“Refusing to show abortion as one of the services Planned Parenthood provides seems oddly prim for a video ostensibly celebrating the clinics’ work. Perhaps Whedon couldn’t figure out how to shoot the procedure in an upbeat way. Or maybe, when he tried, he noticed that this choice compelled him to make further storytelling choices, which complicated his narrative.
Whedon started to tell a story he didn’t manage to finish. In his ‘bad’ timeline, the girl finds out she is pregnant, and she tells her mother immediately. Their wordless scene is shot with the positive pregnancy test between them, while the girl hangs her head in shame and the mother begins crying and yelling. In the ‘good’ timeline, he erases the pregnancy. Otherwise, when he ran the tape forward, any scene that followed would have had to answer the question: Is her mother there?
[…]
Making contraception the solution keeps the mother, and all other loved ones, out of the story. In Whedon’s timeline, the girl’s choices don’t affect anyone else.”