If Diablo Cody had to write it today, Juno would probably be a very different movie. The 2007 film, starring Ellen Page, was Cody’s breakout hit, a dramedy about a high-school girl who gets pregnant and decides to give the baby up for adoption—rather than have an abortion. In a recent interview with the podcast Keep It!, Cody said that recent events in Georgia and Alabama—where state legislatures have spurred liberal backlash by passing some of the country’s most restrictive abortion bills—have made her uncertain about how she would handle Juno today.
“I don’t even know if I would have written a movie like Juno if I had known that the world was going to spiral into this hellish alternate reality that we now seem to be stuck in,” the Oscar winner said. “The Georgia thing is horrifying . . . it sucks so fucking bad.”
In Juno, the title character finds out fairly early in the film that she’s pregnant. At first, she decides to terminate her pregnancy. But she’s talked out of that decision by a pro-life classmate, who tells her that at this stage in the pregnancy, the fetus has developed enough to have fingernails. Juno heads into a clinic anyway, but ultimately winds up changing her mind and carrying to term.
In the wake of Georgia’s restrictive “heartbeat bill,” which would ban abortion for women at the six-week mark (before some women even know they’re pregnant)—and would also allow the state to prosecute women who go out of state to get abortions anyway—numerous Hollywood figures have called for an industry boycott of the state, which is home to several film and TV productions.
In the interview, Cody said that when she was writing her first feature, she never thought Juno would actually be made. She considered the script an industry calling card she would use to get other screenwriting work. When asked how she would handle the abortion aspect of the story nowadays, Cody paused.
“I think I probably would have just told a different story in general,” she said. “When I wrote it—first of all, I didn’t think it would ever be a film . . . I wasn‘t thinking as an activist; I wasn’t thinking politically at all.”
She also acknowledged that the “most horrifying thing” to come out of the movie‘s success “was me getting a letter from my Catholic high school thanking me for writing a pro-life movie. And I was like, I fucking hate all of you. And I’m as pro-choice as a person can possibly be.”
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