Shilyh Warren Abortion, Abortion, Abortion, Still

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Shilyh Warren

Abortion, Abortion, Abortion, Still: Documentary Show and Tell

Some of us are weary of the topic. Some of us are weary of ringing the alarm bells, of holding signs, of trying to keep clinics open, sidewalks clear, women informed. After several months of working steadily on the subject of abortion in feminist documentary, while also living in Texas, I, too, am wearing down. But the fact remains: we are in the midst of an urgent political, legal, and cultural upheaval over abortion. Still. Since women placed abortion at the center of their concerns in the late 1960s, abortion has remained at the top of the feminist agenda. While many conceptual, social, and material links connect 1970s feminisms with the contemporary landscape of feminist activism, abortion abides as one of the significant power struggles between women and systems of patriarchal and capitalist power and control. In the words of Ellen Willis (quoted in Nelson 2003: 3), a member of the New York–based radical feminist group Redstock- ings, demanding legal abortion in the late 1960s was about “asserting autonomy and subjecthood; it was about the right to have sex, play God, to bring life into the world. This freaked people out.” Histo- rians such as Wendy Kline (2010: 68) explain that abortion was initially “a touchstone” for women’s

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liberation and was taken up by feminist activists as “a collective problem for all women.” However, abortion has not been a coalition issue for women in the way second-wave feminist activists envisioned. This was already true in the late 1960s, when women of color regarded white women’s liberation with intense skepticism; for example, for many poor women and women of color, the right to bear healthy children was as significant as the right to terminate undesired pregnancies, a point that seemed to escape the attention of white feminist activists (Nelson 2003: 5). As with so many systemic and yet personal and gendered concerns, abortion necessarily fails to cohere a unique gender-based identity—it fails to unite all women. This has neither lessened the activist claim that abortion matters to all women, nor has it deflated the opposition. Access to safe, accessible, affordable, and legal abortion has been almost constantly under attack since Roe v. Wade.1 For better or for worse, abortion continues to be the central concern of women’s health activists and remains at the top of the conservative political agenda. In this essay, I study the ongoing audiovisual campaign launched in the early 1970s by filmmakers determined to make abortion first legal and then quotidian, while demanding that women’s personal and physical experiences be heard, seen, and acknowledged as expert testimony and theory, what Teresa de Lauretis (1987) might call the articulation of a gendered subjectivity constructed by audiovisual abortion technologies. Within a broad archive of feminist documentary films about abortion, beginning with It Happens to Us (Rothschild 1972) and ending with The Last Clinic, which in 2015 is still in production, I read the aesthetic and rhetorical strategies most commonly deployed by filmmakers as they seek to produce narratives and images to counter those of abortion opponents. I demonstrate that feminist documentaries about abortion have primarily depended on a strategy that was politicized during second-wave feminist activism: women sharing personal experiential narratives about their pregnancies, abortions, and emotional and physical experiences with each other and in public. In dozens of abortion documentaries, in both traditional media and today’s wider swath of digital media platforms, telling has been successfully mobilized to construct a collective, visible, political subject who demands a universalized set of legal and social rights over her reproductive capacities, desires, and possibilities. And yet, despite decades of productive telling, reproductive rights advocates are arguably losing the culture war over abortion. Unless you have had an abortion, you are still unlikely to know what transpires when you walk into a clinic, doctor’s office, or hospital for the pro-

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cedure. In the United States today, most people are more familiar with the gruesome fetal images brandished by the opposition than the look of the products of conception in a vacuum in the operating room. Why? In what follows, I argue that the feminist audiovisual campaign in support of abortion has failed to fully exploit the possibilities of showing. Both of these strains of feminist documentaries—those that show and those that tell— wind their way back to the early 1970s and continue to resonate in contemporary digital media productions. Although the now-dominant tradition of telling has been vital to the production of feminist subjectivity, I explore why the audiovisual struggle over abortion rights may require additional empha- sis on showing.

Contemporary Abortion Narratives Popular culture has largely banished unsensational stories about abortion from the fictional worlds of film and television. When Obvious Child came out in 2014, critics raved about the incredible work the fictional film did to reframe the conversation about abortion. In the sharp, comedic film by Gil- lian Robespierre, a twenty-seven-year-old woman finds herself unexpectedly pregnant after spending the night with a terribly nice stranger. Her decision to have an abortion is clear, sensible, and, although emotional, far from traumatic or even spectacular. When we see Donna (Jenny Slate) in the operating room and hear the sucking sounds of the vacuum, we are seeing and hearing one of the most realistic fictional representations of abortion ever made.2 Obvious Child stands out dramatically against a backdrop of contemporary fictional films in which abortion is usually completely unthinkable, impossibly traumatic, or fatal. In a study of representations of abortion on film and television from 1916 to 2013, sociologists Katrina Kimport and Gretchen Sisson (2014) argue that the problem is not so much that abortion is absent from the mainstream (it features frequently), but rather that fictional representations depart in significant ways from empirical data about abortion decisions and outcomes. In film and television, decision-making that includes abortion is frequently linked to “adverse outcomes” and, particularly, death.3 That directors who screen abortion resort either to the silent treatment or the infamous and inflammatory scare tactics of The Silent Scream (1984) points to a deep misog- ynist ideological undercurrent in popular film culture, which unwittingly or deliberately misrepresents women’s experiences, often to the detriment of

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reproductive rights education and activism.4 Nonfictional representations of abortion are rarely singled out for attention by the mainstream press, and these generally come into the public eye through sensational reporting. For example, in January of 2014, a young white woman named Emily Letts made public a short project about her own abortion. Letts posted her three-minute video on the sharing platform Vimeo with the title “Emily’s Abortion Video.” By May, the video had gone viral and had generated a flurry of press attention, public support, and public outcry. Many headlines read some version of, “Woman Films Own Abortion.”5 The video opens with a choppy montage of Letts in a series of five talking head shots in which she speaks directly to the camera. “Let’s just talk,” she begins in close-up from the driver’s seat of a car. Within a few seconds we are in the operating room in a clinic where Letts dons a surgical cap and gown and sits down to begin the procedure. From here forward, the primary focus of the video rests on Letts’s torso, prone on the operating table, shot from the perspective of someone who might be standing beside her, near her shoulder, holding her hand. In this early stage of the procedure, the video cuts back several times to Letts in other times and places, always in a talking head pose telling us that she is confident in her decision and that she’s well-supported. In the most affectively constructed segment, Letts appears in close-up, her light hair and skin against a dark backdrop, her features serious, as she says in an almost whisper, “I just want to tell my story . . . to show women that there is such a thing as a positive abortion story.” In an essay she penned for Cosmopolitan magazine about her motiva- tions for making the video, Letts explains her intentions with charming mil- lennial clarity. She says that she both wanted to demystify the actual surgical procedure and “inspire other women to stop the guilt” (Rudulph 2014). While it is true that the film gives us a strong sense of one woman’s notably positive experience, because the film remains exclusively “above the belt,” we do not in fact come away with a clear picture of what a positive abortion looks like. Like Letts’s video, women’s documentary films about healthcare and reproductive rights consistently allow women’s personal experiences to create a field of expert testimony, an archive of irrefutable evidence against political, medical, and religious ideology, which defines knowledge exclusively as that which is disarticulated from the personal—from Amalie Roth- schild’s It Happens to Us (1972), Margaret Lazarus’s Taking Our Bodies Back: The Women’s Health Movement (1974), Early Abortion (1973) produced by Ramsgate Films, and Martha Stuart’s segment on abortion for her public television series Are You Listening? (1974), to later films, such as With a Ven-

geance (1989), When Abortion Was Illegal (1992), From Danger to Dignity: The Fight for Safe Abortion (1995), Leona’s Sister Gerri (1994), Jane: An Abortion Referral Service (1995), Speak Out: I Had an Abortion (2000), We Can Do It Better: Inside an Independent Abortion Clinic (2004), Silent Choices (2004), The Abortion Diaries (2005), and so many others. Letts cites none of these particular audiovisual predecessors, and indeed, she does not mention feminism at all. And yet, to locate her film within an established archive of char- acter-driven documentaries about abortion is to acknowledge an important feminist legacy of nonfictional audiovisual activism centered on telling stories about abortion. The audiovisual predecessor that Letts does claim is her contemporary Angie Jackson. In 2010, Angie Jackson posted several videos on YouTube and live tweeted with the hashtag #livetweetingabortion while she was expe- riencing a medical abortion induced by RU486. In her initial video on You- Tube, titled “Abortion,” Jackson says, “I’m having an abortion. Right now.” She goes on, “I’m doing this to demystify abortion. I’m doing this so that other women know, ‘Hey, it’s not nearly as terrifying as I had myself worked up thinking it was. It’s just not that bad . . . This is the best choice . . . It’s not shameful. It’s not a secret. It’s not killing a child.” Placing herself squarely in the center of the frame, which is dominated by her head and upper torso, Jackson speaks directly to the camera, or to “everyone on YouTube,” in her words, as she describes why and how she is having her abortion. Jackson’s story was heralded as the first abortion ever to be documented “live” on Twit- ter and YouTube, and like Letts’s video, it went viral. Jackson appeared in interviews on CNN, ABC, Salon, and a host of other online media sites where she has articulately expressed her thoughts about the significance of telling personal stories about abortion. Although we talk a lot about the “political” aspects of abortion, she explains in her CNN interview, we do not talk nearly as much “about the individual women” (Phillips and Jackson 2010). A concern with individual women and their personal stories also domi- nates a noteworthy New York Magazine cover story titled “My Abortion” (2013), which explains the author’s drive to narrate in terms reminiscent of 1970s feminism. Although hundreds of thousands of women experience a range of abortion procedures every year, the author, Meaghan Winter, explains, “very few people talk openly about the experience, leaving the reality of abortion, and the emotions that accompany it, a silent witness in our political discourse” (1). In today’s digital media climate, the “talking” about abortion has taken many forms. From “live tweeting” and YouTube, to the archive of

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personal stories contributed to imnotsorry.net and the “I Had an Abortion” Experience Project, websites that allow women to post their “positive stories” about their experiences with abortion, politicized personal narrative domi- nates the so-called pro-choice side of the abortion divide.

Abortion as Experience The clear-eyed commitment to the political value of publicizing personal abortion experiences should be understood as part of a larger feminist claim that personal experience produces viable political and theoretical knowledge for feminist subjects. This was as true for women in consciousness-raising sessions in the 1970s as it today, despite the technological differences that structure the telling and sharing processes. For political women of the 1970s across a broad spectrum of race, class, and sexual identities, personal experience formed the theoretical basis for a political project that would undo existing structures of systemic oppression. When feminists in the 1970s came together to articulate and share their personal experiences, they believed that “from that sharing and growing consciousness,” they could “build a politics that [would change their] lives and inevitably end [their] oppression” (Combahee River Collective [1977] 1983: 266). In her assessment of feminist standpoint theory, Sandra Harding (2004) explains that this understanding of experience is necessarily political, because in order to reach “critical insight” about their own experiences, oppressed individuals and collectives must resist the processes of naturaliza- tion that shape dominant ideologies. She writes, “The epistemic privilege of oppressed groups is by no means automatic. The ‘moment of critical insight’ is one that comes only through political struggle, for it is blocked and its understandings obscured by the dominant, hegemonous ideologies and the practices that they make appear normal and even natural” (9). Feminists have regarded the act of telling as having the potential to be transformative at the level of the individual who resists naturalized discourses of oppression as well as having the ability to activate new working knowledge for a collective of political subjects. This legacy of understanding experience as feminist epistemology and as a form of political activism reverberates in the audiovisual abortion advocacy projects produced by Letts, Jackson, and Winter. However, these activists also verbally articulate a commitment to showing. Why, then, is it that none of these contemporary examples actually show us what an abortion looks like? What machines accompany Letts inside the operating room? Which one is

inserted into her cervix? What materials are aspirated from her uterus? What happens next to the aspirated tissue? Why do these contemporary examples focus exclusively on women’s bodies above the belt and what effect does this focus have on the political ambitions of abortion advocates? The relative absence of showing in contemporary practices has political consequences worth considering. Feminist theorists have expressed skepticism about the alleged trans- parency and theoretical-political viability of experience. The poststructural- ist critique of experience-based knowledge and political projects, articulated most forcefully by Joan Scott (1991), argues that while experience-based knowledge makes repressed experiences visible, it also risks minimizing the work of history and ideology in the construction of identity, subjectivity, and experience itself. In other words, for critics like Scott, making experience visible “cannot contribute to a transformation of experience” (Alcoff 2000: 44). Judith Grant (1993: 31, 32) has argued that experience comes with a host of problems that feminist theory continues to struggle with, namely, the uni- versalization of white women’s experiences, the endless proliferation of particular experiences that were often contradictory, and the troubling fact that not all women feel oppressed. Like most grassroots feminist activism, feminist audiovisual abortion advocacy has maintained a definitive commitment to experience, arguing that a universal category of women exists, even as it is structured by differences of class, race, and sexuality, and that policies and practices that affect women’s bodies must be informed by women’s particular experiences of living with and among those bodies.6 This enduring commitment (and its undeniable political gains) demonstrates that we clearly still need stories told and we need feminist documentaries shaped by these stories. And yet, we hold this truth alongside a more difficult admission. We have heard decades of storytelling, benefited from tens of thousands of individual stories. But as theorists such as Scott and Grant intimate, grounding feminist politics exclusively in experience potentially forecloses access to other avenues of critique and may support, rather than dismantle, existing structures of subjec- tivization and power. In a post-Roe era defined by the frenetic circulation of audiovisual media and the decades-long ascendance of the religious Right, our task is not only to insist that abortion is legally and ethically necessary for individual women but also to establish an alternative epistemic and affective framework for pregnancy terminations. Indeed, as Letts, Jackson, and Winter propose, we need to show that abortions are medically mundane, visually

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unsensational, and acceptably quotidian. Opponents of legal abortion have flooded the Internet with gruesome images of fetuses and fake abortion procedures and have only rarely focused on women’s personal “guilt stories” related to abortion. Abortion advocates, on the other hand, dominate a field of telling, and yet have ceded ground on the showing. I argue for showing. Spe- cifically, we need to produce and share more audiovisuals that normalize the range of medical procedures we refer to as abortion. Showing has the potential to depersonalize abortion for a different kind of political gain. As spectators of a showing scene, our political commitment to abortion need not pass primarily through identification, empathy, and the affective. Rather, we might look at the scene of pregnancy termination as an event on par with open-heart surgery, a hysterectomy, or a liver transplant, that is, as a commonplace medical event designed to preserve the health and well-being of the female body. Rather than getting to know the individual teller, we come to terms with the depersonalized fact of the reproductive female body, the movements of the physician, the power of the space, the precision of the instruments, and the relatively simple actions that construct the fact of the abortion. Although Donna Haraway (1999) has forcefully decried the “medical gaze” as inherently linked to a colonial and mas- culinist enterprise of discovery of woman as object, she may have underestimated the political edge and theoretical insight that this depersonalized optical regime might yield for the contemporary battle over abortion. In the following section, I chart the emergence and legacy of showing and telling in abortion documentaries. I begin where feminist activists and feminist documentary filmmakers began: by telling.

Telling: It Happens to Us As Dorothy Fadiman details in her riveting documentary From Danger to Dignity: The Fight for Safe Abortion (1995), one of the first women to speak publicly about her experiences with abortion in the United States was thirty- year-old Sherri Finkbine, a white, middle-class mother of four and the host of the nationally syndicated children’s television program Romper Room.7 The year was 1962 and abortions were illegal in her home state of Arizona, except in extreme cases of maternal or fetal distress. Finkbine had become aware that thalidomide, which she had taken under doctor’s orders for morn- ing sickness, would likely cause severe developmental and physical abnor- malities in her fetus. She and her husband decided to obtain an abortion; her doctor agreed and cited her potential suicide as the medical reason to approve

the abortion. As was the case for many women of means and privilege before abortion was formally legalized in 1973, Finkbine seemed on track for a safe, legal, hospital abortion executed by her own physician.8 But then she did something remarkable. She phoned the press, anonymously, and told her story, hoping to warn other women about the effects of thalidomide. In response, the hospital caved into local pressure and canceled her procedure. When she challenged the hospital’s decision, her name was leaked. For sharing her story and admitting only to the desire and need to obtain a future abortion, Finkbine lost her job on children’s television, her husband was sus- pended from his position as a high school teacher, and their children’s lives were threatened. In the end, she went to Sweden to have her abortion, and she gave several televised interviews about her harrowing experience in the United States. Although she never regretted her decision and never became an icon for the legalization movement, she was dismayed that others could not empathize with the difficulties she experienced (Hoffman 1992). As one of the first pre-Roe stories to be featured in Fadiman’s documentary, Finkbine’s experience immediately demonstrates the radical nature of talking about abortion, particularly in the early 1960s before a legalization movement had coalesced. Finkbine forced matters of abortion into the public eye at a time when the only public details about abortion existed as criminal offense reports in the back pages of the newspaper. But Fadiman’s documentary also quickly notes that once the media storm around Finkbine’s case had settled, “for most women,” the documentary’s narrator bleakly asserts, “nothing had changed.” In the trajectory constructed in From Danger to Dignity, it took political will by a few courageous politicians in California, New York, North Carolina, and Colorado to begin to shift the perception of abortion from criminal to medical.9 California con- gressman Anthony Beilenson, for example, introduced an early bill to legal- ize abortion in specific “therapeutic” cases, and in the documentary he tells an interviewer that he was motivated by the many women who approached him with their stories, all of them tales of illegal abortions.10 If women talking about abortion seriously began in the late 1960s, “abortion rap,” as attor- neys Diane Schulder and Florynce Kennedy (1971: xvi) termed it in their 1971 collection of testimonies “by women who have suffered the consequences of restrictive abortion laws,” crystallized into a feminist political act when activists claimed the issue as a matter of women’s “fight for freedom.” While it may seem obvious today that women should be at the center of discussions about abortion, this was certainly not the case before 1969. Jen- nifer Nelson (2003) recounts the history of Redstockings, which insisted for

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the first time that women be at the center of the debates, hearings, and legis- lation governing women’s reproductive rights. For Nelson and for Susan Brownmiller, who wrote many years apart about abortion speakouts held by Redstockings in New York City in 1969 and 1970, the process of collectively sharing personal experiences grew out of the consciousness-raising method developed initially by radical feminist groups in New York, such as New York Radical Women and Redstockings. Consciousness-raising sessions allowed women to “challenge prohibitions about speaking publicly” about sexuality and reproduction; consciousness-raising also encouraged women to “be collectively empowered through the process of testifying publicly” and to gener- ate specifically feminist political theory and analysis (Nelson 2003: 35). As Michelle Murphy (2004: 125, 127) carefully details in her analysis of the women’s health movement, consciousness-raising, which she aptly describes as a “discursive and social technology,” cultivated an analytical “search for commonalities among women” that would not merely reveal common pat- terns of existence under capitalism and patriarchy (the two major concerns of radical feminism) but also function as a process of “interpellating each other as politicized subjects.” Echoing the trend initiated by Redstockings at the abortion speakouts in 1969, early feminist documentaries like Rothschild’s It Happens to Us (1972), as Julia Lesage (1978) notes, operate as audiovisual analogs to the physical event of consciousness-raising. In the short documentary, which helped establish the important distribution collective New Day Films, women from a range of social, economic, and cultural backgrounds narrate their experiences with unwanted pregnancies and abortions directly to the camera and in their own words. Murphy (2004: 125) observes that the “critical potential of experience as a kind of evidence was not assumed to be self-evident, but had to be made through hard group work.” In the case of nonfictional filmmaking, experience never appears transcendentally but, rather, is always produced by the technologies of cinema, including framing, editing, and sound. Nonetheless, film scholars have also consistently critiqued con- ventional, talking-head documentaries (long instrumental in feminist documentary filmmaking) for seeming to offer a kind of uncritical transpar- ency.11 In both feminist theory and feminist film studies, narrated personal experience signals an ideological danger zone; if misunderstood or offered “raw,” personal experience might conceal the discursive nature of subjectivity and/or cinema and foreclose the possibility of proper theory and/or practice. In contrast, feminist philosophers Linda Alcoff (2000) and Sonia Kruks (2001) acknowledge the discursive nature of experience without eschewing

its value in feminist practice. Similarly, documentaries about abortion demonstrate the ways specific filmmaking practices depend on but also necessarily translate, transform, and activate individual experiences into political and cultural meaning and evidence—in this case, evidence of the need for safe, legal, and accessible abortion for a collectively imagined political subject: women. The copy of It Happens to Us that circulates today begins with a scroll- ing textual prelude that explains the historical significance of the film and its continuing relevance for contemporary audiences: “As long as the avail- ability of legal abortion remains limited or threatened outright it is important that contemporary audiences know the consequences of abortion being illegal, and what life was like before Roe vs. Wade.” This command to know and feel the experiences of women who obtained abortions before legalization, crucial to feminist abortion activism since its emergence in the late 1960s, has also remained a vital element in feminist documentaries about abortion, including two more recent, similarly constructed films: Fadiman’s When Abortion Was Illegal: Untold Stories (1992) and I Had an Abortion by Jennifer Baumgardner and Gillian Aldrich (2000). These films share a politicized aesthetic commitment to the notion of women as experts of their own traumatic experiences, evident in the consistent use of interview seg- ments that feature a woman speaking, sometimes answering audible ques- tions, almost always alone in the frame, narrating her story on her own terms (see figures 1 and 2). The unidentified woman, whose long interview segment opens It Happens to Us, describes two undesired pregnancies: one difficult tale of adoption and another of a traumatic, unsanitary abortion. Sitting upright in a chair placed beside a sunny window, she describes in harrowing detail how she procured phone numbers from friends, evaluated the exorbitant cost, and finally found someone (“I think he was a doctor”) who came to her home, furtively. With remarkable poise and poignant emotion, she narrates the agonizing feeling of her uterus being scraped, the sound of tissue falling onto the newspaper on the floor, the infection and two rescrapings that ensued. For eight difficult minutes, punctuated only by a title card and one question from the interviewer, this woman graphically, carefully recon- structs her painful adoption and abortion experiences for the viewer. The traumatic nature of several of the stories in It Happens to Us work to consoli- date a specific (pre-Roe) feminist abortive subject: one at risk for violent intervention. The pre-Roe abortive subject, several of whom appear in It Happens to Us, has been made vulnerable by her gendered relation to the

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-pdf/114/4/755/471396/ddsaq_114_4_05Warren_Fpp.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 Figure 1. It Happens to Us (1972), one of the earliest feminist documentaries about abortion, opens with a woman’s detailed and emotional interview about forced pregnancy, adoption, and abortion. Like most women in the documentary, she appears alone in the frame, seated in a domestic setting, her body and voice integral to her story. Courtesy of Amalie R. Rothschild

Figure 2. Filmmaker Amalie Rothschild (right) discusses failed contraception with one of the many unidentified women featured in It Happens to Us. Courtesy of Amalie R. Rothschild

state.12 Her particular, personal experience seeks both to “trump” alternative logics (religious, moral) as well as stand in for a universal plea for social and political change (Berlant 2000: 34). Remarkably, although It Happens to Us opens with a difficult, emotional interview about unwanted pregnancy, it ends with two excerpts that stress the positive aspects of abortion. Abortion, relates one woman in the group setting, can be a “marvelous” experience for a young woman as it potentially marks a moment when a woman has to choose herself, make a difficult independent decision about her future and her desires, and admit that she has agency and potential. In the final moments of the film, a seventeen- year-old woman says her abortion made her realize she was in fact ready to take care of someone: herself. In these positive abortion stories a future post- legalization abortive subject emerges through non-traumatic personal experience. In the audiovisual grammar of the film, when abortion is legal and unstigmatized, it offers liberation and autonomy. Similar to the audiovisual political subject produced in the contemporary videos by Letts and Jackson, the modern feminist subject of abortion need not couch her rights claims in the language of trauma; however, personal experience, now possible to imagine as positive and emancipated, still scaffolds the construction of the abortive subject. By featuring the particular, collectivized stories of women and their unwanted pregnancies and abortion in a now classical talking-head format, It Happens to Us demonstrates both the aesthetic and political DNA of a range of feminist abortion documentaries. Significantly, the film also belies a telling absence, hinted at only briefly in a cutaway of an aspiration suction machine. The machine appears during an informational briefing by a few professional women, identified in the film as Felicia Hance, MD, and Naomi Fatt of the Women’s Health and Abortion Project. Dr. Hanse and Ms. Fatt use only their voices and hands to describe available abortion procedures in a classroom where women sit at student desks, pads and pencils in front of them, an occa- sional cigarette and coffee cup evident among them. However, at one point, the film leaves the time and space of the women speaking to insert a cutaway of the suction aspiration machine Ms. Fatt describes (figure 3). The machine reminds us that despite the accumulated presence of women’s faces, their voices, and their stories, what remains out of view or accessible only in narration are the material and physical sounds and images of the procedures they obtained. The documentary thus speaks of and hints at, but does not show us the scene of, the abortion itself.13

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Figure 3. A rare cutaway in It Happens to Us shows a vacuum aspiration machine commonly used to perform abortions in the early 1970s. Courtesy of Amalie R. Rothschild

Showing: Dead versus Dead Gaining ground in the abortion cultural wars has come to mean fighting a battle with still and moving images, which have served as ammunition for both sides (let us leave aside for the moment the fact that this battle has been reduced to only two sides). This was true in 1973 when Ms. Magazine published a now iconic photograph of a woman named Gerri Santoro, whose sprawled and damaged body stood in for the deathly hazards of illegal abortion. This has also been true for abortion opponents, whose attachment to photographs of the unborn once prompted Kennedy to call them “the fetus fetishists.”14 The Silent Scream is perhaps the most obvious and inflammatory “educational” film from the anti-abortion camp, which misleads viewers with absurdly large model fetuses and erroneous visual details of surgical abortions.15 To do an image search for abortion on the Internet today is to face an onslaught of gruesome images of bloody, dismembered fetuses and anti-abortion propaganda. Fetal imagery already dominated the visual terrain of the opposition to legalized abortion by 1973.16 Thus, feminist activists, like journalist Roberta Brandes Gratz of Ms. Magazine, hoped to produce a visual counterstrategy

that would refocus national attention on the bodies of women. In the April 1973 issue of Ms., just months after the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Roe v. Wade, Gratz published a feature story titled, “Abortion Vic- tims: Never Again.” The story, which cautions against thinking of Roe v. Wade as a total victory, attempts to expose the “regulatory, economic, and ideological” loopholes left wide open by the legalization of first-trimester abortions (Gratz 1973: 45). Accompanying the full-page, severe block letter headline of the article is a small, alarming photograph, which would later become an iconic image of the reproductive rights movement. A deceased white woman lies in an eternal fetal pose, bloody towels under her naked still body, her hand reaching out toward the edge of the frame. The caption reads, “This woman was the victim of a criminal abortion” (see figure 4). When Ms. Magazine published this story in 1973, nothing more was known about the woman in the photograph. To include this image was for Gratz a crucial contestation to the anti-abortion image campaign and an attempt to refocus the national conversation about abortion on the lives and priorities of women rather than the contents of her uterus. As Karyn Sandlos (2000: 80) explains, the devastating forensic photograph, leaked from the official files of the medical examiner’s office, made visible the “material violence” of limited access to abortion in the mid-1960s. In the context of the early 1970s, when images of fetuses were increasingly defin- ing the abortion debate, writes Sandlos, brutal images of victimized women “presented a timely and important opportunity” (2000: 80). The apparent need for these kinds of images, traces of violence and vulnerability, would continue for decades. The image would appear in two more issues of Ms. as well as in posters and placards at pro-choice rallies throughout the 1980s and 1990s. In Leona’s Sister Gerri, the photograph is also traced back to an ABC press conference held in 1973, where an unidentified man holds up an enlarged reproduction of the photograph as he asks the people congregated whether we are more concerned about “the one inch tissue” or “the dead woman on the motel floor.” The woman on the motel floor, photographed at the scene of her death, was immortalized in her most tragic experience. But as Gratz’s 1995 reconsideration of this image admits, “she had a name. She had a family. She was Leona’s sister.” That story is the basis for Leona’s Sister Gerri. Leona’s Sister Gerri foregrounds the question of how images serve political ends in the campaign for reproductive rights, opening with archival footage of a 1968 pro-choice protest march and weaving connections between its present (1994), the second-wave women’s movement, and the

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-pdf/114/4/755/471396/ddsaq_114_4_05Warren_Fpp.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 Figure 4. Title page of “Abortion Victims: Never Again,” the 1973 feature story by Roberta Brandes Gratz that first published the crime scene photograph of Gerri Santoro. Courtesy of Roberta Brandes Gratz

pre-Roe era in the 1950s and 1960s. In the opening sequence of archival footage, women in a 1968 rally carry a wide banner that reads “Abolish All Abortion Laws Now,” along with smaller posters with now-classic slogans, such as, “Women Want Freedom of Choice,” and “Abortion Is a Woman’s Right.” The film thus has two stories to tell: the story of women’s vulnerability before first-trimester abortions became legal in 1973, and the story of Gerri Santoro—the woman in the photograph and Leona’s sister. Comprising primarily excerpts from interviews with family and friends, and supported with archival photographs, Leona’s Sister Gerri aims to convey a fuller story behind the dead woman in the iconic photograph. How- ever, the documentary is also an exploration of the use of incendiary images in the abortion culture wars. In a filmed interview, Gratz takes viewers back to 1973 when she decided to include Gerri’s photograph. She explains, “what has always been the answer to aborted fetuses is dead women.” The moment Gratz describes in the 1970s resonates in the film with the feverish mid- 1990s, captured in footage of abortion clinic protestors and pro-choice rallies. Abortion opponents continue to wield fetal imagery, while defenders of abortion rights brandish the dead woman. Placards with Gerri’s photograph under the words “Have You Forgotten?” appear throughout the nation, held aloft by women demonstrators. On the placard Leona carries at one such reproductive rights march, the crime scene photo is juxtaposed with a photo of Gerri smiling. “This Is My Sister,” reads the caption. Brutal images of women killed by illegal abortions, blood-stained arti- cles of clothing, wire coat hangers, blood and tissue, dismembered embryos, minuscule lifeless hands and feet: these resignified signs of the abortion culture wars circulate with vicious intent throughout our contemporary mediascape. And although graphic, violent imagery of assaulted bodies serve the goals of both proponents and opponents of abortion, those who fight to erode abortion rights wield violent imagery with nefarious and productive skill, jamming the cultural airwaves with hyperbolic gore. As the documentaries considered here illustrate, the audiovisual campaign from abortion rights advocates has been dominated by personal testimony and images of women killed by illegal abortions. Carol Stabile (1998) argues that the arsenal of fetal imagery, which ironically uses photographs of aborted fetuses to symbolize the allegedly autonomous “life” within the womb, dis- cursively disappears the woman who gestates. I want to draw our attention to another scene that politicized abortion imagery disappears: the scene of the abortion procedure, which Letts, Jackson, and Winter all gesture toward but refrain from making manifest.

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Showing: Blood versus Blood Margaret Lazarus and her partner Renner Wunderlich had not seen It Hap- pens to Us until they were in postproduction on their film, Taking Our Bodies Back: The Women’s Health Movement (pers. comm. with Lazarus, July 11, 2014). Lazarus remembers that her desire to make the documentary came in part from her involvement with the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, who wrote Our Bodies Ourselves, the landmark text of the 1970s women’s health movement (pers. comm. with Lazarus, July 11, 2014). Through her combined work in the women’s health movement and filmmaking, Lazarus would become involved with New Day Films, meet Rothschild, and become an author for future editions of Our Bodies Ourselves.17 Produced in the wider context of the emergent women’s health movement, Taking Our Bodies Back takes up a range of newly politicized women’s health concerns, beginning with self-examination, and moving through women’s inferior treatment by physicians, sexist advertising by pharmaceutical companies, home birth, the need for truly informed consent, and finally, abortion. Abortion thus exists within the film as one issue among the many that comprise women’s health activism in the early 1970s. Unlike It Happens to Us, which limits its soundscape to its onscreen talking heads, Taking Our Bodies Back includes voice-over narration, professional experts, physicians, educators, and journalists, as well as several women who narrate their experiences in personal terms. In some ways, with filmic hindsight, one notices thatTaking Our Bodies Back depends on a more established range of documentary conventions than does It Happens to Us, which stays extremely close to personal narratives and strays only occasionally into a more educational tone. However, Taking Our Bodies Back uniquely includes radical audiovisual evidence of women’s lived bodily existence: a self-examination scene with a close-up of the educator’s cervix, a surgical operation on a woman’s uterus, childbirth, and abortion. In each case, we are not merely told about the experiences, we witness them firsthand. The resulting film traffics consistently between personal experience and a wider framework of institutional, ideological, and political concerns made manifest through the medically sentient, living body, visible in all its pulsing, bleeding intimacy. In one of the final scenes in Taking Our Bodies Back, a middle-aged white woman walks into a newly established women’s clinic in Vermont to obtain an abortion. In a small room, the patient and a counselor sit facing each other from opposite sides of a low table. Carefully and in calm, medical detail, the

counselor demonstrates the pending procedure with actual equipment. Using her hands and her voice, she shows the flexible tubing (cannula) that is inserted into the uterus, the syringe that, once attached, will create a vacuum to remove the “contents of the uterus,” and the way the tubing will move along the walls of the uterus to remove all the lining. This educational sequence is crucial both to the woman in the scene, who is there to procure an abortion, and to spectators of the film, who watch to learn about women’s health concerns and experiences. In sharp contrast to It Happens to Us and diverging from an important legacy of storytelling documentaries about abortion, Taking Our Bodies Back frames the abortion scene within a newly feminist, but also rou- tinized, medical context. What matters are the details of the subsequent procedure rather than the emotional details of the woman’s decision. When we see the procedure in the next scene, we are granted the visual perspective of a person standing next to the doctor. Whereas the camera in Letts’s personal film and the celebrated Obvious Child place us near the patients’ heads and emphasize the emotive facial expressions of the aborting woman, Taking Our Bodies Back grants us the privileged gaze of the health care provider (here, a woman). The unnamed woman in the clinic lies on the table, feet in stirrups, her knees wide and vulva exposed for the procedure. Her face remains largely out of view in the scene, although we occasionally hear her voice in response to the counselor or the physician. Repeating the steps explained in the previous scene by the counselor, and explaining them in similarly calm, realistic detail, the female physician performs the abortion. In mere minutes, the cervix is prepared, the instruments are inserted, and blood and tissue are aspirated audibly into the syringe (see figure 5). In a single long take, which shifts only to come closer to the event, the termination is completed. If abortion were not an event burdened by an audiovisual history of absence and spectacle, this scene could be (merely) as viscerally affecting as the previous scene of a surgical hysterectomy. At the time of the film’s release, Lazarus remembers that people were genuinely excited about the scene, grateful to be offered a matter-of-fact representation of abortion (pers. comm. with Lazarus, July 11, 2014). Indeed, forty years later we are perhaps more likely to be surprised by the filmed abortion than were audiences at the time, since frank, unsensational audiovisual abortion scenes are virtually nonexistent in the contemporary mediascape. Today, one sees a hideous range of faked, hyperbolic abortions on YouTube. In recent years, for example, individuals have posted numerous versions of the infamous “Abortion Scene,” performed annually around the United States in the Christian alternative haunted house, called “Hell

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Figure 5. An abortion scene in Taking Our Bodies Back (1974) shows with rare frankness the removal of the uterine lining by manual aspiration. Courtesy of Margaret Lazarus

House.”18 In every version of the Hell House abortion scene, women scream maniacally and writhe in fake agony; health care providers cruelly insinuate absurd instruments into women’s bodies, and blood flows profusely from between female legs. These outrageously inaccurate scenes should be easily dismissed as reactionary performances, except that they populate an other- wise empty audiovisual terrain. Exceedingly rare are the fictional or documentary films today that include unspectacular, quotidian scenes of routine, surgical pregnancy terminations. Even in an educational video produced by Planned Parenthood, titled “In-Clinic Abortion,” where a physician describes the procedure in careful detail, the visual track of the video remains firmly fixed on the doctor, who speaks about the procedure but does not perform it for the camera. Two feminist documentaries that include abortion scenes stand out: We Can Do It Better: Inside an Independent Abortion Clinic (1994) and a film that was still in production at the time of this writing, The Last Clinic. In both films, spectators see and hear in real time first-trimester vacuum aspiration abortion procedures. We Can Do It Better, about an independent women’s clinic in Massachusetts, offers uncompromising footage of the daily opera-

tions of an abortion clinic, from women’s initial phone calls to the in-clinic consultation and abortion procedure, to the physician’s examination of the aspirated products of conception after the procedure. Maisie Crow’s The Last Clinic similarly includes an in-clinic abortion, this time shot from the perspective of the unrevealed patient. In the carefully constructed scene, the steady camera settles on the physician’s head and arms bracketed by the woman’s stirruped legs. The striking mise-en-scene further deemphasizes this one particular woman’s emotional experience by focusing on the physical movements of the physician, who is framed by the female body of the patient, and in some moments, by the nurse’s body at her side. By including quotidian scenes of termination procedures, these recent films demonstrate a significant effort to cinematically routinize surgical abortions and to transform their discursive power from political third rail to commonplace medical fact. These films perform a unique cinematic demystification and make good on the consistently articulated, but rarely executed, feminist desire to show what abortion actually looks like. In 1987, Petchesky (264) argued that “finding ‘positive’ images and symbols of abortion” was hard to imagine. She worried that “feminist and other prochoice advocates” had “all too read- ily ceded the visual terrain.” In fact, feminists have been producing positive images about abortion since the early 1970s. These moving visual narratives have captured a poignant kaleidoscope of women’s personal, physical, and emotional experiences with abortion decisions. If we have ceded anything in the visual terrain of abortion activism, it is the scene of the abortion itself. What has been largely missing from the audiovisual campaign for abortion rights is an archive of quotidian cinematic abortion procedures. Film and video have the unique capacity to deliberately construct and structure these images such that they create an alternative archive of mechan- ical abortion experiences: the intimate sensory and material experiences of medical practitioners, instruments, and procedures that women depend on in their struggles for justice. In an essay on Alice Guy Blaché’s The Cabbage Fairy, Jane Gaines (2002: 111) provocatively asks scholars to think beyond the fetishized author of the first narrative film and consider instead “the machines, the industrial practices, and the materiality of the mise-en-scene,” that is, the “relatively unanalyzable” subjects of cinema. Similarly, I am inter- ested in the material production of an audiovisual discourse on abortion that would come to terms with not only, as Gaines puts it, “the “(psycho)analyz- able subjects” but also the physical, material, and technological procedures they require in order to realize the liberated political subjectivity they demand.

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Notes

Special thanks to filmmakers Amalie Rothschild and Margaret Lazarus for making time to write and talk to me about their important work as I crafted this essay. 1 The Pew Research Center’s Religion and Public Life Project publishes a comprehensive account of key abortion rulings beginning with Roe v. Wade in 1973. See www.pewforum .org/2013/01/16/a-history-of-key-abortion-rulings-of-the-us-supreme-court/. 2 Another rare outlier is Vera Drake (2004), which represents women who have abortions and women who perform abortions with compassion, while also showing procedures that are physically uncomfortable and frightening, but only rarely dangerous. 3 “In all,” Kimport and Sisson (2014: 417) write, “13.9% (n= 42) of the stories ended with the death of the woman who considered an abortion, whether or not she obtained one,” compared to the reality, which is that statistically zero women die directly as a result from abortion. See also Kimport 2015. 4 See also MacGibbon 2009. 5 See, for example, Landau 2014, Rickman 2014, NBCNewYork.com 2014, and DeSouza 2014. 6 Kathy Davis (2007) elaborates in valuable detail on the rhetorical similarities and differences between women’s health activism and feminist theory. 7 The fictional film A Private Matter (1992), starring Sissy Spacek, reconstructed Fink- bine’s story. 8 Susan Brownmiller ([1969] 2012: 127) describes the racial and economic disparities evident in women’s access to abortion: “Between 1951 and 1962, over 92 percent of women who received hospital abortions in New York City were white, while over three- quarters of those who died from illegal abortions in the city were women of color.” 9 Kristin Luker’s (1984) comprehensive history of the intellectual and social history of abortion corroborates the assertion that, echoing the first wave of abortion activism in the nineteenth century, it was primarily doctors who instigated the abortion-law reforms of the mid-1960s in opposition to Catholics. The feminist versus Protestant culture war, which we inherited in the twenty-first century, is a later iteration of the abortion battle. 10 Beilenson sponsored the 1967 California Therapeutic Abortion Act, which would become one of the nation’s most liberal abortion reform laws. David Karol (2009: 68) claims that in 1967, abortion “was not part of a ‘culture war’ as it is today.” He argues that it was “doctors, not feminists” who were the major figures in abortion-law reform, which helps explain why then Governor Ronald Reagan signed the bill into law on June 14, 1967 (2009: 68). 11 For a history of these concerns as they relate to feminist film practice, see Juhasz 1994, Walker and Waldman 1999, and Gaines 1999. 12 It Happens to Us was made after New York State legalized abortion on April 10, 1970, but before the Roe v. Wade decision of 1973. 13 I shared a portion of this essay with Rothschild, who informed me that she had in fact filmed an abortion procedure, which she later decided not to include in the final cut of the film. She writes, “It became apparent that the important thing was to tell the women’s stories, and that actually showing a vacuum suction procedure was more likely to become so controversial as to take away from the more important message of the film.

The thinking behind the decision was that you didn’t need to show an abortion to con- vince anyone that a woman should be able to decide to have one” (pers. comm., Febru- ary 6, 2015). 14 An interview with Kennedy is excerpted in the excellent feminist documentary With a Vengeance: The Fight for Reproductive Freedom (Hiris 1989). 15 Rosalind Petchesky (1987) offers one of the most comprehensive feminist readings of The Silent Scream. 16 See Stabile 1998 for a history of fetal imagery and how it has been used to sever the material and discursive relationship of woman to fetus. 17 Lazarus, like Rothschild, has produced and directed numerous feminist documentaries, which are distributed by Cambridge Documentary Films, including Rape Culture (1975), Defending Our Lives (1994), and Rape Is . . . (2012). 18 For more information about Hell House, see the documentary Hell House (Ratliff 2001).

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