The Anti-Choice Movement's Bag of Dirty Tricks

Unborn in the USA: Inside the War on Abortion, the recent documentary by Stephen Fell and Will Thompson, is an eye-opening, must-see portrait of the pro-life movement's win-at-all-costs philosophy. It goes beyond the movement's robotic way of staying on-message and reveals anti-choicers' unrepentant, and often subtle, employment of dirty tricks. What makes these tricks so disturbing -- and, arguably, effective -- is that most of them aren't coming from extremists perpetuating bald-faced lies. Instead, it's the reasonable-seeming, public-relations-type woman who pushes misinformation about a link between abortion and breast cancer. It's the young student with a Northface backpack who displays horrifying visuals of aborted fetuses on university campuses. It's the nonthreatening, formerly pro-choice 19-year-old who shares her own heartbreaking abortion story.

In its even-handed depiction of the movement's moderates and extremists, this film offers one bitter-pill lesson: appeals to science and reason, however ethical, simply do not influence the masses as well as blood-and-guts emotionality. For example, in response to anti-choice images of broken fetal arms strewn in blood, reproductive justice activists show a wire hanger next to a smiling picture of Joan Crawford. This comes across as sterile, diminutive and polite. By contrast, a no-holds-barred approach would be an image of a woman who had died during a back-alley abortion. A corpse.

With the fright of South Dakota and the Supreme Court's ban on "partial birth" abortion, this is an important documentary that all progressives should see. But it's particularly critical that reproductive justice activists, who see the foreboding reversal of Roe etched into every new parental notification law, watch the film to gain whatever upper hand they might in this vicious battle over women's lives. Upon seeing this film, some feminists may ask themselves if they might be more ruthless in their fights against anti-choice propagandists.

What this film makes clear is that the fight should be easier given the sanctimonious misogynists behind anti-choice rhetoric who pretend to care for women's well-being. In a revealing scene that takes place at Focus on the Family Headquarters, we witness a group of young students eager to take up the anti-choice mantle. These are students who, as part of their curriculum, need to learn how to appear compassionate toward a young woman who has been raped. Forget actual sympathy. The group is watching a video of a young woman who publicly admits to having been raped at 13 years old and subsequently having had an abortion. As they pause to critique the scene of two men squabbling with this young woman about the "unborn child's" DNA, none of the women students in the seminar balk at their cruelty. Instead, they listen as the male teacher says first that there should be a woman there to validate this young woman's trauma. Then, after they've disarmed her with their kindness, they should move in for the kill and ask why the child should pay for the crimes of the father. That they need to "learn not to condescend" tells us much of what we need to know about this group.

This scene comes at the very beginning of the film, effectively upping the ante for what we're about to see next: the "Justice for All" exhibit, a gruesome, three-sided, 18-foot-tall billboard photomontage of bloodied aborted fetuses, holocaust survivors, and executions erected on college campuses since 2001. Also underwritten by deep-pocketed Focus on the Family, the display provokes all sorts of reactions, from indifference to fury. We meet two male students at Colorado State University who vehemently argue with the students staffing the exhibit. One student asks why, if they're so anti-abortion, they aren't handing out condoms and birth-control pills to teens, to which the anti-choicers say nothing. That anti-choice proponents are at base anti-sex is not news, but that those groomed to be pro-life spokespersons had no pat, gimmicky retort to the issue of birth control exposes an inherent weakness in their machine.