Hannah on ‘Girls’ may finally grow up

When we first met Hannah Horvath (Lena Dunham) in April of 2012, it seemed that if she ever found herself accidentally pregnant, the choice she would make would be an obvious one. Like her friend Jessa (Jemima Kirke), who got her period on her way to terminate a pregnancy, or Hannah’s rival Mimi-Rose (Gillian Jacobs), who had perhaps the most matter-of-fact abortion in television history, I always assumed that if it happened Hannah would simply terminate her pregnancy.

Being Hannah, she would leave it to the last possible minute, and especially being Hannah, she would probably say something wildly inappropriate during the procedure. However regressive Hannah can be, on “Girls” to date, deciding to have a baby when you’re living in squalor and disorder is the kind of thing that only someone truly unbalanced, like Caroline (Gaby Hoffmann) would contemplate.

So “Girls” defied my expectations, when in the March 12 episode of the show, we learned that Hannah intends to have her baby. “I’ve been thinking, so much, I’ve been doing all the big thinking, about how much life is going to change, and the little thinking, about how I’m going to have to start drinking water, and any way I think about it, I just get this feeling –” she told her mother, Loreen (Becky Ann Baker), “That this is your baby,” Loreen broke in. “This is my baby,” Hannah confirms.

The longer I’ve thought about the episode, though, the less surprising it seems. Both the way Hannah became pregnant and her decision to become a mother are in keeping with the conservative streak “Girls” has always had, which suggests that the pursuit of pleasure and self-actualization may actually bring less happiness than an embrace of stability, responsibility and constraint.

Mimi-Rose makes a liberal argument that it only makes sense to have children after you’ve finished the self-improvement and self-actualization process in the argument she has with Adam (Adam Driver), Hannah’s ex, who got Mimi-Rose pregnant during their brief relationship.

“We’ve been together for less than seven weeks. I don’t think we’re ready for a child,” Mimi-Rose told Adam when he objected on learning of her decision. “We should have the baby, and put it in your toolbox as a cradle, and feed it sardines and tell it that you don’t know my middle name?”

This was the position the more broadly comic FX sitcom “You’re The Worst” took last year, when bored housewife Lindsay Jillian (Kether Donohue), a woman so self-absorbed and irresponsible she makes Hannah look like a Peace Corps volunteer, decided to terminate her pregnancy. Lindsay was so obviously unready to be a mother that an anti-abortion protester at the clinic where she was going to terminate her pregnancy told Lindsay’s friend Gretchen (Aya Cash), “In my book, there are extenuating circumstances: rape, incest and whatever this is.”

Freedom and irresponsibility aren’t everything, though. Hannah and her friends seem to ricochet between trying to fit themselves into pre-existing formulas for success — from Hannah’s sojourn to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop to Marnie’s (Allison Williams) ill-advised marriage — and getting lost in the thicket of choices available to them. Five-and-a-half seasons in, none of them are truly content: Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet) is professionally regretful and yearning after Ray (Alex Karpovsky), Marnie remains hopelessly mired in her self-absorption, and Jessa is still making her decisions in response to everyone else around her, rather than in pursuit of anything she authentically wants.

In this unhappy context, treating child-bearing (and marriage) as capstone accomplishments to be attempted only after the rest of your life is in order makes less sense. For decades, Americans have also treated a woman’s pregnancy as if it’s something that will install a previously feckless young man with a new sense of responsibility. So why shouldn’t the same thing happen to a young woman?

Since “Girls” debuted five years ago, Hannah and her friends have become the avatars of young women who haven’t quite managed to grow up. Hannah herself is obviously aware of this: Her list of “reasons it’s insane to have a baby” includes the notes “I AM ONLY 27” followed by “I ACT EVEN YOUNGER THAN THAT,” and proceeds on through “I ONCE FORGOT ABOUT A GUINEA PIG FOR SIX WEEKS.”

Despite these practical objections, Hannah is clearly feeling the same thing that Bev, one of the protagonists in Emily Gould’s novel “Friendship,” says when she also gets unexpectedly pregnant: “I think I have this idea about adulthood that kids are the only thing that can make you an adult. … Maybe this would be what I need to stop sinking lower and lower. Because I don’t know what else would ever motivate me to finally get my life together.” And perhaps the only thing that can turn this particular girl of “Girls” into a woman is being both responsible for and displaced by a new generation. For at least one episode, Hannah proves more than capable of tracking down and caring for her lost mother, who has overdosed on marijuana-laced Gummy worms. It’s a start.

Hannah’s decision to continue her pregnancy is contrarian in the best possible way: It has the potential to be annoying to observers on both the left and right, while revealing prickly truths about both positions. For conservative critics who have bashed “Girls” and Dunham as examples of liberal cluelessness and decadence, Hannah is now doing what’s presumed to be the “right” thing and putting the possibility of an abortion out of her mind. For liberal viewers who defend the show as a critique of its characters’ attitudes, and who continually hope Hannah will pull herself together, this may be an unexpected and high-risk way for her to do it.

The plot echoes an observation from another character in “Friendship,” Sally, a middle-aged woman who becomes a close friend of Bev’s. Until she met her husband, Sally “had assumed that said adulthood came for everyone eventually, without exception or much effort — like a bus if you just waited around for it long enough.”

“Girls” is suggesting to liberals that it wasn’t inevitable that Hannah would grow up if given time to wander in the wilderness, and to conservatives that when adulthood finally arrives, it might not look like we expect it to.