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Competing to glamorize abortion

The website Deadline reports that there are not one but two movie projects attempting to glorify an underground abortion collective in Chicago that operated in the four years before the 1973 Roe v. Wade court decision legalizing abortion.

One radical feminist at the Jezebel blog proclaimed this was a wonderful development “in a particularly fragile time for abortion rights.” She added, “Considering our current administration I’d say the more media we can get about underground abortion collectives, the better!”

Fragile? It’s debatable that the current Congress can even muster the votes to defund Planned Parenthood, the nation’s dominant abortion corporation, never mind passing any laws that would outlaw or seriously restrict abortions. Many pro-lifers would be relieved to just stop funding Planned Parenthood with our tax dollars. It’d be a baby step, sure. But something.

This friendly competition between productions began when Amazon Studios bought a film called “This Is Jane” that is based on the nonfiction book “The Story of Jane: The Legendary Underground Feminist Abortion Service.” The operation was called the Jane Collective, based on the very average-sounding female name.

Stop at the word “legendary” and ask yourself: Would a movie about any mass murderer ever carry the word “legendary”?

Then, an indie film called “Ask for Jane” began production. It is based on work submitted to a film competition sponsored by the leftist movie producer Participant Media (these are the folks who produced Al Gore’s documentary “An Inconvenient Truth”). The company’s films are designed to “inspire and compel social change.”

Abortion advocates always believe that producing horror stories about the era before the Roe decision will win the debate. “Ignorance” is always the defining quality of their opponents. “So many of the lawmakers trying to restrict abortion access (today) have never even considered the disparate reasons why a woman might be driven to seek one,” Cait Johnston, a producer and star of “Ask for Jane” told Deadline. “‘Ask For Jane’ beautifully depicts a few of their stories, and illustrates how vital it is to keep this procedure legal and safe.”

Hollywood producers rush to glamorize the ugliest things. The Jane Collective started in 1969 as a referral service for women who wanted to kill their babies, and more than 11,000 clients were served. And since illegal abortions were expensive, these “heroic” women started performing surgical abortions themselves, despite a lack of medical education.

The Hollywood left wouldn’t dare consider the very real horror stories inside abortion clinics, like that of Dr. Kermit Gosnell in Philadelphia, who also let unqualified women do abortion procedures. They not only killed babies but also ultimately killed one helpless mother with an overdose of anesthesia. Gosnell was convicted of slicing the spines of babies who had already been born. He joked that one baby he killed outside the womb was “big enough to walk me to the bus stop.”

It was all part of that vaunted “right to choose.”

They won’t consider real-life exposes by The Center for Medical Progress. One report after another uncovers horrors. It recently displayed a hidden-camera video from National Abortion Federation conventions in 2014 and 2015. One abortion doctor wisecracked, “The fetus is a tough little object, and taking it — I mean, taking it apart on day one is very difficult.” Another said: “Our stories don’t really have a place in a lot of pro-choice discourse and rhetoric, right? The heads that get stuck that we can’t get out … the hemorrhages that we manage.”

Instead, Jacklynn Blanchard of the Ms. Magazine blog publicized these movies as an opportunity to make abortion uplifting. She said, “I think that positively portraying this experience as not always something that results in death — which is a very common way that abortion is portrayed on screen — is so important.”

The humanity of unborn babies is the first casualty of feminist propaganda. That’s just a neglected dumpster full of collateral damage in a libertine world.

L. Brent Bozell III is the president of the Media Research Center. To find out more about Brent Bozell III, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

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