What about contraception? Flawed or dishonest script from the start.

Rating: 2/10 (3 August 2008)

The worst thing about this movie is what it was awarded an Oscar for: the script. It may contain some funny dialogs (like step-mother Bren's remark about doctors) but its story is flawed from the start and for me logical flaws always spoil everything. (Since I liked the soundtrack and can enjoy it independently of the rest of the film, I gave it one star above minimum for that.) The story is about Juno, a self-confident, witty, sarcastic teenager who consciously decides to have sex with a class-mate whom she knows to be in love with her. After she suspects to have become pregnant (what a surprise), she even is self-confident enough to buy three pregnancy tests in a local store among a lot of loud fuss-making with the store-keeper.
And here's the problem: If she's that witty and self-confident, and if the sex with her class-mate was a conscious decision, why oh why on earth didn't she think about contraception for one moment? What would have prevented her from either getting a subscription for the pill or buying a condom and using it on the boy who was shown have taken a passive part in the act anyway? (He was sitting in an armchair at least at the beginning.) And the lack of logic doesn't even stop here: When she tells her mature, sexually active friend and then her open-minded parents about her pregnancy, nobody even asks her about whether she and the boy did or did not use contraceptives. (After all contraceptives can sometimes fail.) It's not as if something in the sex-ed went wrong or as if contraceptives have failed or as if Juno made a regrettable misled decision about unprotected sex, it's as if contraception didn't even exist in the world that Juno lives in. However that must be some parallel universe, because there is contraception in our world.
So in the parallel universe of the film sex invariably leads to pregnancy and if this is unwanted, it of course only leaves the choice between abortion or giving birth to the child and setting it up for adoption.
The next flaw in the script is when Juno decides to have an abortion in a clinic and in front of that meets an anti-abortion activist from her school. That school mate tells her that the fetus already has fingernails and from all human traits a fetus develops, it is just those fingernails that makes Juno revise her decision.
Given that this information given to Juno is just wrong at that point of time (after all she is said to be around week 12 and fetuses only develop fingernails from week 18 onwards), Juno's decision is now based on wrong premises. But that never gets cleared up in the film.
Instead Juno now finds a yuppie couple as adoptive parents who despite appearing to be quite nice (yet also a bit shallow and superficial) soon turn out to have some problems with themselves. However they have money and this alone seems to qualify them for being good parents.
Yet another flaw is when the lawyer of that couple leaves Juno the choice between closed and open adoption and Juno goes for closed adoption. This is in total disregard of the fact that Juno and the prospective adoptive parents already know each other and the places they live, so that that adoption can never be closed. (Juno will always know at least a little of the whereabouts of the child she gives birth to.)
I don't know whether the script writer (and those who bought the script and made a movie out of it) simply didn't think about these logical inconsistencies or if perhaps they willfully ignored them to push a conservative message ("Abstinence is the only way to avoid pregnancy, and if it's already too late adoption is an easier way out than abortion") with a purportedly progressive film.