Greece – An Abortion Hidden from Parental View in “Memoir of a Veering Storm”

In Sofia Georgovassili’s short film, drawn from life, a teen-ager and her friends go on a pivotal excursion in the course of a school day.

Film by Sofia Georgovassili
Text by Helena Ong
February 17, 2023
Film: 13:48 minutes

[From YouTube description] It is a morning in September and a storm is coming. A mother takes her daughter to school in the morning, unaware that she will be a young woman when she comes back home in the evening. Fifteen-year-old Anna sneaks out of school and goes to a hospital. There, she is faced with an event that will close the door on her childhood forever.

What happens to a young woman’s psyche when she experiences an abortion while all surrounding social structures see her as a child? Greek director Sofia Georgovassili’s melancholy short film, which has screened at many festivals including the Berlinale Generation competition, reveals the world that the film’s protagonist is confronted with through minute details, touches, light pulsations, and mythology.

Film available at: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/screening-room/an-abortion-hidden-from-parental-view-in-memoir-of-a-veering-storm

17.02.2023

Film, Art, Books

abortion films

Memoir of a Veering Storm

Sofia Georgovassili

Europe

Greece

‘Plan C’ Review: Timely Documentary Examines Abortion Solutions in a Post-Roe America

Tracy Droz Tragos' no-frills film centers on the healthcare professionals and volunteers seeking to ensure easy access to abortion pills for pregnant people in restrictive U.S. states.

By Guy Lodge
Feb 16, 2023

Even before last year’s Supreme Court overturning of Roe v. Wade, a recent international surge in films about abortion rights and the endangerment thereof — from period pieces like “Happening” to present-day portraits like “Never Rarely Sometimes Always” — almost seemed to anticipate such a devastating blow. In America in particular, where talk of abortion access has always been snarled up in extreme religious rhetoric and eternal red-blue division, it has never been a subject to be treated complacently. Urgent and unvarnished, Tracy Droz Tragos’ documentary “Plan C” is an early entry in what might be considered post-Roe cinema, focusing less on pro-choice ideology than on the practicalities of ensuring choice in a system increasingly stacked against the idea.

Continued: https://variety.com/2023/film/reviews/plan-c-review-1235524927/

16.02.2023

Film, Art, Books

Abortion: Stories Women Tell

Abortion—The Real Irish Lessons

Road to Repeal: 50 Years of Struggle in Ireland for Contraception and Abortion (new book)

by Tomás Mac Sheoin
Feb 01, 2023

In August 2022, Fintan O’Toole, a journalist with the Irish Times, published an article in the New York Review of Books giving his interpretation of the lessons to be learned from the Irish experience with abortion. O’Toole first outlined the history: in 1981, right-wing groups, buttressed by American support—including financial support—formed the Pro-Life Amendment Campaign, which persuaded the Irish government to propose a referendum to include a ban on abortion in the Irish Constitution. The ban was passed in 1983, becoming the constitution’s eighth amendment.

O’Toole outlines three problems with legal bans on abortion. First, they simply do not stop abortions: in 1985, 3,888 women traveled from Ireland to England to terminate their pregnancies; in 2001, that number was 6,673.

Continued: https://monthlyreview.org/2023/02/01/abortion-the-real-irish-lessons/

01.02.2023

Featured

Film, Art, Books

constitutional amendment to ban abortion

Eighth Amendment

Fintan O'Toole

Pro-Life Amendment Campaign

Savita Halappanavar

traveling for abortion

‘Outsider Girls,’ Chilean Dramedy About Abortion Dilemma, Debuts Trailer Ahead of Rotterdam Premiere

By Anna Marie de la Fuente
Jan 30, 2023

Niña Niño Films’ “Outsider Girls” (“Las Demás”), the debut feature of rising Chilean talent Alexandra Hyland, which world premieres in the Bright Future sidebar of Intl. Film Festival Rotterdam, has bowed its trailer exclusively with Variety.

Hyland was named one of Variety’s Five Chilean Talents to Watch in 2018. Her feature debut follows best friends Gaby (played by Alicia Luz Rodriguez) and Rafa (Nicole Sazo), two college girls whose pink-hued oasis is disrupted when Rafa gets pregnant after a night of debauchery. Given Chile’s ultra-conservative society, abortion is illegal except in extreme cases. They set out to earn enough to pay for the pricey abortion pills through a series of oddball part-time jobs, straining their friendship in the process.

Continued: https://variety.com/2023/film/global/outsider-girls-rotterdam-1235506196/

30.01.2023

With recent book, Bay Area author and physician reflects on life as a parent and her work as an abortion doctor

by Karla Kane / Palo Alto Weekly
Sun, Jan 15, 2023

Life is full of choices, big and small, but there is also much that's out of our control.

In her new memoir, "Boundless: An Abortion Doctor Becomes a Mother," author Christine Henneberg ponders the concept of choice — from her own career decisions and journey toward motherhood to the importance of trusting the choices of her patients — and how to reconcile a need for boundaries with the boundless love and dedication of parenthood. Though it's a deeply personal book, Henneberg also beautifully recounts many stories of patients, family members, friends and colleagues that have stuck with her over the years, from harrowing to heartwarming (and sometimes both at once).

https://www.pleasantonweekly.com/news/2023/01/15/with-recent-book-bay-area-author-and-physician-reflects-on-life-as-a-parent-and-her-work-as-an-abortion-doctor

15.01.2023

Featured

Film, Art, Books

abortion books

Boundless: An Abortion Doctor Becomes a Mother

India – Pandemic pushes wife to write book on crusading doc who fought to raise abortion limit

Mumbai News
Published on Dec 24

Mumbai: When Covid forced the world to shut down, Dr Smita Datar, the wife of a renowned gynaecologist and judicial activist used the time in hand to write about her husband’s 14-year crusade—a crusade that pushed the Union cabinet to upgrade an archaic law in 2020. The story of Dr Nikhil Datar, who got policymakers to raise the upper limit for abortions from 20 weeks to 24 weeks, is now encapsulated in a Marathi book, Fakt Tichyasaathi (Only For Her), which was released today in Mumbai.

“Years ago, the need to amend the Medical Termination of Pregnancy (MTP) Act and extend the permissible abortion term was discussed only in medical conferences,” said Dr Smita. “My husband had just started his practice but he was focused on bringing justice to women. He saw many ups and downs and faced criticism but never gave up. And 50 years after the passage of the historic MTP Act of 1971, the MTP Amendment Bill 2020 was passed. It was a landmark.”

Continued: https://www.hindustantimes.com/cities/mumbai-news/pandemic-pushes-wife-to-write-book-on-crusading-doc-who-fought-to-raise-abortion-limit-101671905399843.html

24.12.2022

Medical Termination Of Pregnancy (MTP) Act

MTP Amendment Bill 2020

USA – ‘Love Is Blind,’ ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ and more: How abortion’s portrayal on TV is changing

A researcher found more plotlines around and more mentions of abortion on TV this year — though wealthy White characters are still overrepresented.

Jennifer Gerson
December 15, 2022

For the past five years, researcher Steph Herold has studied portrayals of abortion in television and film as part of the Abortion Onscreen initiative.

The latest study by Herold, a research analyst at Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH) at the University of California-San Francisco’s Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health spans this year. It found 60 abortion plotlines or mentions from 52 distinct television shows, well outnumbering the 47 abortion plotlines in 42 shows seen in 2021.

Continued: https://19thnews.org/2022/12/abortion-portrayal-television-movies-after-dobbs/

15.12.2022

Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health

ANSIRH

Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health

Gray's Anatomy

Steph Herold

United States

USA – My Body No Choice: taking the fight for abortion rights to the stage

A new stage production tells the stories of women and their bodily autonomy, or lack thereof, as part of the fight to reverse the supreme court decision to restrict abortion

David Smith
Thu 27 Oct 2022

Theirs was a secret space. In the early 1970s, Molly Smith and her sister Bridget attended weekly women’s consciousness-raising sessions in a friend’s living room near Washington’s Catholic University. They read books such as Our Bodies, Ourselves, a groundbreaking text about women’s health and sexuality. Sitting on cushions, the circle of women listened to one another, laughed and cried and shared their deepest secrets.

“Women needed spaces where they could be open, where they could be uncompromising, where they could speak about the beginnings of their feminism, where they could speak about their stories around their bodies without shame,” Smith, now 70, recalls by phone. “A lot of women didn’t understand their bodies at all.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2022/oct/26/my-body-no-choice-supreme-court-abortion-rights-stage

27.10.2022

Review: A 1960s underground abortion network in ‘Call Jane’

By Jake Coyle, The Associated Press
Posted Oct 26, 2022

In Phyllis Nagy’s “Call Jane,” Joy (Elizabeth Banks) is a 1960s housewife married to a defense attorney (Chris Messina) with a teenage daughter (Grace Edwards) and a baby on the way. A heart condition, though, threatens her life in childbirth. The only treatment, her doctor tells her, is “to not be pregnant.”

When they, acting on the doctor’s advice, appeal to the hospital’s board for permission to conduct a therapeutic termination, this critical moment in Joy’s life passes curtly. The all-male board members discuss it briefly while not acknowledging Joy, across the table. “No regard for her mother?” she asks. Their votes sound the answer. “No.” “No.” “No.”

Continued: https://toronto.citynews.ca/2022/10/26/review-a-1960s-underground-abortion-network-in-call-jane/

26.10.2022

history of abortion activism

Canada – The fight for reproductive justice is an abolitionist struggle

Review | October 3, 2022
by Maya Campo
Abortion to Abolition: Reproductive Health and Justice in Canada by Martha Paynter (Fernwood, 2022).

With the overturning of Roe v. Wade, reproductive rights are coming under increasing attack. However, the mainstream political discourse about reproductive rights and access to abortion too often narrows this discussion in a way that replicates systemic oppression and white supremacy.

Martha Paynter’s new book, Abortion to Abolition, aims to recentre the discussion around a framework of reproductive justice, which Paynter highlights as being developed by women of colour. Paynter takes an intersectional approach to the abortion rights, presenting case studies that highlight systemic issues of colonialism, homophobia and transphobia, racism, and classism that infringe upon reproductive rights in Canada.

Continued: https://springmag.ca/the-fight-for-reproductive-justice-is-an-abolitionist-struggle