Mills College WeeklyThe Power of Choice is an amazing documentary and is not like
any other. Although onesided, it is not meant to attack
anyone personally but rather to provide us with a summary of the
battle that nurses, doctors, organizations, individuals, political
figures and victims fought in order to give women the right to
terminate an unwanted pregnancy.
Dorothy Fadiman, Emmy-winning, Oscar-nominated filmmaker, and
her team did a great job researching real footage and interviewing
victims of illegal abortions. Their testimonies are powerful
and give the audience a better understanding of the struggle and
the atrocities that many women went through.
The movie/documentary opens with this quote from the narrator
and director Fadiman: “This film is based on my personal story.
I’d had an illegal abortion, blindfolded, without anesthetic;
I never saw the face of the person who performed the abortion.
My own doctor, who refused to provide a safe abortion, would
now try to save my life. This film follows the story of what
I and many others went through.”
Meant to give many a quick overview of the battle for the
freedom of choice, Fadiman shows the history of this battle. She
found real footage of an amazing piece of history: in 1970, the
Bill to Legalize Abortion was being voted on the New York state
capitol in Albany; the result was a tie but when George Michael,
who represented a very conservative district in N.Y., asked the
specker of the house to change his vote to a positive one in favor
of the bill; he knew that at this point his political career was
going to be terminated and it was.
Next to this amazing historical turnover, the lawyer of the
plaintiff in Roe v. Wade, Sarah Waddington, tells her story as a
victim of an illegal abortion and what she felt in the courtroom
when she pleaded and won the most difficult case a lawyer could be
assigned. Because she was once the victim, she had it in her
heart to win the case and to give justice to all the women who had
suffered like her from the lack of personal freedoms.
The power of Choice is 26 minutes long and Fadiman hopes it will
be broadcasted to the general public but in the mean time you can
order it online at www.thepowerofchoice.net for
$5.00.
