Abortion Issues

A movie has just been finished based on the true story reported by WND of a woman trapped in the bathroom of an abortion clinic who watched helplessly as her baby, who was born alive, died.

The film, "22weeks," made by a young, Puerto Rican filmmaker, Ángel Manuel Soto Vázquez, will soon be released in private screenings in select cities as it ramps up for hopeful showings at the Toronto and Cannes Film Festivals.

The film, with promotional pages on MySpace and Facebook, describes the movie on its homepage as follows:

A young woman is locked in the bathroom of an abortion clinic after her aborted baby was born alive.

A film about decisions, their effects and the echos [sic] they leave behind. Based on the shocking WorldNetDaily article by Ron Strom, on victim's testimonies, and real 911 calls about one of the most controversial subjects of our time, "22weeks" achieves to confront both sides of the spectrum and their perspective to the on going [sic] question: "what would you do?"

The film's MySpace page adds, "This is the shocking true story about the reality behind abortion and the heroic struggle of a mother willing to do anything to save her child."

***A trailer for the film can be seen below, but viewers should be aware it contains graphic images and disturbing content:

The mother in the true story, identified only as Angele, since she has asked her last name not be used, was scheduled to have her 22-week pregnancy ended at the EPOC Clinic of Orlando Women's Center in Orlando, Fla. Instead, Angele told WND, she delivered the baby alive in a restroom at the clinic and said her cries for help went unheeded by the medical staff, even when an employee saw that the tiny boy was moving.

Angele said she ran to a phone outside the clinic to call a friend for help, then curled up with her son for the full 11 minutes of his short life after birth. She bathed the baby, whom she named Rowan, and cut his umbilical cord. After medical staff demanded she surrender her son's body, she blocked the door to keep them away and stayed trapped in the bathroom, praying and weeping, until the police arrived, she said.

Angele described her son:

He was perfect, slightly pale and a little translucent. His eyebrows were pale but wide and well-defined. You could see little hairs on his face and head. He had the tiniest little fingernails and toenails. I noticed they already had a little bit of growth. His mouth was lovely. He was this perfectly formed one pound, one ounce human being. He was beautiful. He had been so strong.

I wrapped him in [a] blue pad instead of one of the wet blankets. I just kept kissing him and telling him I loved him so much. I told him I was sorry I couldn't get anyone to help us and I was so sorry for ever coming here.

Baby Rowan

Now, with the help of supportive movie industry artists and the makers of the award-winning movie "Bella," a film about a single mother's struggle with choosing between abortion and adoption, Soto Vázquez is bringing Angele's story to the big screen.

Soto Vázquez told WND the film isn't a pro-choice or pro-life agenda film, but rather the telling of a true story that allows audiences to reach their own conclusions.

"Even though the movie doesn't take any side, the way I show it, I show both sides of the spectrum on the issue of abortion," Soto Vázquez said. "I just let the spectator decide which side he's going to take from the story, because it's based on a true story."

He said it's a move "about a woman who decides to get an abortion, and she gets an abortion. But it's also the story of a woman who, after she gets the abortion, realizes what she has done when she has that mother-son connection."

The movie is scheduled to premiere at a private screening in Puerto Rico in early October, with invitations sent to the press and to the artists who have supported it, including the makers of "Bella" and actor George Clooney.

After the premiere, screenings are planned in Kansas City, Dallas, and Los Angeles.

"We want to do private screenings for our target audience, then branch out from there so viewers can recommend the movie to more people," Soto Vázquez said. "We're doing it that way because we don't have the money to distribute it nationwide yet, but we do have access to viral marketing so we can get our main niche to follow the movie and recommend it and create enough noise to get media attention. Eventually, we'd like it to go all over the country."

WND asked Soto Vázquez how people who want to see the film can get access to it.

"I know a lot of people who support the pro-life movement would like to see this film excel," he said. "The main ways to do that are to help us make connections with media, help us find places to do screenings and help us financially make those screenings happen.

"If we found a spot do a private screening, I'm more than willing to try to make it happen. Right now, our connections are in those cities where we have screenings planned. But, for example, I don't know people in, say, Chicago."

WND asked Soto Vázquez if private theater owners who wanted to invite the movie to be shown at their facility should contact him.

"Oh, totally," Soto Vázquez answered, "that would be a blessing."

The movie's official website, 22weeksthemovie.com, has both contact information and an address for donations to increase the movie's potential distribution.

Following the death of baby Rowan three years ago, Angele told WND she chose to go public with her story and take legal action "so this doesn't happen to anybody else." As WND reported, a pro-life law organization called Liberty Counsel filed complaints on Angele's behalf against the clinic that performed the abortion.

Mathew Staver, president of Liberty Counsel, has since told WND Florida authorities chose not to act on the complaints but that the lead doctor at the clinic, Dr. James S. Pendergraft, just last year had his medical license revoked for violating the state's late-term abortion laws and prescribing medication without a license.

Pendergraft, as WND reported, is known in pro-life communities as the "Tiller of Florida," after George Tiller, a well-known late-term abortion doctor in Wichita, Kan., referred to by some activists as "Tiller the Killer."

Staver suggested the attention Pendergraft received after baby Rowan's death couldn't have helped the doctor's reputation and confirmed that though Pendergraft has applied for reinstatement, it has not yet been granted.

Angele's story is a case that would likely fall under the 2002 federal Born-Alive Infant Protection Act, which requires doctors to attempt to keep alive a baby that survives an abortion. The act has been thrust into the national spotlight recently as Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has been steeped in controversy for allegedly lying to cover up his opposition to a similar bill that would have protected babies like Rowan.

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LIBERALS WOULD HAVE ABORTED ALEXANDER HAMILTON

Who should live and who should die is, among liberals, the decision of government and society. The baby has no choice. This sounds more like Hitler's Germany than America. Let us remember, the manner of conception does not demean the life conceived.
- Paul Greenberg
April 3, 2001

Our eugenic society

LITTLE ROCK, Ark - There were so many striking, revealing quotations in a news article last week about some of this state's leading abortionists - excuse me, abortion providers - that it wasn't easy to choose the most chilling.

The most provocative assertions from these "healers" fell into what might be called the Better Off Dead school of apologetics for abortion. Which leads naturally to the argument that Society Is Better Off, Too.

The laurel for the best specimen of such reasoning goes to ... Dr. Tom Tvedten of Little Rock, who practices at the oddly named Family Health Care Center. "We're out there saving society," he explains. "Most of the people in Cummins (the state prison) are from single-parent families and weren't planned or wanted."

Viewed in this (dim) light, abortion becomes a kind of pre-emptive strike, a way of eliminating the criminal element early. How efficient. Think of it as capital punishment without the bother of a trial, let alone verdict and sentence. It simplifies the whole process and avoids all those bothersome legal technicalities.

Thanks to the wonders of modern science, we can now decide who will live and who will not. What did the serpent promise Eve? You will be as gods! Yes, this is an old, old temptation. And now, God help us, some of our doctors seem to have confused themselves with Him.

What is most impressive about Dr. Tvedten's kind of preventive criminology - the clairvoyance or the class-consciousness? Here is a fortuneteller who can confidently predict the fate of souls still in the womb and tell us which ones will wind up in a state prison.

But why, one wonders, would the good doctor mention Cummins, a typical Southern prison farm, but not the kind of upscale federal housing reserved for errant politicians and other white-collar types? Is it only the lower classes who produce criminals, and so are expendable?

Bastardy has long carried a stigma in polite society, and even the best of us may give way to Dr. Tvedten's censoriousness in our less than best moments, punishing the child for the parents' indiscretion. But surely not all of us would take it to such a surgical extreme.

In a fit of pique, even good old John Adams once referred to his fellow Federalist and political rival Alexander Hamilton as "the bastard brat of a Scotch peddler." As often happened, Mr. Adams was entirely and literally correct. As he famously said, facts are stubborn things.

And few of the founding fathers could have been more irritating than Colonel Hamilton, especially after he got himself promoted to general and began beating the drum for an unnecessary war with France. It was not his finest hour. No wonder he drove poor John Adams to distraction, and Aaron Burr to shoot him.

But think of what America might have been without this poor immigrant who became our first secretary of the Treasury, this aide to General Washington who was first over the British parapet at Yorktown, this eloquent advocate for the Constitution in the Federalist Papers ... .

And, lest we forget, Alexander Hamilton was also the first American statesman to devise, advocate and implement an economic program for the whole country - a comprehensive vision that stressed investment, development, national independence and individual enterprise.

It is not a happy prospect, a Hamilton less America. Think of how different some things might have turned out if Alexander Hamilton had never been born - like the American Constitution and economy, not to mention the 10-dollar Bill. Not bad for the bastard brat of a Scotch peddler.

But in the Age of Abortion, not just the denizens of Cummins are preventable, but the unwanted and unplanned Alexander Hamilton's. It's hard to tell which will turn out to be which just from the sonogram. They all seem so ... alive. Who can be sure how many future Hamiltons we have been spared by now, almost three decades after Roe v. Wade? We will never know, not in this world.

Nevertheless, let's tell ourselves we're eliminating only the socially undesirable and saving society. It's a draining job, but somebody's got to do it, right? Isn't that what Himmler used to tell his death squads?

©2001 Tribune Media Services townhall.com

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