Posted on May 1,
2019
Unplanned Vs. Untruthful
Abortion messaging in the movies
by
Daniel
Clark
The movie Unplanned,
about former Planned Parenthood clinic director Abby Johnson’s defection to the
pro-life movement, has done surprisingly well at the box office. That’s great, but unfortunately, it’s not
likely to get much play on TV, where it could be seen by those who aren’t
actively seeking its message. This came
to mind recently, when Starz Encore started running the pro-abortion movement’s
most successful cinematic effort, The
Cider House Rules, the 1999 Academy Award winner written by John Irving,
and starring Michael Caine.
If you happen to be someone who’s wavering on the
abortion issue, it might be helpful to contrast the messages of these two
movies. While the content of Unplanned is nothing surprising to those
who actively oppose abortion, elements of it would shock most others, because
the facts it exposes are so divergent from what the public is instructed to
believe.
For
instance, the pro-abortion movement and therefore the news media would have us
believe that a chemical abortion is as simple as a woman taking a couple pills
and ceasing to be pregnant. The severe
pain and excessive bleeding that Johnson experiences from her own RU-486
abortion, and Planned Parenthood’s acknowledgment that these complications are
not unexpected, tell a different story.
The incident that ultimately causes Johnson’s
reversal, when she is called to assist with an abortion and sees a sonogram of
an unborn child fighting for its life before its graphic termination, contrasts
with the popular perception of a suction abortion as a simple extraction, not
unlike sucking a lemon seed through a straw.
Most people probably have no idea that, as tiny as an unborn child is at
that stage of development, it is still many times larger than the suction tube
that is used to destroy it.
In the end, Johnson is freed by her willingness to
accept the truth. Contrast this with The Cider House Rules, in which it is
lies that are portrayed as liberating.
The conflict in that movie is between Dr. Wilbur Larch, who runs a
WWII-era orphanage where he does illegal abortions, and his protege,
an orphan named Homer Wells, who opposes abortion, but comes to accept it
through an exercise in situational ethics.
When a young, infirmed orphan named Fuzzy dies,
Dr. Larch explains his absence by having one of the older children tell the
others that Fuzzy has been adopted. The
children will believe it, he reasons, because they want it to be true.
After a young couple named Wally and Candy stop at the
orphanage for an abortion, Homer goes with them – over Dr. Larch’s objections –
to work on an apple orchard owned by Wally’s family. Wally introduces Homer to his mother, but
doesn’t want to explain how they know each other, so he tells her they met at a
wedding. Shortly afterward, Wally goes
off to fight in the war, from which he eventually comes back paralyzed. Homer
and Candy in the meantime have had an affair, but agree that it is best to
conceal it – for Wally’s sake, of course.
Meanwhile,
Dr. Larch, hopeful of Homer’s return, forges a diploma and a medical license
for him so that he can take over at the orphanage. Using reverse psychology, Dr. Larch presents
the falsified qualifications to the orphanage’s board of trustees, but pretends
to disapprove of Homer by claiming that he’s a Christian, and even concocting a
story about him doing missionary work in India.
According to plan, he dupes the board into demanding that Homer be
chosen to be his successor-in-waiting.
Back at the orchard, Homer learns that the foreman,
Mr. Rose, has impregnated his own daughter.
After confronting Mr. Rose about the matter, Homer volunteers to perform
an abortion, leading any attentive viewer to wonder what the nature of his
objection had been in the first place.
Not long afterward, Mr. Rose’s daughter stabs her father and runs away. The mortally wounded and guilt-ridden Mr.
Rose persuades Homer to tell the police that he committed suicide, so that his
daughter may go free.
Upon receiving news that Dr. Larch has died, Homer
returns to the orphanage. One of the
sisters there reveals to him that a heart condition he thought he had was
nonexistent. Dr. Larch had dummied up
the diagnosis to keep him out of the war.
The visibly grateful Homer agrees to continue Dr. Larch’s work, as an
uneducated, unlicensed doctor and an illegal abortionist.
The fact that this homage to the art of lying was
written by a pro-abortion propagandist, and celebrated by Planned Parenthood
(which gave an award to this heroic portrayal of “back-alley butchers”), tells
us everything we need to know about the veracity of the pro-abortion
argument. Whereas truth is cast as the hero in Unplanned, in The Cider House Rules, truth is an adversary that must be
vigilantly opposed.
If this sounds like an unlikely admission for the
adherents of any political cause to make, just look at the way they go about
their day-to-day activism. Liberal Supreme
Court justices declare abortion to be a “fundamental constitutional right” even
though they know it has no foundation in the Constitution, and then they defend
that argument by claiming that every person has a right to his or her own
reality. Abortion clinic employees routinely
lie to women about the development of their unborn children, and about the dangers
of various abortion procedures to the women themselves. Abortion advocates rail against people who
show pictures of dead unborn children, as if an accurate representation of the
act of abortion were worse than the carnage itself.
Even the pro-aborts’ promotion of their own movie is
a lie. If you ever see a copy of The Cider House Rules on DVD, pick it up
and read the jacket. You won’t find any mention
of the a-word, or even any reference to it, however indirect. Ditto that for any description of it on your
cable or satellite TV guide, where you’re likely to see it explained as a
heartwarming tale of an orphan being raised by a kindly doctor. That’s like trying to explain Dumbo to someone without giving any hint
that it has anything to do with a flying elephant.
Pro-abortion activists knew all along what The Cider House Rules was about,
however, and they are the target audience of its pro-lying message. Irving’s movie is a pep talk, in which he
tries to relieve abortion advocates of responsibility for their words and
actions. There’s no need for them to feel
hesitant to lie, or guilty for having done so, because lying is good, as long
as it’s being done for the cause. And
the cause demands that it be done.
Always.
The Shinbone: The
Frontier of the Free Press