Tornado Alley (PROG)

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The Messiness of Reproduction and the Dishonesty of Anti-Abortion Propaganda

"There is a lot of Xtian propaganda in my local library these days. Last week I saw a movie about
a serial killer and when I looked at the jacket it was about a doctor who preformed abortions."

Like the sleeper hit “Unplanned,” recent legislation in Georgia, Alabama, and Ohio strenuously avoids the complexities of pregnancy and childbirth.

By Jia Tolentino

May 17, 2019

[...]

The state of Georgia, in the past decade, has issued hundreds of millions of dollars of tax credits per year to the film and TV industry; in March, in an op-ed for Deadline, the actress Alyssa Milano urged the state’s politicians to block HB 481 in the interest of preserving the economic growth that has come to the state from Hollywood investment. Soon afterward, Ashley Bratcher, who lives in Georgia, responded, with her own Deadline op-ed. “For the latter part of a year I’ve watched as women I’ve admired, like you, spoke out in regards to women’s rights, more specifically women’s reproductive rights,” she wrote. “With radical laws like the ones in New York and Vermont being passed,” she went on, alluding to New York’s Reproductive Health Act and Vermont’s constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to abortion, “it’s more critical than ever that we are using our voices to fight for the rights of women. One problem, you’re forgetting about the rights of women within the womb. If feminism is all about equal rights, then where are her rights?”

[...]

I believe that there should be no legal restrictions on abortion whatsoever, and that belief has intensified the more I have learned about late abortions. But I am intimately acquainted with, and sometimes sympathetic to, the conviction that life begins at conception—the idea that a clump of tissue, generated even under the most unfortunate and cruel of circumstances, shows God working the most sacred miracle on Earth. That’s what I was taught, growing up in Texas, in the sort of church community that bought out theatres for “The Passion of the Christ,” and that reiterated, in songs and in sermons, that God knit each of us together in our mother’s womb. I don’t live near a community of those convictions and that size anymore: within a few weeks after the release of “Unplanned,” the closest theatres to my Brooklyn apartment that were showing the movie were on Long Island and in New Jersey. Soon after that, all the tri-state-area showtimes disappeared. Eventually, I found a shady bootleg of “Unplanned” on a streaming site that flashed ads for the Russian gambling service 1XBET.

Fans of “Unplanned” have attributed its success to the way that it sheds light on hidden realities. One of the hidden realities that it somewhat inadvertently showcases is the existence of a large contingent of conservative Christian women who grow up pro-life but seek out abortions when they need them. Many of these women, who tend to be reticent about their personal histories in this regard, have reacted with emotional intensity to this movie, which seems to have delivered a sort of harrowing but cathartic healing to Christian women who have, as they put it, “lost children to abortion.” Abby Johnson, who is played by Bratcher with alert nuance, gets her first abortion early in college, at Texas A&M, after she, a small-town innocent, is bowled over by an older guy in her apartment building. Later, she marries him, and then he cheats on her on Valentine’s Day. The need for a divorce and the need for a second abortion arise at the same time.

[...]

Anti-abortion propaganda, like “Unplanned,” or like “Gosnell,” the transparently racist, repulsive criminal-justice movie that was recently screened in Donald Trump’s White House, is produced to have an impact. One in four American women will have an abortion, ninety-one per cent of them within the first trimester, either through the administration of oral medication or through an in-clinic vacuum-aspiration procedure that takes around ten minutes. For many women, an abortion is not only non-traumatic but a life-altering blessing. Most, however, don’t talk about it much; these movies, then, can slide in with ultrasound images of a sentient, desperate thirteen-week fetus—or, in the case of “Gosnell,” which I regretfully paid to stream on my laptop, graphic descriptions of an abortion performed via the insertion of a “ball of blades” into the uterus—and present this as the reality of what abortion is. (Before Roe v. Wade was decided, the horrific abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell tested out this hideous experimental device on more than a dozen women. “What Gosnell did and what I do may both result in ended pregnancies, but there is no other parallel,” a friend who provides abortions at Planned Parenthood told me. “I am not a belief-free, pregnancy-ending monster; I walk with my patient into a gray area where we actively engage with the ethics of the thing, and I’m guided by a clear conviction in someone’s right to bodily autonomy, and to live their life on their own terms, healthy and free of harm.”)

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-messiness-of-reproduction-and-the-dishonesty-of-anti-abortion-propaganda