‘Roe v. Wade’ Review: Dreadful Anti-Abortion Drama Has No Use for Facts or Filmmaking Basics

Cathy Allyn and Nick Loeb spew lies about 1973's landmark abortion-rights Supreme Court ruling via inept filmmaking and an amateurish cast.

Mar 31, 2021
by Tomris Laffly

To seriously consider “Roe v. Wade” — that is, writer-directors Cathy Allyn and Nick Loeb’s atrocious anti-abortion propaganda piece and not the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision in favor of abortion rights — it is helpful to remember a 2017 quote by journalist Chuck Todd. “Alternative facts are not facts. They’re falsehoods,” Todd succinctly said when confronting Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway on her use of the term. While the Trump era that Conway’s expression sums up is behind us, “Roe v. Wade” has reportedly been in the works for the past three years, so it’s fair to reflect on the baffling film as a product of that period, when right-wing fabrications were routinely presented as truth.

Continued: https://variety.com/2021/film/reviews/roe-v-wade-review-1234939966/

Roe v Wade: an anti-abortion film of staggering ineptitude

Rightwing faces, including Jon Voight, Stacey Dash and Tomi Lahren, join forces for a shoddy new drama purporting to tell the truth behind a major ruling

Robert Daniels
Thu 25 Mar 2021

Nick Loeb and Cathy Allyn believe you’ve been lied to about the landmark supreme court case Roe v Wade – a decision that protected a woman’s right to choose. In a controversial new movie named after the trial, the co-directors want to explain how decision was rigged; how a Jewish doctor (Loeb is of Jewish descent himself) leveraged abortion into a money making scheme; how the abortion rights advocate Lawrence Lader (Jamie Kennedy) concocted a plan to puppeteer two inexperienced female lawyers to prey on a supposedly desperate bumpkin in Norma McCorvey (Summer Joy Campbell) – the Roe in Roe v Wade – to weaponize her to an unsuspecting court system. And they want to spew this deeply biased anti-abortion malarkey as inartfully as possible.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/mar/24/roe-v-wade-anti-abortion-rightwing

25.03.2021

National Abortion Rights Action League

The Capitol Rioters’ Disturbing Ties to the March for Life

Several people who stormed the Capitol are linked to the anti-abortion March for Life. Enough with their dangerous anti-abortion rhetoric, writes comic and activist Lizz Winstead.

Lizz Winstead
Published Jan. 29, 2021

On Jan. 6, insurrectionists attacked the U.S. Capitol and brought into sharp focus a threat those of us who have been monitoring right-wing extremists have understood for years. Some of the people who either attended the siege of the Capitol—or played cheerleader for it to their thousands of followers on social media—were the exact same dangerous extremists who harass and threaten patients and doctors daily at reproductive health centers, including some of the biggest stars of the “pro-life” movement.

It was alarming, then, that on Jan. 29, just three weeks after the storming of the Capitol, another D.C. gathering of Trump-loving extremists, one that annually draws tens of thousands, was seemingly moving forward as planned.

Continued: https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-capitol-rioters-disturbing-ties-to-the-march-for-life

USA – Abby Johnson Spreads Falsehoods About Abortion At The RNC

The anti-abortion activist accused Planned Parenthood of racism and described abortion in graphic language.

By Melissa Jeltsen, HuffPost US
08/25/2020

Anti-abortion activist Abby Johnson used her five-minute speaking slot on the second night of the Republican National Convention to stigmatize abortion and smear her former employer, Planned Parenthood, the country’s largest provider of reproductive health care.

Johnson, who spent the day under fire for past statements on racial profiling and women’s right to vote, worked at Planned Parenthood for eight years before defecting to the anti-abortion movement.

Continued: https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/abby-johnson-abortion-lies-rnc_n_5f45997dc5b6cf66b2afd884

25.08.2020

Republican National Convention

“For Those on Both Sides”: An Interview with Mary Ziegler about Abortion and the Law in America

7/22/2020

Recently, Florida State University law professor Mary Ziegler sat down with Nursing Clio to talk about her new book, Abortion and the Law in America: Roe v. Wade to the Present. The book illustrates how the question of “abortion rights” is only one piece of the puzzle – rather both antiabortion and pro-choice advocates have spent decades in a tug-of-war over policy, funding issues, and larger questions about public health. As Ziegler carefully demonstrates, these battles actually deepened political polarization on abortion and have shaped the debate in increasingly intractable ways. Her interview with Nursing Clio editor Lauren MacIvor Thompson has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Lauren: Your book does such a wonderful job laying out the legal landscape of the complex history of abortion. What drove your narrative and organization of the book?

Continued: https://nursingclio.org/2020/07/22/for-those-on-both-sides-an-interview-with-mary-ziegler-about-abortion-and-the-law-in-america/

What Norma McCorvey Believed Matters

What Norma McCorvey Believed Matters
The original plaintiff behind Roe v. Wade is more than just a symbol in the abortion rights debate.

Mary Ziegler, The Atlantic
May 31, 2020

Last weekend, FX premiered AKA Jane Roe, a documentary on Norma McCorvey, the plaintiff in Roe v. Wade. Backers of the film touted its most explosive revelation—that McCorvey, Jane Roe herself, had converted to the anti-abortion cause only because she was getting paid. This news made waves, and the attention it received has raised, in turn, a bigger question: Why does it matter at all what she really thought about abortion?

The constitutional-law expert Michael Dorf has argued that it doesn’t—or at least that clashing social movements have blown its significance way out of proportion. He contends that when it comes to the ultimate fate of abortion rights, McCorvey’s beliefs matter very little.

Continued: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/why-norma-mccorvey-matters/612295/

FX’s Jane Roe deathbed confession reveals the abortion lie at the heart of the religious right

FX's Jane Roe deathbed confession reveals the abortion lie at the heart of the religious right
The religious right worked to convince McCorvey that abortion was the great defining evil of our time. Then they used her story to push the same line on vulnerable Americans.

May 26, 2020
By Katherine Stewart

Since it has already made the news, let’s go ahead and spoil the film. Toward the end of FX’s “AKA Jane Roe,” we learn that anti-abortion activists used a pile of money and heavy doses of psychological manipulation to convert Norma McCorvey — the actual plaintiff in Roe v. Wade — into a trophy for their cause. The documentary makes for compelling viewing, especially in its final moments, when, McCorvey tells us that, to paraphrase Bob Seger, they used her, she used them, and neither one cared.

Continued: https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/fx-s-jane-roe-deathbed-confession-reveals-abortion-lie-heart-ncna1214381

26.05.2020

Jane Roe's deathbed confession

How the Anti-Abortion Movement Is Responding to Jane Roe’s “Deathbed Confession”

How the Anti-Abortion Movement Is Responding to Jane Roe’s “Deathbed Confession”

By Ruth Graham
May 22, 2020

The pro-life movement has always loved a conversion story. People who reject their former lives working for pro-choice causes are some of the most prominent voices in the movement, and the existence of abortion regret—a woman changing her mind after it’s too late—is a key legislative and rhetorical tactic. So when the real-life “Jane Roe” of Roe v. Wade announced two decades after that landmark Supreme Court case that she had realized abortion ought to be illegal after all, she became an instant star within the pro-life movement.

A bombshell documentary airing Friday night on FX adds a final shocking twist to Norma McCorvey’s ideologically eventful life. In AKA Jane Roe, McCorvey offers what she calls a “deathbed confession”: Actually, she was basically pro-choice all along and only became a pro-life activist for the money.

Continued: https://slate.com/human-interest/2020/05/jane-roe-norma-mccorvey-confession-anti-abortion.html

USA – No One Really Knew Jane Roe Her shocking deathbed confession makes that clear.

No One Really Knew Jane Roe Her shocking deathbed confession makes that clear.

By Callie Beusman
May 21, 2020

Norma McCorvey spent most of her life as a symbol. At age 22 — mired in poverty, a survivor of childhood abuse, and pregnant against her will for the third time — she became Jane Roe: the anonymous plaintiff at the center of Roe v. Wade, an emblem of the cruelty of America’s abortion bans, whose case eventually enshrined the right to choose into the constitution. To feminists, her pseudonym became synonymous with the battle for liberation and bodily autonomy. To the Christian right, it made her the new face of evil. But then, two decades after the ruling that made her a national figure, Jane Roe abruptly defected from the pro-choice side. In the welcoming waters of an anti-abortion extremist’s swimming pool, she was baptized and born again as an unlikely spokesperson for the movement, appearing on TV and at protests across the nation to denounce the killing of the unborn, cross necklace glinting at her throat. “The poster child has jumped off the poster,” the head of a local anti-abortion group gleefully proclaimed at the time.

Continued: https://www.thecut.com/2020/05/jane-roe-norma-mccorvey-deathbed-confession-abortion.html

The Anti-Abortion Movement Was Always Built on Lies

The Anti-Abortion Movement Was Always Built on Lies

This week, it was revealed that Norma McCorvey, a.k.a. “Jane Roe,” admitted on her death bed that her late-career anti-abortion crusade was all a ruse funded by the Christian right. Laura Bassett takes a hard look at the house of cards the American anti-abortion movement was built upon.

By Laura Bassett
May 20, 2020

In 1973, the plaintiff “Jane Roe” brought a case to the Supreme Court that would legalize abortion throughout America. So it was quite a surprise when, in the mid-1990s, Roe, whose real name was Norma McCorvey, suddenly emerged as an anti-abortion activist. She wrote a book about her change of heart, spoke at multiple annual March for Life rallies, and even filed a motion in 2003 to get the Supreme Court to re-decide her case. “I deeply regret the damage my original case caused women,” she said at the time. “I want the Supreme Court to examine the evidence and have a spirit of justice for women and children.”

Continued: https://www.gq.com/story/jane-roe-anti-abortion-lies/