‘Adults’ Takes A Strong Stance on Abortion: Everyone Deserves Access, Including Jerks
From the start, the characters of Adults have taken strong political stances. They’re opposed to sexual harassment, particularly by Boomers against Zoomers. They’re anti-gun to the degree that they don’t want to live with one in the home they all share, but if they can sell it for profit, someone else having it is fine. If they weren’t in favor of single-payer healthcare initially, they probably changed their minds after Billie (Lucy Freyer) got that $15,000 medical bill. They’re not too worried about the surveillance state if tracking an AirTag dropped into a hot stranger’s tote bag could lead to a love connection. And — as we learn in the season’s seventh episode, “Annabelle” — they believe everyone should have access to safe and legal abortion, even someone who is kind of an asshole.
The housemates don’t just donate money to abortion funds, as we all should do, or attend protests against the ongoing attacks on reproductive rights. Issa (Amita Rao) has volunteered to host a pregnant teenager named Annabelle (Lilah Guaragna), who’s come to New York for the weekend to terminate her pregnancy. Presumably, Issa can’t really plan too far ahead for something like this, so we’ll give her the benefit of the doubt that she wasn’t just careless when Annabelle’s arrival coincides with crunch time for a children’s ballet recital Issa’s directing, forcing her to fob Annabelle’s care and entertainment off on Anton (Owen Thiele) and Paul Baker (Jack Innanen).
Anton is excited about the assignment — “Guiding troubled youth through hardship is, like… it’s really my calling” — but Annabelle has another friend’s abortion weekend experience to compare hers to, and can immediately tell hers is going to suck by comparison. Annabelle’s friend got to see Sarah Jessica Parker’s house! What can Annabelle’s “abortion dads” offer that even approaches those heights?
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They even disappoint her when they try to meet her demand for pizza, taking her for a square slice and failing to convince her that, actually, “Sicilian is having a moment.” Annabelle is equally unimpressed by the offer to take her for a pedicure, since she can do that at home. “Wow, something you can get done back home,” Anton spits — a reminder that this girl has traveled a long way, alone, to stay with total strangers, legal decisions outside her control even in the abstract having limited her ability to seek a medical procedure. Just because she’s deeply unpleasant doesn’t mean she should have to go to these extremes!
The more time the guys spend with Annabelle, the more their dynamic does start to become quasi-parental — in a bad way. Paul Baker’s attempts at conversation over Anton’s homemade spaghetti dinner quickly devolve into Annabelle slamming him for a mustache that makes him look like he belongs “on Dateline as a pedophile” before shrieking, “I wish I was having this abortion at Sarah Jessica Parker’s house!”
“We ALL wish we were having this abortion at Sarah Jessica Parker’s house, okay?!” Anton bellows back. “With Matthew and Andy and Brooke Shields and Marci fucking Klein!”
When Annabelle screams that Anton keeps saying his sweater is vintage but that she saw it at Target, Paul Baker has to intervene before Anton backhands her across the room. To be fair, this kind of recall for fashion sourcing and willingness to shop in a discount store would make Annabelle simpatico with Parker, who once had a fashion line called Bitten at the university sportswear retailer Steve & Barry’s, putting her in such fine company as Amanda Bynes.
After dinner, Paul Baker tries to make peace over weed, and it seems to work. Softening for the first time since Issa left, Annabelle explains that she wanted this to be her weekend in New York, not just the weekend she got an abortion — a reasonable thing for a girl from a red state to want! Paul Baker opens up about his own expectations of the city when he moved from Canada, and how much it sucked at first. He urges Annabelle to keep an open mind. Smiling sweetly, Annabelle tells Anton and Paul Baker, “If I had your lives, I’d abort myself.” This is what finally loses her Paul Baker’s support.
But even though Paul Baker ends the conversation screaming “Fuck you!” in a pregnant teenager’s face, the next time we see Annabelle, she’s not a pregnant teenager anymore. Like anyone her age probably would, Annabelle has spent her time with Paul Baker and Anton testing how far she could push their boundaries, but as acrimonious as things get, there’s never a question that the guys are going to fulfill their duty to her. It’s easy to have empathy for a theoretical person who wants to end their pregnancy. Or, I guess, it’s easy for some; it seems hard for an upsettingly large number of American lawmakers, who not only lack the humanity to comprehend how barbarous forced birth is, but also the basic intellectual competence to read polls about it. But in the world of Adults, Annabelle isn’t acting like a desperate person who needs these strangers’ help to get her life back on track; she’s acting like an entitled little bitch.
And the thing is, she is entitled to the care she’s seeking, no matter how bitchy she gets. “Abortion on Demand, Without Apology” never had a more perfect personification than Annabelle, making demands and apologizing for nothing. As is her right.
