Abortion: Desperate Choices
39th Sydney Film Festival
A film by Susan Froemke and Deborah Dickson
From "American Undercover" Series by Maysles Films Inc (USA)
Reviewed by Kath Tucker
The current battles in the USA to retain women's access to legal, safe abortion make this film very timely. It tells the stories of four women seeking abortions in a clinic in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Interspersed are six stories spanning the decades before the Roe v Wade decision which legalised women's right to abortion in 1973. The historical perspective, the film makers decided, was critical to understanding the current state of affairs.
The resulting collage of experiences is interrupted by the activities of a group of Right to Life activists, who picket the clinic. They speak of their reasons for being involved; we see footage of them praying at the "tomb of the unborn child" and are told by one that she became an anti-abortion activist after her mother told her she had considered aborting her. "She had no right", was her conclusion.
The film claims to be "unbiased" and "even-handed" and is, in presenting the feelings and reasons of both the anti-choice activists and the women demanding their right to control their own bodies. However, the oral histories of the pre-1973 cases tell the real story.
One 70-year-old woman still grieves over the death of her mother, who had been living in one room with a family of five when she became pregnant. Her husband made a trip to the pharmacist, and the resulting concoction caused haemorrhage and, within days, death.
Another woman heard her neighbour in the flat above fall. She went to help, but her neighbour didn't answer the door. When the husband came home, he found his wife dead on the bathroom floor. She had attempted to abort with a coat-hanger.
There are more stories of coat-hangers, being thrown down flights of stairs and being given enormous amounts of quinine in an attempt to induce abortion — stories of women who would "rather have died" than carry the pregnancy to term. Some did.
The film makers discovered while researching that abortion was legal when the USA was founded. Once it became illegal, just before the turn of the century, the number of abortions did not decrease. "It simply changed the experience."
Deborah Dickson says they "achieved a well-balanced picture" and that "what makes the film so strong is that it shows the passion and confusion of people on both sides". This is certainly true, although perhaps the film would have been better balanced had it included footage of a woman who experienced no grief at her termination, but
The film goes a long way towards demystifying the abortion experience, and is an important contribution to raising awareness about the procedure, and the reasons why women seek terminations. For this viewer, it made clear that "choice" is the bottom line.