When Abortion was Illegal
In the News • 27m
Directed by Dorothy Fadiman • Documentary • 1993 • 28 minutes
Nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short
The era of illegal abortion, roughly the period between the turn of the century and the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, has been a sealed chapter in women's history.
The profound aura of shame and fear surrounding unwanted pregnancies and abortions before Roe v. Wade kept most women from ever admitting that they had had illegal abortions. Women suffering complications from back alley or self-induced abortions risked arrest if they admitted what they had done, as did their husbands and doctors if they acknowledged compliance and aid.
WHEN ABORTION WAS ILLEGAL illuminates this largely undocumented era and reveals the physical, emotional and legal consequences of having an abortion when it was a criminal act.
"Its tone is quietly eloquent, never hysterical... a picture of long-remembered fear and last ditch desperation." —Little Rock Free Press
Up Next in In the News
-
Dear Dr. Spencer
Directed by Danielle Renfrew & Beth Seltzer • Documentary • With Lili Taylor • 1998 • 25 minutes
From the early 1920s until his death in 1969, Dr. Robert Douglas Spencer practiced medicine in a small town in the anthracite coal region of Pennsylvania. Dr. Spencer treated colds, set fractures...
-
The Paradise We Are Looking For
Directed by Joseph Mangat, Norbert Shieh, Quyên Nguyen-Le, R.J. Lozada • Documentary • 2019 • 91 minutes
San Diego has been called many things – including a paradise. It’s also a refugee city, a cluster of neighborhoods, a militarized zone, a border town. And Asian American. This collection of f...
-
Bullets in the Hood: A Bed-Stuy Story
Directed by Terrence Fisher, Daniel Howard • Documentary • 2005 • 23 minutes
Terrence Fisher, a teen living in the Louis Armstrong housing project in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, has had seven of his friends shot and killed with guns. Terrence is not a gang member or a drug dealer˜just a normal...
