmore Girls consistently went out of its way to avoid the subject, despite the startling number of unplanned pregnancies that occur throughout the show.
Every pregnancy we see in Gilmore Girls is unplanned, with the exception of Sookie’s second baby in season five. The show is built around a teenage Lorelai’s unplanned pregnancy with Christopher’s baby (aka Rory), and in the season-three episode "Dear Richard and Emily," we see that whole saga play out in flashbacks.
“Why doesn’t she get rid of it? It’s an option,” says Christopher’s mean rich father Straub, who cares only about protecting his son’s carefully planned future in the family business. Everyone — including Straub’s wife — is horrified, and Emily immediately says that it’s not an option, because she says so. But it is an option, certainly for an unmarried 16-year-old with aspirations to travel the world, and it’s unfortunate that Gilmore Girls gives the lone pro-choice voice to a character who might as well be twirling his mustache.
Lorelai and Christopher are excluded from the decision-making process, angrily eavesdropping on the stairs as their parents decide their future. Christopher tells Lorelai he’ll give up his dreams of sleeping on benches in Europe (which sounds romantic when you’re super-privileged, I guess?), and work for his father so that he can support her, while she’s determined that they’ll figure it out on their own. Neither one of them mentions the possibility of abortion, and we’re left with no sense of whether Lorelai ever considered it.
In season five, Sookie is extremely clear about the fact that she does not want to have any more children after her second — so determined, in fact, that she wants Jackson to literally get a vasectomy right after she gives birth. And yet when Sookie does end up pregnant again in the seventh season, against her will because Jackson lied about getting the procedure, there’s never any question that she’ll keep the baby. She’s really, really upset about it, because she’s spent the last two years changing diapers while also holding down her job at the inn, and doesn’t know if she can to do it all again now that her two existing kids are finally potty-trained.
“There was a light at the end of the tunnel!” she wails to Lorelai, who quips in response “You know you can’t walk off a pregnancy, right?” Well, no, you can’t… but you can terminate a pregnancy. Sookie is in a loving, financially stable relationship, and maybe abortion isn’t the right path for her. But it is a path, one that Gilmore Girls yet again refuses to acknowledge.
Then there’s poor Lane, whose storyline will always be the single worst thing about the much-reviled season seven. After having sex with Zack just one time — an experience so awful that she never wants to do it again — Lane ends up pregnant with twins, a twist which ultimately put an end to her rock ’n’ roll dreams.
Lane comes from a devout family, and might never have considered an abortion. But she was also defined by her rebel spirit, her independence, and her ingenious methods of skirting her family’s strict religious adherence. There’s nothing in her character to suggest that she’d be ideologically opposed to abortion, at least not so much that she wouldn’t even consider it. Upon hearing the news from a horrified Lane, Rory tells her that she can do this, and has “nine long months” to study up on parenting skills. Wouldn’t Rory, who has a "Stop The War On Choice" poster on her wall at Yale, so much as mention the possibility of Lane not going through with something that seems to terrify her so profoundly?
There are other, more peripheral unplanned pregnancies throughout the show, which are mostly used to drive conflict: Sherry gets pregnant by accident with Gigi, and Christopher re-abandons Lorelai and Rory in order to be with her. Liz seemingly didn’t plan on getting pregnant either, because her response is to kick TJ out of the house and project her insecurities about being a bad mother onto him. In carrying their babies to term, these five women are all technically exercising their right to choose. But it is significant that throughout Gilmore Girls, the right choice for every woman is always to keep her baby. The definition of pro-choice is "advocating legalized abortion," and Gilmore Girls simply does not qualify on any level.
By saying that the show is not pro-choice, I’m not saying that it is therefore pro-life, or anything other than neutral when it comes to reproductive rights. As far as the conversation about abortion on television goes, Gilmore Girls is a non-entity. The series aired on The WB between 2000 and 2007, a time when abortion on primetime television was still largely taboo. On the same network, Everwood famously featured an abortion episode that proved so controversial it was never aired in re-runs. I understand why depicting an actual abortion would be off the table for Gilmore Girls back in the day. But refusing to acknowledge it as an option at all is strange, and significant, particularly if Sherman-Palladino now wants us to believe that Rory would consider it herself.
At a time when abortion is finally becoming commonplace even on network television — on everything from Scandal to Jane the Virgin to Crazy Ex-Girlfriend — Gilmore Girls: A Year In The Life does not get credit for coyly leaving Rory the hypothetical right to choose. The show cannot be celebrated as pro-choice, any more than the Harry Potter series can be celebrated as LGBTQ-inclusive because JK Rowling revealed that Dumbledore was gay after the final book came out.
If the Palladinos had wanted to take advantage of their new, more liberated home on Netflix and make A Year In The Life textually pro-choice, they certainly could have. Rory’s one-time BFF Paris Geller is a gynecologist who runs a fertility clinic — why not slip in a line during their conversation where Rory mentions she doesn’t feel ready to be a mom, or Paris makes a passing reference to abortion rights?
There’s an even more glaring missed opportunity in "Fall." Rory shares a conversation with her now-estranged father Christopher, asking him why he didn’t fight harder to be in her life, and whether he thinks Lorelai being a single mom was the right decision. In retrospect, it’s clear Rory is asking him these questions because she knows she’s pregnant, and is wrestling with whether to involve the father. That’s what she’s wrestling with. Not whether to keep the baby. What if, instead of that strange and stiff conversation between Rory and Christopher, we’d instead seen a scene where Rory asks Lorelai if she ever considered terminating her own pregnancy? It could be an immensely powerful moment between them, and a logical follow-up to their fight over Rory using Lorelai’s story as fodder for her book — Rory could pass it off as research, but after the final four words it would become clear she’s trying to decide whether to keep her own child.
Gilmore Girls: A Year In The Life premiered at a terrifying moment for women in America, a time when abortion rights are under threat in ways that nobody could have predicted during the revival’s production. Abortion on television has never been more accepted, but abortion in the U.S. is a different story. I’m glad that Amy Sherman-Palladino has made her own stance clear in interviews, and I’m glad that in her mind, Rory Gilmore has the right to choose. But Gilmore Girls as a show has consistently chosen to remove itself from the conversation about abortion, mining drama out of multiple unplanned pregnancies without ever acknowledging their termination as a possibility. It is not, and never has been, an openly pro-choice show.
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