It’s not about what is right or wrong. It’s about being able to make a choice.
This is the goal award-winning filmmaker Dorothy Fadiman presented Thursday night at the Women’s Center in her film, “Motherhood by Choice not by Chance.”
The film shown was a condensed version of Fadiman’s trilogy, “From the Back-Alleys to the Supreme Court ‘ Beyond” on the issues surrounding abortion.
Her trilogy has earned an Oscar nomination, an Emmy and a Gold Medal from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
It’s about the debate and the “back alleys” women had to face when abortion was illegal. It’s about what women still face today, Fadigman said.
“The film is about what happens when there isn’t the choice to make,” she said. “Women need a safe place.”
Fadiman shared her own horror abortion story: Blindfolded and without anesthetic.
Other women whose friends had died from unsafe, unprotected abortions shared their stories. A woman tried using an herbal method and instead her friends had to tell her story. The stories that many have heard about girls using douches with bleach are true, Fadigman said.
Abortions because of rape, incest or life endangerment are state-funded and many believe that self-induced abortions occur when women can’t get help, she said.
It was the sharing of these stories that touched the hearts of many. Graduate student Maria DeRose said she felt the power created by a glimpse into the lives of the women on the film.
“There are so many levels of story-telling, and this level is overwhelming. It’s hitting the heart and you don’t know how to talk about it,” she said. “It just makes everything so much more real. It makes it personal.”
Fadiman is one of the millions of people fighting for women’s reproductive rights.
This documentary is being shown all over the world. Fadigman said that she received a letter from someone in Poland asking to find the trilogy and begin viewing it there, to help the cause — abortion is illegal in Poland. Right now, she is specifically targeting the swing states in advance of the upcoming presidential election.
Mary Krueger, director of the Women’s Center, believes that everything is about choice.
“It’s about who gets to tell you what decisions you can make about your life, who owns your life. That is what it really comes down to,” she said. “It really is about choice, not abortion being right or wrong; it’s your choice.”
The common goal of Fadiman, of Planned Parenthood, and so many others, is to work together to protect reproductive freedom and to share these stories and convince others to take an active role.
“Women who had abortions or were dying and did die, went into a state of denial as I did for 30 years,” Fadiman said. “In 1991 Bush was going to put a judge on the Supreme Court who could essentially overturn Roe v. Wade, and we women who had lived the back alleys knew what that would mean–I had to make this film.”
