Y tu Luna también: Pan y circo: Season 1, Episode 5 – “My Body is Mine: Termination of Pregnancy” (2020)

Much like the episode on gender violence, this is another where Diego Luna wisely takes more of a back seat, setting the stage for the dinner conversation but mainly listening to other voices at the table.

The chef for today’s episode lives and works in Puebla, an ultra-conservative area of Mexico. In conducting short interviews with passersby ahead of the dinner, Luna encounters opinions like, “I’m all for it, as long as it’s because of rape,” and claims that women treat abortion as trivially as, “I’m just taking an Alka-Seltzer.” And naturally, the conversation throughout the country is entangled with questions of religion and morality—at one point, we see a clip from a speech where Pope Francis says abortion is “like hiring a hitman to solve a problem.”

Highlights from the conversation:

• One of the guests is the Secretary of State – It’s rare for a government official to come on the show and not immediately earn the suspicion of the other guests. But while the secretary gets some pushback here for her stance on decriminalization over legalization, she’s not really positioned in opposition to the others.
• In response to the decriminalization vs. legalization question, the president of the National Institute for Women says, “I think what is dramatic is that we are still talking about this in terms of crime instead of rights.”
• A theological advisor for a pro-choice Catholic group emphasizes throughout the night that the Church shouldn’t dictate legislation – “In Mexico, the legislative discussion now is not whether abortion is a sin or not. That is a matter for the churches, and they will have to convince their parishioners, the pastors, and the bishops what is a sin or not.”
• But a senator points out the trouble with that statement, which is that the Church doesn’t stick to that – “This has really been the great debate and the great contradiction that they wanted to address from the point of view of religion instead of law and justice.”
• A feminist advocate and social psychologist pushes back on Luna framing the abortion debate as “unpopular” – “In the cities where it’s decriminalized, people lose their fear, people change their opinions when they respond.”
• Meanwhile, an actress and activist argues that the tide on abortion hasn’t changed across the board, pointing to childhood friends from her rural hometown – “They tell me that I get to be naughty and they can’t, because in the provinces, they’d kill them if they got a divorce or had an abortion.”

As I said, Luna spends much of the discussion sitting back and listening. That means that his largest contributions come from his voiceover near the start of the episode. He observes the double standard in Mexico, saying, “While we are sitting here, there are women in prison for having terminated their pregnancies. But if we open that door, we can find hundreds of thousands of men who have abandoned their children and who are walking around freely.” He also stresses that the episode isn’t about debating abortion, that everyone on the show begins from a standpoint that people should have the right to abortion: he says, “This table is about listening to women, understanding their arguments, and, ideally, raising the awareness of those out there who think differently.”