Sherry was raped one night in 1954 while walking through a schoolyard in southern Illinois on her way home from work. She got pregnant.
”I attempted any number of so-called home remedy things,” she says,
”such as drinking castor oil and sitting in scalding tubs, throwing myself down a flight of stairs, pounding on my abdomen with a meat mallet, things like that, and none of them had any effect.”
Though it would be almost 20 years before abortion was legal, she found a doctor to perform one.
”It was really a very simple procedure,” she says. ”For the thousand dollars, I got two aspirin and a dirty knife.”
The doctor poured a drink, then approached the operating table with a curette in one hand and a shot glass in the other.
When it was over, after he had shoveled the remains of the fetus into a bucket at the end of the table and emptied the bucket, he offered her a $20 refund–if she would perform what she calls ”a deviant sexual act.”
This probably sounds like another of those ”Sherry-not-her-real-name”
stories, its plausibility undercut by the anonymity of the storyteller. But Sherry, a married mother of two, has recounted her abortion while sitting at her kitchen table and looking straight into a camera. She knows that thousands of people will hear and see her, in fact hopes so. She was willing to use her last name, but the makers of the recent Planned Parenthood film, ”Personal Decisions,” decided against it.
”All the people in this program agreed to use their full names and home addresses,” a narrator`s voice says at the film`s end. ”Considering the climate of violence and harassment directed at clinics and women seeking abortions, only first names were used for the protection of their families.” The language of ”Personal Decisions” is sometimes strong, but then the war between opponents and proponents of legalized abortion is rarely delicate. It is a war symbolized on one side by pictures of bloody coat hangers and on the other by pictures of mangled fetuses. ”Personal Decisions” is part of Planned Parenthood`s recent $1 million campaign in the battle.
The film, along with eight full-page ads that began appearing in national magazines last fall, marks a new strategy for the country`s largest family planning organization.
”We had attempted to fight on a rights issue, but hadn`t put abortion in the context of people`s lives,” says Doug Gould, Planned Parenthood`s vice president for communications. ”We wanted to make sure that people understood that women who had abortions were not two-headed monsters.”
Events of 1984 prompted the new approach. ”The Silent Scream,” an antiabortion movie that purports to show a fetus writhing in pain during an abortion, was released that year and, despite widespread criticism by the medical community, was hailed by abortion opponents nationwide as the weapon that could win them the war. A Louis Harris poll done last summer showed that 42 percent of Americans had seen, heard about or read about the film.
In addition, 30 clinics where abortions are performed were bombed or set on fire in 1984, compared with 4 in 1983.
Planned Parenthood, like other advocates of legalized abortion, decided their most effective counter tactic was to divert discussion from the fetus to the women and families involved in abortions.
”We wanted to counteract the idea coming from the antiabortion people and ”The Silent Scream” that women who had abortions were being cheated, were not smart, not moral, not ethical, that they didn`t have religious beliefs,” Gould says.
The ads have been appearing in such magazines as Time, Newsweek, Esquire and the New York Review of Books. Created by The Public Media Center, a small not-for-profit San Francisco ad agency, they show women of different ages, backgrounds and family circumstances.
One is a freckled teenager sitting at a school desk with her elbow propped on English and Algebra texts. ”Do I look like a mother to you?” the headline asks. The ad text responds: ”She does if you look at the statistics. The United States is the only industrialized nation where the teenage pregnancy rate is going up. Forty percent of all girls who are now fourteen will get pregnant before they`re eighteen. One million each year.”
Another ad shows a grandmotherly woman above the headline ”Forty years ago I had a back-alley abortion. I almost died from it,” and in another, a mother who appears to be in her late 20s holds her towheaded child above the headline ”When I was fifteen, Planned Parenthood saved my life.”
In one ad, a man in a sweatshirt sits on a park bench. ”It`s easy for men to have an opinion about abortion,” the ad says. ”We can always pretend it`s not our problem.”
Two of the ads show women–a black in one, a white in the other–in trim business suits and wearing wedding rings, accompanied by the headline, ”The right to choose abortion makes all my other rights possible.” In two others, a pensive young woman accompanies the headline ”Abortion is never the easy way out.”
Like the ads, the film focuses on the stories of individual women. Planned Parenthood hired Washington, D.C., filmmakers Gerardine Wurzburg and Tom Goodwin to make the 30-minute movie, which has been screened in the last few weeks in several cities and is to be distributed to affiliates throughout the country for public showings. Planned Parenthood also hopes to have it televised.
Wurzburg and Goodwin have made award-winning documentaries on such diverse subjects as female coal miners and Duke Ellington.
”It was a very conflicting project to work on,” Wurzburg says. ”Both of us are Catholics. But working on the show really galvanized our feelings about the issue. Once you sit down and you`re dealing with family
circumstances and looking at the impact that child`s going to have on the family, what the future would be for that woman, as soon as you put it in a real situation, it immediately becomes very clear that it`s a right that must be kept.”
They traveled across the country seeking women whose stories would reflect the diversity of women who have abortions.
”We wanted to show people that abortion does not mean that you do not like life, that you will not go on and have a family,” Wurzburg says.
Of the many women they filmed, they edited the film to include seven. In contrast to the swelling musical score of ”The Silent Scream,” ”Personal Decisions” is conspicuously without background music, relying for emotional impact on the faces and voices of the people interviewed.
Eileen, a 16-year-old brunet with braces, is shown barbecuing with her parents, who talk about the anger, sadness and confusion they felt when they discovered their daughter`s pregnancy.
”I think it`s even more difficult when you`re a mother to go along with abortion,” Eileen`s mother says. ”I know after I had my kids I had a different opinion about it. But by the same token, it`s a personal decision, and I think people that decide to have an abortion are not only thinking of themselves, they`re thinking of whether or not they can take care of this child.”
Elizabeth, a Hispanic woman who supports her three children, talks about her abusive husband, who prevented her from learning English or socializing outside the house. After a year and a half of sexual estrangement, she slept with him once and became pregnant. She saw her hope for self-sufficiency vanish.
”I was screaming, crying,” she says. ”And I really, I want, at that time I want to kill myself because I knew if I had some hope I couldn`t make it if I had another child.”
Though Wurzburg and Goodwin tried to avoid the melodramatic, they wanted
”Personal Decisions” to reflect the emotion of the women interviewed.
”It hurts, it hurts bad,” Eileen says. ”It really does–emotionally and physically it hurts. And there`s no way that, that you can block something like that out. You think about it all the time. I think about it all the time.” She says she still believes she made the right decision.
The abortion debate has often pitted doctor against doctor. Dr. Bernard Nathanson, an obstetrician-gynecologist who ran a large Manhattan abortion clinic before changing his views, dons a white smock to narrate ”The Silent Scream.”
The Planned Parenthood ads feature physician Donald H. Minkler, director of the University of California`s Center for Population and Reproductive Health Policy. The film features Dr. Kenneth Edelin, chairman of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology of Boston University Medical School. Both doctors discuss the medical dangers for women before abortion became legal and the importance of birth control and sex education.
Abortion opponents, predictably, are critical of the Planned Parenthood film and ads.
”In 1985, they went on the defensive publicly for the first time due to the release of the movie `The Silent Scream,` says Dan Donehey of the National Right to Life Committee, the country`s largest antiabortion group. ”It was quite obvious in 1985 that the pro-life movement got off to a very fast start, focusing the debate where we`ve been trying to get it focused for the past 13 years. This is not the area that Planned Parenthood is comfortable debating.” He foresees no direct response to the Planned Parenthood campaign.
”We`re going to stick with our main agenda, which is to educate the public on the sanctity of life within the womb and how abortion destroys that life.” ”Abortion was made legal for a very good reason,” Gould counters, ”and that reason has to do with the lives of women.”
