From 2001 to 'And Just Like That': the Complete Timeline of Abortion Plots in 'Sex and the City'

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The frankness of 2001 makes the revival series, And Just Like That, all the more puzzling to cultural critics. In Season 2, Episode 10 ("The Last Supper Part One: Appetizer"), secondary character Lisa Todd Wexley (played by Nicole Ari Parker) discovers she is pregnant at age 51. The timing could not be worse: she is in the middle of directing a major PBS documentary that could define her professional career.

Rather than confronting the options available to an affluent Manhattan woman in her fifties, the show’s writers spent the episode treating the situation as a light domestic crisis. Lisa and her husband Herbert quietly fret over nursery space and older-parent fatigue. The word "abortion" was never uttered on screen. The plot was then swiftly resolved when Lisa suffered an off-screen miscarriage that evening, neatly removing the dilemma without requiring any character to make a conscious choice.

Viewers quickly voiced dismay on social media and critical review boards. Writing for major publications, television critics pointed out the glaring regression. The original series aired when television was tightly reined in by traditional standards, yet it tackled abortion head-on. The sequel aired in a post-Roe v. Wade environment where reproductive healthcare was among the most urgent civic conversations in the United States, yet the series chose narrative avoidance.