Good point about the Lorings.  However, I found the movie's reversal in its treatment of them unconvincing.  All of a sudden, Mark has cold feet; we don't see him transform from the eagerly-prospective-father we initially meet, and nothing that we see at the end of the movie lets us see in retrospect how the underlying unreadiness was there all along.  Likewise his dancing with Juno -- that he's coming on to her seems not entirely plausible, and if that's what we're to believe, the casualness of his announcement that he's leaving Vanessa seems implausible.  Likewise Vanessa -- early on, she's not just "reliable, earnest, domestic," but near-neurotic; it's a bit troubling that Juno feels so comfortable giving her the baby.

One thing that has bothered me about the discussion of Juno is the assumption that having the baby is an inherently conservative choice.  Although conservatives think that having the baby is the correct choice 100% of the time, it's not like liberals think abortion is the correct choice 100% of the time, or even often.  What's important to liberals is that the prospective mother is able to make the best choice for her own circumstances.

Knocked Up was a ridiculous film. I saw it on a hot day and had it not been over 90 outside I wouldn't have stayed till the end. Juno on the other hand was an equisite little film with sharp witty dialogue and great acting.

I didn't much care about the politics while I was watching Juno any more than I care about politics when I read a story by Philip Roth or Alice Munro. People who resort to political explanation of works of art don't much about either politics of art.

I think somebody - well, I guess me - should point out that an unwanted pregnancy that ends in an early abortion isn't merely hard to hang a story on. By taking away the main complication, you take away most of the plot. Who would see, for instance, a war movie where the invasion our heroes are training for is cancelled halfway through the film? Or a romantic comedy where the male lead moves to a different city in the second reel and the protagonists forget about each other and move on with their lives? In other words, if the woman doesn't choose to carry the child to term, there's no story to be told, and hence that hypothetical movie isn't made.

It may be a sign of how badly conservatives are losing the culture wars that a story that ends with a career woman choosing to raise an infant by herself - a scenario that was denounced by a Vice President only 15 years ago - is held up as vindication for conservative thought.

Benjamin81 is exactly right.  Knocked Up is, in my simplified version here, a movie about an irresponsible, immature guy who is forced to grow up when he has a one-night stand and she ends up pregnant.  Hilarity ensues.  That's the plot.  You can say you don't like it, or you don't think it's funny, or that the characters are annoying, or that the story falls apart somehow, or any host of other things, but it's simply not legitimate to criticize a movie for NOT telling the story that you would like it to tell.

This discussion all year has reminded me of Do The Right Thing.  At the Cannes press conference, a reporter asked Spike Lee how he could possibly make a movie set in Brooklyn in the late 80s without addressing the drug problem (there's footage of this on the DVD).  This is how he could do it: he didn't want to.  He wanted to tell a different story, about a neighborhood, and some characters he created, and a pizza shop, and a racial problem.  This is what people who tell stories do.  

ejbenjamin:  Agreed.  Most of us on the pro-choice side are just that -- pro-choice.  We're not, like, *rooting* for abortion.  And, also, I don't regard "personal responsbility" to be a conservative quality.  These sorts of assumptions play into the right's paranoid caricatures of those who hold different political views.

That said, I wouldn't mind seeing a movie or TV show where someone has an abortion and everything and everyone is better for it and the woman isn't emotionally destroyed.  Such things happen in life, but not so much in screen fiction.  I'd also like to see a sci-fi movie that takes place in the future when communications and medical technology is so advanced that everyone is, like, half-machine, and -- switcheroo coming -- everything and everyone is better for it!  You get the idea -- I want to see cliches busted.

I thought Michael Loring never really wanted the baby to begin with, and seeds were planted to show this. Remember when Jennifer Garner was surprised that Juno found the ad in Thrifty Nickel [or something like that - I forgot the name]? She said, with a slight edge of frantic confusion - "you found our ad in Thrifty Nickel?" and the scene moved on. I thought at the time, "obviously she didn't place the ad..." and then later, "duh, he placed it, didn't place it anywhere else, and he didn't want anyone serious to see the ad."

I'm coming a little late into Chris and Michael's discussion of this, but I watched Dirty Dancing

There's another interesting truth here: it is nearly impossible to sympathetically depict a character willingly having an abortion. I myself am a pro-choice conservative; having ditched the self-righteousness of liberalism, wherein describing someone as an "Indian giver" can result in a fifteen-minute lecture on the sufferings of  indigenous peoples, I have no desire to pick up a different bombastic morality. But nearly everyone I respect who has had an abortion is  haunted by it, and wishes it didn't have to happen. The leftist view of an abortion, as morally and humanly no worse than having a half-eaten hamburger removed from your tummy, does not compute with most thoughtful people. If it did, we could name a single popular movie that culminates in someone triumphantly getting an abortion - but I can't think of one.