Dialogue on abortion
From a screenplay unlikely to be brought to term
Once on here I shared the opening scenes of a screenplay I wrote called Climate Change. Soon after I finished that script, I had notions of a follow-up called Abortion. Suitably enough the story idea never surpassed the embryonic stage; I’ve only ever seen bits and pieces of what it might be like. Perhaps I could explore gestating the rest of it through writing, but previously I’ve only started writing a script once I saw the whole form of it in my mind. Like how you don’t start filming until you have a completed script, I don’t start writing until I have a completed vision — if only for efficiency’s sake. I don’t got no time for no unfinished screenplays. And the vision’s not coming in this instance, or at least it hasn’t yet. But I always thought there’d be in the movie a dialogue between two characters about abortion. Even if the rest of the story is a miscarriage, I decided recently I want to write out this dialogue. And so I have. And here it is!
There’s a bunch of worldbuilding in the background that you’re not getting in this sample, but probably the only thing that would be helpful to know is that these American characters inhabit an alternative world in which Orthodox Christianity rather than humanism has recently ascended as the dominant ideology in Western media and politics. Both of these characters play supporting roles in Climate Change, which takes place while this ideological transition happens. Abortion takes place some years later. If you want to know what the characters look and sound like, Denis Cissé is indeed a black man, but despite the French first name and Malian last name, is entirely American in origin, having been born as Dennis Williams. It is common in this alternative history for black Americans to have taken African last names due to a recent Reparations Act. Denis is a bit of a chameleon, highly adaptive, having passed through many different identities to survive a harsh landscape. He presents here very differently from in Climate Change, where he was a transgender woman known as Denise who was ideologically opposed to the Christian faith. Adam Bahadur for his part looks and sounds, despite the last name, like any white American man in media. (I will confide in you that I have always imagined the musician YouTuber Adam Neely in this role.) He is actually of Sámi heritage but as an infant was adopted out of northern Russia near the Finnish border into the home of an Indian American man in Boston (hence the last name).
In what follows, because I don’t expect anything to come of the rest of the story, I’ve placed no limitations on what this dialogue could be. I just let the characters talk as long as they want. I suppose what I’ve done is scripted the recording of a fictional podcast conversation, of the type that in this universe is broadcast on network television, except this one in fact never airs. Maybe you’ll find it as interesting as I do!
N.B. I’m posting the text in images to retain the screenplay format. If it helps you to know, it’s about 8,300 words and 39 pages. One page ≈ one minute.
