The question is, what is Girls trying to say?

The specter of getting pregnant has hovered around the show since the beginning, when, in the second-ever episode, “Vagina Panic,” Jessa (Jemima Kirke) is scheduled to have a termination. Her friends are extremely supportive—“I could not be more proud of you for getting this abortion,” Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet) gushes—even while Jessa, and Hannah, seem nonchalant about the decision itself. “What was she gonna do, have a baby and take it to her babysitting job?” Hannah asks Adam. “It’s not realistic.” Ultimately, Jessa gets her period midway through a bar hookup with a stranger, with the show electing to cop out via the classic TV trope of the convenient miscarriage.

At the time, a frank storyline involving abortion on a high-profile show was rare enough to be noteworthy, even though the procedure itself was merely theoretical. Entertainment Weekly pointed out that Girls was busting taboos merely by having the characters repeatedly use the word “abortion” (11 times, compared to a Sex and the City episode ten years prior that largely relied on euphemisms). But unlike its HBO predecessor, Girls gave short shrift to the gravitas of the issue at hand, tackling the topic with bravado, but only superficially.

Three years later, it tried again. In the fourth-season episode “Close-Up,” Adam (Adam Driver) pressures Mimi-Rose (Gillian Jacobs) to go running with him. After politely declining once, she explains, “I can’t go for a run because I had an abortion yesterday.” Then she sits up and smiles at him. Adam’s visceral shock, and his outrage that she chose to terminate his baby without consulting him, tapped into one of the more ethically complex debates about pregnancy, and how much say men should have when it comes to a baby they won’t have to carry. “While you watched the Oscars, Girls did a super-chill abortion episode,” Jezebel wrote, approving of the episode’s “straightforward and fairly realistic” treatment of Mimi-Rose’s decision, if not the improbable facility with which her abortion was procured and managed.

Granted, Mimi-Rose was an ancillary character, not one of the show’s primary forces. But there are echoes of “Close-Up” in Hannah’s pregnancy now, even though her choice appears to be a very different one. For one thing, Hannah doesn’t seem compelled to involve Paul-Louis (Riz Ahmed), either in the process of her decision, or in the hypothetical future of her child. “He’s like a random waterski instructor I’m never going to see again,” she tells her mother, Loreen (Becky Ann Baker). And for another, she doesn’t particularly care what anyone else thinks. After being told unceremoniously that she’s pregnant by her one-time hookup, Dr. Joshua (Patrick Wilson), she storms out when he assumes that ending the pregnancy would be her de facto choice. And though she cries when Elijah cruelly informs her that she’s going to be a terrible mother, she doesn’t let his judgment remotely inform the future she’s leaning toward.