Shilyh Warren Abortion, Abortion, Abortion, Still

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 work- ing 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 The South Atlantic Quarterly 114:4, October 2015 doi 10.1215/00382876-3157122 © 2015 Duke University Press 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 756 The South Atlantic Quarterly • October 2015 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- 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 Warren • Abortion, Abortion, Abortion, Still 757 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 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 758 The South Atlantic Quarterly • October 2015 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,”

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