Sandra Paterson: Abortion film brings honesty to the debate

COMMENT

WARNING: this column may cause offence or be upsetting.

I sat down with four girlfriends this week and watched a copy of My Foetus, the British documentary on abortion which screens here on Wednesday.

It's not the normal thing you'd make a social event out of, complete with tea and biscuits.

But after getting a taped copy from my brother in England, I was interested to see what a bunch of friends, both pro-life and pro-choice, would make of it.

It begins with a warning like the one above, presumably because it shows an abortion being performed and photographs of aborted foetuses - pictures never before seen on television.

But sometimes words can be as disturbing as images.

Take this, for example, early on in the documentary, from gynaecologist Dr John Parsons about late-term abortions: "Doing the procedure is a bit unpleasant. You either have to bring on labour and end up with a foetus that looks like a small baby in the bed - dead - or you have to dismember it and pull it out of the cervix in pieces."

It's just him talking, dressed in his surgical gear, but the picture he paints, we all agreed, was confronting stuff.

So too were the statistics.

We were aghast and slightly disbelieving on hearing that one in three British women will have an abortion in her lifetime. One in three.

"Surely it's not that high here?" someone wondered.

Well, maths is not my strong point but the statistics I have since looked at suggest ours is at least that high. New Zealand's general abortion rate is higher than Britain's and second only to the United States.

You wouldn't know it was so common because abortion is such a taboo subject.

Women talk about all sorts of personal topics in a way which seems alarmingly candid to most blokes, but rarely about abortion.

That's perhaps the best thing about this documentary. That people will talk about it.

The producer of My Foetus is Julia Black, whose father founded one of Britain's largest abortion providers.

She grew up with abortion and had one herself when she was 21, barely questioning it.

But 13 years later, when she again became pregnant and wanted the child, she decided to lift the veil of secrecy and investigate further.

"Would I still be able to be pro-choice if I confronted the reality of abortion?"

So the second half of the documentary takes us into her father's establishment and we witness an abortion being performed on a woman four weeks pregnant, her legs apart with a doctor pumping the manual vacuum.

It's all over in three minutes and the bloody pulp in the bucket does not look anything like a baby.

Then again, at only four weeks, that wasn't likely.

One of the few criticisms I have of My Foetus is that for a documentary purporting to show the reality of abortion, filming a termination at only four weeks was a soft option.

Surgeons rarely perform abortions that early.

In New Zealand, only 6.9 per cent occur before the woman is eight weeks pregnant and none was done at four weeks in recent years.

The vast majority are performed between 10 and 12 weeks when you would begin to see arms and legs, fingers and toes quite different to what Black chose to film.

She also failed to lift the veil of secrecy surrounding the psychological and often long-term effects of abortion on women.

One girlfriend who watched it had an abortion when she was 17.

"It's not just about what happens in the clinic on the day or even during the months afterwards," she said. "I managed to ignore it for 20 years, and then the grief hit me."

None of us changed our overall view of abortion having seen the documentary.

Those who were pro-choice stuck to Julia Black's statement that without knowing the reasons for a particular abortion, you can't make a moral judgment as to whether it is right or wrong.

But we all agreed it should be screened - and that it will push the issue firmly back into the spotlight.

It needs to be. Because there were 18,510 abortions last year in this country and that is appalling no matter where you stand.

"It made me realise that abortion on demand is definitely happening," said one self-declared feminist.

Julia Black too remains pro-choice but her convictions are by no means as strong as the abortion industry might hope.

In the final moments of the film she concludes, "it is difficult to reconcile what I have learned with my view that women should not be forced to bear children they do not want.

"So I now realise that it is possible to be opposed to what abortion actually is and still be pro-choice."

Which is a wishy-washy kind of conclusion - you can't have it both ways - but it is also very honest. And what this debate does need is honesty.

* Sandra Paterson is a freelance writer based in Tauranga.