I tend to be skeptical of movies with a message. But I’d heard
enough about this movie to be open to it, because it's more about story than message.
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| Abby Johnson, now a pro-life speaker, whose story is told in the movie Unplanned, screenshot from here |
I don’t see R-rated movies—if the movie is rated for R based
on sex, language, or violence, as you’d expect. I skip a lot of PG-13 movies
for those very reasons. This movie has none of that. But there is some
intensity. And there is some realistic blood.
Last week Glenn Beck talked about the movie quite a bit. He
traveled to Utah for the opening—to encourage people who don’t usually attend
an R-rated movie to make this one an exception. Reports are that attendance
there was double the per screen rate of the rest of the country. In the country
overall, the movie got a very good first weekend reception on about 1000
screens. I saw one report that it was a higher per screen rate than Captain Marvel, maybe because this is
about real life female power against evil.
Glenn Beck had suggested that telling this story could end
abortion in our lifetime. That might be an exaggeration. But it is powerful. It may be that telling this
story truthfully to young people will reveal something about abortion—and about
Planned Parenthood in particular—that will change the culture. The challenge,
then, will be getting young people to see it.
It’s odd how the motion picture rating system works.
Something can be truly vile and immoral, and shocking, and still get a PG-13
rating, meaning parents are cautioned, but no one asks any questions of
teenagers going to see such a movie. But an R-rating means that a minor must be
accompanied by an adult, because the material is so inappropriate that only a
parent can override that decision.
Some of the promotional material has pointed out that a 13-year-old
can get an actual abortion without parental consent, but can’t see this movie depicting
what will happen during that abortion without parental consent.
The movie was closer to home than I had been aware. We were talking to our son on the way to the theater, and he says, “Oh, the one about
the woman from Rockdale?” That’s a town a short distance from where they live;
they drive there to their church building. I hadn’t known Abby Johnson was that
local. I hadn’t been aware that the abortion clinic where she had worked was in
Texas—Bryan, Texas, a suburb of the town where Texas A&M University is
located. And there’s a portion of the story related to the Houston Planned
Parenthood building, which I’ve seen so many times from the freeway on the way
into downtown.
Here's the trailer:
Here's the trailer:
The movie does a couple of things really well. It describes what is going on in the minds of many of the pro-abortion (pro-choice) people. And it depicts the experience at the clinic.
One point Abby Johnson makes well is that scaring someone
and yelling at them that they’re going to hell, when they’re facing a traumatic
crisis in their life, is not likely to persuade them. Actually, the pro-life
people who most frequently talk with her through the fence agree with that.
They’re much more about loving-kindness and caring than you might expect, and that’s
probably crucial to the story.
Most of us pro-life people have never seen the inside of an
abortion clinic, let alone seen the actual procedure. This movie, by all
reports, worked hard to be accurate. Even the doctors playing the role had been
former abortion doctors.
You may have heard that the “violent” scene that garnered
the R-rating depicts an actual abortion—CGI version (no babies were harmed in
the making of this film). It shows a baby on ultrasound, dodging the suction
tube, avoiding its own destruction, before being caught and sucked down a tube
that suddenly becomes bloody.
This is actually the life-changing moment from Abby Johnson’s
life. She was a career abortion provider, confessing that she was complicit in
some 22,000 abortions over eight years with Planned Parenthood. But she had
been able to convince herself that it was about helping young women in crisis,
and working to make abortion rare—by offering birth control that would prevent
the crisis pregnancy.
She was from a pro-life Christian family, with parents who
continued to pray for her and love her anyway. And her husband—her second
husband—was pro-life all along. It’s mystifying that he loved her when her job
was so against his moral beliefs, but that is also probably key to her eventual
epiphany.
She had gone through two abortions herself. The first was during
her first year of college. First time away from home, and she let herself
become a party girl right away. She had a relationship with a man ten years
older. When she became pregnant, he insisted on the abortion. She was a
freshman, afraid to tell her parents what she had become. And she knew she was not ready for parenthood. Pressured by the guy, she lets him take
her to the Houston Planned Parenthood clinic. The guy doesn’t pay for it; she
has to get a credit card on her own, and work her way out of the debt, to avoid
telling her parents.
She marries that guy, to the dismay of her parents. He’s a
bum. A year later, she finds out he’s unfaithful and immediately gets a
divorce. And then finds out she’s pregnant again. At this point, the very idea
of having a child that will connect her to that man is horrifying. So, again,
abortion seems like the answer.
This time she goes to the local clinic in Bryan, TX, the one where she
eventually works. Because it’s so early in the pregnancy, she is persuaded to
do a chemically induced abortion—the RU-486 pill. She is told that she will
have some mild cramping, and then her body will gently eliminate the pregnancy.
She gets ready at home, takes the prescribed pills. And then suffers intense
cramping, bleeding, clumps, more bleeding, more cramping—so that she fears this
is how she will die. For 48 hours. Followed by twelve weeks of continued
bleeding, passing clumps, and cramping.
This was the most affecting part of the movie for me. And
possibly the most graphic. TMI, but my own pregnancy that ended prematurely was
followed by very painful afterbirth, as if I were being ripped inside, more painful after birth than my full-term babies, and then
about ten weeks of bleeding. But, as traumatic as it was, I wasn’t alone and
uncared for or stricken by shame.
Abby angrily contacts the Planned Parenthood clinic. They
tell her this is normal. And she demands to know why they didn’t warn her. How
could this be normal and they not let her know ahead of time? They dismiss her
and hang up.
It’s another year or two later, when she’s recruited to
volunteer. By then she’s forgotten her anger toward Planned Parenthood, and has
replaced it with self-loathing. Looking for a way to volunteer and do something
better with her life, she at first resists the girl in the pink hat at the
recruiting table. But pink girl insists to her that they’re about making
abortion rare; that’s why they’re about birth control and women’s health. And to
that she says, “Sign me up.”
For a person who wants to think of herself as doing good,
she finds it surprisingly easy to lie. There’s a father that she knows who
brings in his daughter, whom he clearly cares about. Abby Johnson assures them
it’s a simple, safe procedure. She’ll be done shortly, and then following a
short recovery time, they can go on their way. It doesn’t quite turn out that
simple. The doctor perforates the uterine wall, something that can happen quite
easily when no ultrasound is used during the procedure.
They did ultrasounds before the procedure—which they did not show
to the client; they used it only for the purpose of determining size of the
fetus, which then determined difference in cost. But they didn’t generally use
ultrasounds during the procedure, despite increased safety for the mother,
because it would require an extra several minutes to set up (added cost) plus the
use of another worker (added cost).
Anyway, when this procedure goes badly, Abby is very
upset. She had promised this girl and her father that all would be well. And
now there was the possibility the girl could die. Abby’s quick work and that of
the rest of the staff eventually saves the girl, who is unconscious
throughout, so they do not even tell her there was a problem. Abby wanted to call 911, but her supervisor absolutely forbade her; it would look
bad with all the protesters outside to see an ambulance come. They couldn’t
afford the bad image. And then she chastised Abby for getting upset about a
little blood. (It wasn’t a little.)
The supervisor orders her to go explain the delay to the father
in the waiting room. She does, with a lie. She says there was an allergic
reaction with another patient they were dealing with that took some extra time,
but that his daughter was fine, and after a short time in recovery she’d be
brought out to him.
There’s a day before Hurricane Ike (2008) that she reschedules
all the Saturday clients to Friday to get them done ahead of the storm. She and
her staff think of it as heroic work. She comes home exhausted and wet from the
rain. Her little girl questions her about the blood on her shoes. She casually
lies that a person at the clinic got a nosebleed.
Lying is too easy for her. That must come from shame.
The day of her change of heart, Abby was called in to
help during a procedure, because the doctor who had been called in that day refused
to do the procedure without the ultrasound help. She hadn’t, in all her
years of working there and even running the clinic, been witness to the baby on
ultrasound during the procedure.
There were a couple of other details leading to her being
ready to recognize the truth that day. I’ll avoid any more spoilers. But there’s a
lot of reality here.
Once she has left the clinic, and has begun her redemption
journey, she talks through the fence to a girl arriving for an abortion, and
she gets her to listen to the basics of what is going to happen inside that
clinic. They aren’t going to offer her options; they are going to push her to
have an abortion. She knows this, because she used to be really good at it.
This was maybe one of the less natural moments in the film, but it is an
effective speech—because by this time we’ve seen the truth. An abortion doesn’t
make the problem go away. You can’t go through those clinic doors and come back
out to the way things used to be; things are never the same.
Planned Parenthood is an ironic name. It’s not about
planning to be a parent; it’s about avoiding being a parent. At all costs. It’s
a political organization. And it’s a money-making “non-profit”; and money is made
by doing more and more abortions.
There ought to be some truth in advertising. They wouldn’t
have made such inroads into the culture if they’d honestly called themselves “Baby
Killing and Disposal for Profit.” But that is their true name.
For those of you, like me, Christians, maybe even Latter-day
Saints, who avoid R-rated movies, there’s one thing this movie depicts rather
well. When we say Christ descended below all things, that He has atoned for all our sins—He really means it.
Redemption is possible even for a woman who was complicit in the deaths of two
of her own babies and tens of thousands of others. That’s a message of hope for
our troubled, wicked world.
Abby Johnson speaks out against abortion. She also started a
nonprofit (And Then There Were None) to help abortion workers leave what in some ways resembles a cult. In
six years or so she has helped over 500 leave, including several actual
abortion doctors. As she says, the goal isn’t to shut down clinics; the goal is
to change the hearts of people so our culture says abortion is an unacceptable
practice for civilized people.
