Documentaries

12th & Delaware (Directors: Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady): In Fort Pierce, Florida, a battle for abor­tion rights is taking place at the inter­sec­tion of 12th Street and Delaware Avenue. On one side of the street is the pro-life Pregnancy Care Center and across the street is an abor­tion clinic called A Woman’s World.

Every day at the crack of dawn, a pro-life sup­porter keeps a watchful eye on the abor­tion clinic. Later in the day, more recruits show up and patrol the side­walk out­side of the clinic. They dis­play signs and graphic images of unborn babies to the passing traffic. When women visit the clinic, the pro-life sup­porters call out to them and urge them not to go in.

All across America there are sim­ilar abor­tion battles taking place. Pro-life centres often appear next door or across the street from abor­tion clinics. The hope is that women will enter a pro-life clinic by mis­take where they will be per­suaded to con­tinue with their preg­nancy. In some cases they are offered fin­an­cial sup­port but sadly, these prom­ises are almost never kept.

Directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady do a mas­terful job of providing an enga­ging and fairly objective view of the two sides in 12th & Delaware. Both groups are given equal screen time but it is the pro-life group that has all of the “inter­esting” char­ac­ters. The Hot Docs audi­ence often groaned or gasped in dis­be­lief at some of the things the film’s pro-life sup­porters were telling women in their clinic – that abor­tions can cause breast cancer or that con­doms work only 80 per cent of the time.

I think it is fair to say that the pro-life sup­porters in the film aren’t rep­res­ent­ative of all people that share the pro-life stance. The film’s pro-life sup­porters tend to say or do almost any­thing to pre­vent an abor­tion. This sets up sev­eral scenes that are dif­fi­cult to watch because they are so embar­rassing! Oddly enough, this is one of the aspects of the film that I also found appealing. It reminded me a lot of Ewing and Grady’s pre­vious film, Jesus Camp.

For me, the best moment in the film occurs when a woman pulls into the abor­tion clinic parking lot and con­fronts a pro-life sup­porter. She wants to know why the group must dis­play graphic images of an unborn fetus to passing traffic, including her child’s school bus. This woman is obvi­ously a Christian and tells the pro-life sup­porters that they are mis­guided and that there are better ways to get their mes­sage across.

Ewing and Grady had unpre­ced­ented cooper­a­tion and access to both groups, taking the viewer into each of their build­ings for a detailed look at how they operate. The preg­nancy centre uses sev­eral tac­tics in per­suading women to con­tinue with their preg­nan­cies – graphic videos, lit­er­ature, ultra­sounds and coun­seling. Across the street the abor­tion clinic oper­ates in an envir­on­ment of fear and heightened security. Cameras mon­itor the premises. Doctors are whisked into the clinic with sheets over their heads to pro­tect their iden­tities (during the filming of 12th & Delaware, abor­tion pro­vider Dr. George Tiller was murdered in his church).

I was sur­prised to learn that there are over 4,000 pro-life preg­nancy centres in the US and just over 850 abor­tion clinics. This well-crafted film doesn’t try to resolve any of the issues in the abor­tion battle but it provides a revealing look at both sides that is simply fascinating.

Official site of the film

(9/10)

Second Look: Drew Kerr

12th & Delaware is the latest fea­ture doc­u­mentary from Oscar-nominated co-directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, the film­makers behind the excel­lent Jesus Camp, which took a dis­turbing look at the reli­gious indoc­trin­a­tion prac­tices at a Pentecostal summer camp for chil­dren. Their latest finds them focusing on the abortion/pro-life issue, as told through the events that occur at an abor­tion clinic called A Woman’s World Medical Center, and the church-affiliated Pregnancy Care Center, which just hap­pens to be on the opposite side of the street, at the inter­sec­tion of 12th Street and Delaware Avenue in Fort Pierce, Florida. The set­ting is prac­tic­ally ready-made for a re-examining of the ongoing, incen­diary American debate, and Ewing and Grady take a decidedly neutral approach in showing both sides of this divisive issue. Slightly more screen time seems to have been given to the Pregnancy Care Center side, but not in a way that slants things in the pro-life direction.

The centre is run by a woman named Anne, who appears genu­inely invested emo­tion­ally in her work and the cause she believes in. Losing patients that decide to opt for an abor­tion brings her close to tears and “wins” (patients choosing to not ter­minate their preg­nancy) elicit equally emo­tional responses of joy. Some of the Pregnancy Care Center’s methods appear to border on the uneth­ical, or just plainly are. Misinformation is given about the actual abor­tion pro­cess, patients are falsely told that abor­tions can cause breast cancer, and some patients are informed (as alleged by Candace, the oper­ator of the abor­tion clinic) that they’re not as far along in their preg­nan­cies as they actu­ally are, increasing the chances that by the time they make a decision they’ll be too far along to leg­ally obtain an abor­tion. Then there’s those manip­u­lative “Hi Daddy” and “Hi Mommy” “mes­sages” from the fetus that get added by tech­ni­cians to the ultra­sound prin­touts for the parent or parents.

Life over at A Woman’s World Medical Center appears sig­ni­fic­antly more stressful for Candace and her hus­band. Threats of viol­ence and van­dalism are an everyday worry, and while the clinic hasn’t mon­et­arily brought the couple any­thing more than a modest life­style, Candace is also strongly ded­ic­ated to her work, believing women need a place like hers that gives them an option. Picketers are a con­stant pres­ence out­side the clinic, many of whom fit your “reli­gious nut” cat­egory. They walk around with signs showing grue­some pic­tures of aborted fetuses, har­angue young women (and teen­agers) as they exit and leave the clinic, amus­ingly preach their beliefs while standing out­side closed win­dows of the clinic and speaking loudly, and one par­tic­u­larly scary pro-lifer even stalks/stakes out one of the ren­dez­vous drop-off points where the doc­tors who per­form the abor­tions get picked up by Candace’s hus­band in a bright yellow Mustang (the doc­tors follow such a pro­tocol and are brought to the clinic which sheets cov­ering them to pro­tect their iden­tities). The Mustang is effect­ively used sev­eral times by Ewing and Grady, with its ominous starting roar and its slow backing out of the clinic’s garage acting as a potent little dra­matic enhance­ment in the movie.

Whenever I see a film or tele­vi­sion show that man­ages to get people to open up on such intensely per­sonal issues I marvel at how brave/stupid/attention-starved they are. I would cat­egorize the women who vis­ited the clinic or centre that talked to the Ewing and Grady as more brave than the other two adject­ives, but my mind still boggles that the dir­ectors got as much insight into these women’s minds as they did. Combine this with a well-rounded look at the two med­ical facil­ities and their prin­cipals, and the result is a com­pel­ling, thoughtful film about a very tough sub­ject that refrains from taking sides or edit­or­i­al­izing, just let­ting the facts and hap­pen­ings speak for themselves.

(8/10)

Tagged as: #hotdocs10, abortion, pregnancy, pro-life

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