Someone forwarded to me this NY Times review of a new abortion film, Lake of Fire, by the British director Tony Kaye (who had, with plenty of Edward Norton's input, previously directed American History X). I haven't seen the film yet, so I can't commment on it, but I would like to post this excerpt from the review (emphasis mine):
"Intentionally or not, Mr. Kaye has made a documentary that vividly delineates how religious-fundamentalist terrorists take root in a country, slide around the law and gain legitimacy (martyrdom), and how those who profess to love God can justify murder.
Which leads me back to some of the more shocking images in “Lake of Fire.” It’s possible that Mr. Kaye opted to show several abortions because he wanted viewers, particularly those sympathetic to a woman’s right to abortion, to understand what stirs some people not just to action, but also to kill doctors. If nothing else, the first abortion in the film (of a 20-week-old fetus, though that information is not in the film) reinforces what an abstraction the term pro-choice really is. Abortion does end the life of something. The fight, of course, is over what that something is — an embryo, a baby, God’s creation, a blob of cells — and who has dominion over it and the fully formed human being carrying that something inside her body.
I wish there were more of those fully formed human beings in “Lake of Fire,” which has an awful lot of men talking about what women should and should not do with their bodies. There are women here, to be sure, though it may be instructive that one of the most memorable female voices belongs to an unreliable witness who talks about seeing “babies” stacked in an abortion-clinic freezer. Mr. Kaye follows this startling testimonial with otherworldly and unidentified images of intact late-term fetuses or babies or maybe even dolls. Because I couldn’t tell what I was looking at, I asked the film’s distributor. According to the company, these images had been given to Mr. Kaye by members of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue.
One lesson of “Lake of Fire” is the galvanizing power of the visual image. Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words, and sometimes pictures are not enough. Although the film doesn’t identify her, the dead woman in the photograph that Mr. Kaye shows us late in the film is Gerri Santoro. In 1964, when abortion was not yet a constitutional right, she and a male lover checked into a Connecticut motel room, where he tried to perform an abortion. She had become pregnant and feared that her estranged husband, who beat her and their children, would find out. Something went wrong, and the lover fled. Ms. Santoro died, smeared in blood, defeated, naked and alone. Before she was a symbol, she was a person."
Which leads me back to some of the more shocking images in “Lake of Fire.” It’s possible that Mr. Kaye opted to show several abortions because he wanted viewers, particularly those sympathetic to a woman’s right to abortion, to understand what stirs some people not just to action, but also to kill doctors. If nothing else, the first abortion in the film (of a 20-week-old fetus, though that information is not in the film) reinforces what an abstraction the term pro-choice really is. Abortion does end the life of something. The fight, of course, is over what that something is — an embryo, a baby, God’s creation, a blob of cells — and who has dominion over it and the fully formed human being carrying that something inside her body.
I wish there were more of those fully formed human beings in “Lake of Fire,” which has an awful lot of men talking about what women should and should not do with their bodies. There are women here, to be sure, though it may be instructive that one of the most memorable female voices belongs to an unreliable witness who talks about seeing “babies” stacked in an abortion-clinic freezer. Mr. Kaye follows this startling testimonial with otherworldly and unidentified images of intact late-term fetuses or babies or maybe even dolls. Because I couldn’t tell what I was looking at, I asked the film’s distributor. According to the company, these images had been given to Mr. Kaye by members of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue.
One lesson of “Lake of Fire” is the galvanizing power of the visual image. Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words, and sometimes pictures are not enough. Although the film doesn’t identify her, the dead woman in the photograph that Mr. Kaye shows us late in the film is Gerri Santoro. In 1964, when abortion was not yet a constitutional right, she and a male lover checked into a Connecticut motel room, where he tried to perform an abortion. She had become pregnant and feared that her estranged husband, who beat her and their children, would find out. Something went wrong, and the lover fled. Ms. Santoro died, smeared in blood, defeated, naked and alone. Before she was a symbol, she was a person."
Thank you, Manohla Dargis, for saying something that everyone seems to forget once we get caught up in fetal rights: that someone else's life and rights are at stake as well, and that someone else is the mother, the fully-formed, undeniably living human being. I hear a lot from pro-lifers about how abortion destroys the fetus and its potential. I can only hope that they mean the potential to self-actualize, to accomplish, and to dream - not merely the potential to live on a technical level. If so, then is it not contradictory to support fetal right and not woman's rights? After all, one day, that fetus will grow and become a person in the world, perhaps even a pregnant woman. If we truly support the right to live and to thrive - that is, to become the person who we want to become - we should support that right at all points of the life cycle, and not only at the beginning.
I don't like abortion - I don't know anyone who does. But I have never met a person who wasn't trying to do the right thing when they got one, who wasn't making a difficult decision in order to create a better future, whether for themselves, their loved ones, or their future loved ones. I hope people will remember these motivations as they cast their own judgment on the abortion debate.
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