The following comes from a June 20 story by Heather Wilhelm on Real Clear Politics.
Earlier this week, I did something terrible: I talked my husband into going to a screening of an “abortion romantic comedy” with me. It was his birthday.
To my credit, we went to a manly steak dinner beforehand. Also to my credit, I usually have decent taste in movies. But over the past few weeks, I’ve seen glowing review after glowing review for Obvious Child, a film, as The Guardian describes it, “about a girl who gets an abortion and lives happily ever after.”
Variety calls it a “fresh and funny chronicle of a one-night stand with consequences.” To The Washington Post, it’s a “cultural watershed.” The New Republic finds it “vital and brave.” After winning accolades in this year’s Sundance Film Festival, then opening to a small number of theaters, Obvious Child is on the verge of a national release.
I wanted to review it—and to review it, alas, I had to see it. This is more difficult than it sounds, because as of now, Obvious Child is playing at exactly two theaters in the entire state of Texas, population 26,448,193. I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again: God bless the Lone Star State. That said, a “pre-screening” of the film popped up in Austin this week, for one night only—hence, our birthday abortion propaganda movie date night extravaganza. My husband is a very good sport.
You’ll note that I said “propaganda” above. That is an accurate description, but now that a national rollout of Obvious Child is on the way, the movie’s creators would beg to differ, despite the fact that Planned Parenthood has proudly announced that they “consulted closely on the development and production” of the film.
“A lot of journalists have used the shorthand ‘abortion comedy,’” director Gillian Robespierre told Variety, “but that makes it feel small.” The film’s true focus, Robespierre told Elle magazine, “was never will she or won’t she have the abortion. It’s will she or won’t she gain the confidence that we tend to not have in our mid-20s to late-20s.”
“She,” in case you’re wondering, is Donna Stern, the film’s lead character, a self-absorbed, money-strapped New Yorker who moonlights as a highly scatological stand-up comic. In essence, Donna is a six-year old boy trapped in the body of a petite, jaded brunette, doomed to flail at adulthood while uttering an endless loop of fart, poop, and underwear jokes in a disarming, chipmunk voice.
The plot of Obvious Child is fairly simple (warning, spoiler alerts ahead): Donna gets dumped by her weirdo boyfriend, loses her quirky bookstore job, and has drunken, unprotected rebound sex with a cute guy she meets in a bar. He is “not her type,” her friends and mother tell her, because he appears to wear working deodorant and have serious job prospects.
Donna gets pregnant. She decides, immediately, to get an abortion. She consults her friends and her mother and discovers that everyone in the world has had an abortion, even her gay male best friend. Donna’s closest female friend urges her to “get that f!@$ing thing out” of her body. Donna goes to Planned Parenthood and, taking Hollywood product placement to a new level, sits conveniently in front of a Planned Parenthood logo. She kind of likes her one-night stand partner, so she invites him to her comedy routine where she proudly announces to him—along with a crowd of oddly beaming strangers—that she is pregnant with his baby and will be aborting it the next day. Surprise!
The next morning, because men are naturally attracted to sociopaths, Mr. One-Night-Stand (his name is Max) surprises her with flowers and accompanies her to the abortion. He is cute in the waiting room. Afterward, in Donna’s apartment, Max jokes that they were actually just at the DMV. Then he wraps her in a big fleece blanket and requests that they watch 10 hours of Gone with the Wind together. The only section of this I am making up is the part about the gay friend’s abortion. That was just a test.
“We don’t make jokes about abortion,” Robespierre, the film’s director, told Variety. “We’re not trying to push envelopes or buttons.” The audience at my screening of Obvious Child certainly felt otherwise, at least with the following set of lines:
Donna’s best friend, on the day before the abortion, right before Donna goes on stage for her comedy act: “You are going to kill it out there!”
Donna, smirking: “I actually have an appointment to do that tomorrow.”
The good news for humanity, I guess, is that only half of the audience laughed. The other half let out an uncomfortable “Oooooh.” But, sadly, when it comes down to it, those two lines pretty much sum up the message of Obvious Child—and, perhaps, the forward strategy for today’s most ardent abortion advocates. Like Donna, the modern abortion lobby wants no moral qualms about abortion, no matter the circumstance. Like Donna, a growing number of abortion advocates know—and many even admit—that abortion ends a life….
To read the entire story, click here.
Disgusting…..
Yes–the title is subconsciously true–it is “Obvious” that what is inside of her is a “Child.”
Also, for an antidote for this nihilistic approach to abortion, watch the film Juno, which while “hip,” shows a teenager that does act maturely when faced with the same situation while still remaining essentially a kid. The scene outside the abortion clinic is quietly repellent for all its drabness and denial that “All babies want to be born,” as another teen picketer chants.
It sounds like watching this film would be like being some of the local residents near a concentration camp in nazi germany who used to pack a lunch and sit on a hillside watching the activities of the various guards and inmates. To think there are actually people who paid to make this ‘film’, to see this film…who got paid for ‘acting’ in it! I guess you could call this a ‘snuff film’…which I thought were illegal.
“… I guess you could call this a ‘snuff film’…which I thought were illegal.” You are absolutely correct, Dana. This is a glorified snuff film. As to the films activity being illegal, that really doesn’t mean much these days as the word from the Justice Department is to only act upon those laws that you ‘feel’ are right.
As to the people enjoying this film, there is a comparison I’d like to make to the psychological operations currently in use by our government in the Middle East. The approach – changing the hearts and minds. That is we are attempting at the village level to win over the people to our way of thinking by becoming their friends and facilitators with regards to basic needs – food, water, medical care. The same is done here in the United States with our supposedly better educated society. What a joke.
Give Americans a free pass to behave like perpetual Peter Pans who have no desire to grow up and they’ll love you. Why? Because everything is a farce about making mistakes and discovering that nobody wants to grow up, take responsibility, do the right thing. It’s not fun or funny or sexy or popular to – HAVE THE BABY and struggle. For all this malarkey of women’s groups asserting female power, they certainly ascribe to a roll over mentality when presenting the ability of a woman to choose that which is hard – taking responsibility for actions – as compared to flippantly choosing to behave in an adolescent manner while the world laughs.
That is so true, Ann Malley! Hence the obsession with looking young, having face lifts, exercising hours a day to keep thighs like a young boy. (now that is sick!) Your response would also be a good response to the anonymous person accusing Catherine & I of criticizing Pelosi’s physical appearance. We wouldn’t if she weren’t so obsessed with it herself. I suppose it must be tv and hollywood that is perpetuating this peter pan myth? I read a bio of J.M. Barrie, who was a wanton pedophile whom Virginia Wolfe blamed for the suicide of her brother and another young man. In the movie (they ALWAYS lie) he was made to look like a loving step father and so in love with the mother, but it was just the opposite. One of those stepsons committed suicide while still a young man. There’s something terribly wrong about not growing up, not wanting to accept responsibility for our behaviors. As I wrote before, there’s a rainbow flag on all our embassies abroad. It is so embarrassing to see our country become utterly amoral, spreading childish images of sex, birth control and rainbow flags. Suffering and sacrifice help people mature. I suppose what America needs is a plague of some sort to show people there are more important issues than their sex organs.
Thank you Ann Malley and Dana for those very wise and truthful posts. A few years ago I spoke with a law school student who was leaving a killing center after a consultation to abort her baby. Planned Parenthood told her that she was too far along to have the killing take place at that particular location and they gave her the phone number of a late term killing center. She was 5 months pregnant. She sat outside on the sidewalk waiting for a ride that never came. I asked her if I could drive her back to the University campus which was close by. This young woman also seemed so desensitized when she told me that she did not like children and that she never wanted to have any. She was only worried about her law career and her social life. She told me that her own mother had gotten an abortion and that her mother deeply regretted it but that she needed to finish law school. I was able to share the story about a once famous Hollywood actress named Gloria Swanson. I told her that no law degree or personal honor would ever have the same meaning if she aborted her baby because she would always know that a child died in order for her to exactly live as she wished or seemingly without any consequences from her choices.
One year later I received a phone call from this young woman who had once sounded just as cold as the writers of this evil movie and she asked me if I remembered her? She told me that it was her own mother who asked her to call me to thank me for helping her daughter not kill her grandson. Praise God for his generosity!
Excerpts from Hollywood film actress Gloria Swanson’s Abortion
by Herbert Ratner, M. D.
https://www.priestsforlife.org/postabortion/casestudyproject/casestudy1353.htm
Five and a half decades after those events, she could write:
“. . . the greatest regret of my life has always been that I didn’t have my baby, Henri’s child, in 1925. Nothing in the whole world is worth a baby, I realized as soon as it was too late, and I never stopped blaming myself.”
“It is easy to scrape a baby out of the womb, but not so easy to scrape the aborted baby out of the mind and – one may add – heart and soul.”
“Nowhere is this shown more poignantly than in Gloria Swanson’s life history, which she wrote when she was 80 years of age. In Swanson on Swanson, her remorse over taking her unborn baby’s life begins and ends her autobiography. Despite her sophisticated, colorful, worldly career as a renowned movie star, despite her half a dozen marriages – or perhaps because of them and their lack of fulfillment – she still hadn’t forgotten a death that had taken place 55 years earlier. She began her autobiography by saying: I’m going to start with the moment in my life when I thought I had never been happier, because until that moment, I hadn’t ever assessed the events that had come before it, and once it was over, I could never view my life or my career in the same way again.”
Thank you Catherine for sharing this important truth.
Good one. If you don’t mind, I’m going to use that one.
I can’t imagine (but then I’m not pro-abortion) what would make the people who made this film think that it would be okay, to make it, and then that it may succeed at their message. The desensitization continues…..
This is the America that you get by voting for the Democratic Party.
When you spend your money to “review” immoral movies,
you financially support the movie and those who made it.
You encourage them to make other movies of the same ilk.
Further you yourself become even more desensitized to evil.
Killing human beings for the convenience of others is no joke.
https://www.ehd.org/movies.php?mov_id=44
This movie is a horrible thing! A NIGHTMARE! There are Catholic movie reviewers, (such as for EWTN and the “National Catholic Register”) who also always review all the latest trash that Hollywood puts out, indiscriminately. I have always thought this to be terribly wrong! Such reviewers should instead be strongly outspoken against Hollywood, and seek to outlaw most of today’s films and filmmakers! The Church also should warn her people against going to these horrible movies!! We no longer have the pre-Vatican II constraints, on the media– books, movies, etc., with terrible movies “condemned.” This is sad! The film industry should be destroyed, along with the rock “music” industry, and outlawed, as immoral and a terrible source of destruction, to our Nation! Since the filthy, lawless, violent 1960s, it has been so shocking, to see that American young people are allowed to live so ignorantly, lawlessly, immorally, like filthy and destructive “hippies,” in an endless, immoral pig-pen of rock “music,” dope, sex, and liberal, selfish “trash,” never being told, “you go home, get off the college campus, you are EXPELLED! Go home and GROW UP!!” Since the 1960s, growing up and taking responsibility, has been abandoned in America, for a horrible, self-centered, lawless “hippie” life!!
Amen, Linda . Ann Malley said something similar on another post. What you describe was just what was expected of us at one time…to be mature, honorable and discrete. (Wish I’d done my part better!) I remember that anyone who spoke out about the dangers of rock & roll, as it was called then, was ridiculed and derided. Look at the hideous nightmare world of young people now…it’s grotesque to see their faces twisted with cynicism and depravity as they leave those depraved concerts, their fingers contorted into the devil sign.
Well, isn’t that special!
I am writing this in the hope that it will help others.
Most of you know me as an International Pro–Life Leader; however my good mother aborted my big brother. It was during the Depression, and all goods, especially food, was at a short supply. My mother was not yet a citizen and she was married to Sailor who was away when this took place. She found herself pregnant and scared, so she tried to self abort, and she partially succeeded.
You see she was pregnant with twins, a boy and a girl. Fortunately she only succeeded in taking the life of my Big Brother. My father never knew that he had an older son. He does now in Heaven!
We always wondered why my mother who loved my father dearly would often fight with him. Well we found out when she told my sisters, including my Big Sister “pray that God will heal me before I die”. My other sister, older than me but younger than my Big Sister, told her “mom that is silly, because if God heals you, you won’t die yet.” That is when my mother told both of my sisters that they have a Big Brother.
When I picked up my Big Sister on the way to my parents house to be with father. My mother had passed away in bed with him where she wanted to die. God healed her, she died wearing the Brown Scapular which my other sister had placed on her and she had the “Last Rites of the Church”. God has showed us in many ways that he has forgiven my mother!
When my Big Sister told me this, I cried because I realized how much it must have effected my mother to have a pro-life leader as her son, but I also realized that God used me to bring her to full repentance!
I fully understand how Gloria Swanson suffered!
May God have mercy on an amoral Amerika and His Church!
Viva Cristo Rey!
Yours in Their Hearts,
Kenneth M. Fisher