Film actress and television host Ricki Lake, twice pregnant (in real life and also in the movie Mrs. Winterbourne, alongside his royal hotness, Brendan Fraser), brings one of her birth experiences to the silver screen in The Business of Being Born.  Upset with the hospital birth experience the first time, Ms. Lake opts for a home birth the second time (Go Ricki! Go Ricki! Go Ricki!).  Her second son, Owen Sussman (now 9 years old), greets the world in gooey glory about 45 minutes into the movie, so you know it’s good.  The only thing that might have made it better is, as is the case for all movies, Brendan Fraser.

Somewhere between Frontline and Fahrenheit 911, this documentary presents a fact-based albeit slightly sanctimonious (and one-sided) examination of midwifery (mid-whiff-er-ee) and birthing options in America.  The statistics are frequently sobering – the one that really stuck with me was that, in 1900, 95% of all U.S. births took place at home, which was down to 50% by 1938 and <1% by 1955 (where it is today).  The movie partially credits hippy communes with the “rebirth” of midwifery in the U.S., noting necessity and the empowerment aspects of home birth.  (more…)

There are two events happening at Rutgers in March and in April that are directly related to reproductive justice and women’s rights worldwide.  The first one is being hosted by the Rutgers Women’s Law Forum.  It is a screening of Mrs. Goundo’s Daughter, which is a documentary about a woman’s struggle to obtain asylum in the American immigration system.  If she is deported to Mali, she will have to bring her daughter with her, who would then be subject to Female Genital Mutilation, or excision.  Approximately 90% of women and girls in Mali are subject to FGM, some as young as two days old, which can lead to infection, reproductive problems, and death.  It is an ancient tradition, linked by some to Islam, that many people are fighting against in local communities, at the statewide level, and across the world.  The movie Mrs. Goundo’s Daughter explores not only the cultural and social issues surrounding FGM in Mali, but also reviews the legal process by which Mrs. Goundo attempts to protect her daughter from FGM. (more…)

There was a lot of (figurative) ink spilled this past summer over the Judd Apatow film Knocked Up, and about how the film did and, mostly, did not deal with the question of whether or not the protagonist, a twenty-something woman, pregnant after a drunken one night stand, will have an abortion. The film was at root a comedy, and it muted political concerns by either mocking the righteousness of the abortion debate or ignoring it. It just depended on your perspective.

So it’ll be interesting to see what the reaction is to two new films that shine a spotlight on abortion. The first, 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, doesn’t address abortion in the American political context, but rather tells the story of a Romanian woman living under Ceausescu’s communist regime who tries to seek out an abortion (then illegal). The film unblinkingly portrays her search and struggle, and explores the  bribes, secrecy, covert meetings and the looming possibility of jail that women seeking abortions in communist Romania had to face. The film has been very well received, even winning the Palme D’or at the Cannes film festival this year.

The second film deals directly with abortion in American politics.  Tony Kaye’s Lake of Fire is a 2.5 hour documentary (all in black and white) about abortion in the U.S. In the film, reviewed in today’s NY Times and premiering at the New York Film Festival this week, Kaye interviews  political activists, religious activists, and people whose lives have otherwise been affected by abortion (both access to it and the desire to stop that access). But this is no normal talking-head documentary. Kaye also films and screens, without commentary, two (perhaps more?) abortion procedures as they take place. One of them occurs at 20 weeks, and is carried out by non-intact dilation and extraction, the one late term procedure still legal after the Supreme Court’s decision in Gonzales v. Carhart last term. But, as NY Times critic Manhola Dargis points out, Kaye never tells the viewer (1) at what stage in pregnancy the abortion is taking place, or (2) how infrequently this procedure is actually used. What’s more, according to Dargis’s review, the film, though very obviously about an issue most directly affecting women, features very few women on screen. Dargis writes:

The fight, of course, is over what that something is — an embryo, a baby, God’s creation, a blob of cells — and who has dominion over it and the fully formed human being carrying that something inside her body.

I wish there were more of those fully formed human beings in “Lake of Fire,” which has an awful lot of men talking about what women should and should not do with their bodies. There are women here, to be sure, though it may be instructive that one of the most memorable female voices belongs to an unreliable witness who talks about seeing “babies” stacked in an abortion-clinic freezer. Mr. Kaye follows this startling testimonial with otherworldly and unidentified images of intact late-term fetuses or babies or maybe even dolls. Because I couldn’t tell what I was looking at, I asked the film’s distributor. According to the company, these images had been given to Mr. Kaye by members of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot, Kaye also relied on anti-abortion groups for footage that he includes, again without comment, in the film. So, despite a glowing review from a family member whose opinion and politics I trust, I’m skeptical about Kaye’s film (though curious to see both Lake of Fire and 4 months, 3 weeks, and 2 days). And I’m starting to think that maybe Judd Apatow got it right in mocking Americans’ inability to actually talk about abortion while not actually broaching the topic himself.