Wetwork: A Review of Unplanned

    

Wetwork: A Review of

Unplanned
 

Brad Miner on a remarkable, if uneven, pro-life movie that makes clear why abortion is “wetwork,” a loan word from the Russian mokroye delo: meaning murder.

My anti-abortion views solidified in 1976 when I bought a copy of Esquiremagazine. There was something in it by or about George Plimpton that I wanted to read, but thumbing through the pages I came to an article titled “What I Saw at the Abortion” by Richard Selzer, M.D.

            I’d been a Catholic for about three years and knew what I was supposed to believe about abortion. I’d recently readHumane vitaefor the first time and been deeply impressed by its clarity: “all direct abortion, even for therapeutic reasons, [is] to be absolutely excluded.” But it was when I read Dr. Selzer’s article that my view was forever set.

            What knocked me for a loop was Selzer’s reference to a “flick,” a resistance, the fetus defending itself against its murder. Read it for yourself, but here’s the good doctor’s conclusion:

I am not trying to argue. I am only saying I’ve seen. The flick. Whatever else may be said in abortion’s defense, the vision of that other defense will not vanish from my eyes. What I saw I saw as that: a defense, a motion from, an effort away. And it has happened that you cannot reason with me now. For what can language do against the truth of what I saw?

            So, it seemed to me before I watched the new movie, Unplanned, that the defining scene would have to be just such a moment, one in which Abby Johnson (played by Ashley Bratcher) witnessed the abortion that changed her life. (The film is based on her book of the same title.)

            That moment is set up nicely in an earlier scene in which Abby, the youngest clinic director at Planned Parenthood, banally counsels a young woman not to worry: “The one thing that all experts agree on is that, at this stage, the fetus can’t feel anything.”

Click here to read the rest of Mr. Miner’s review . 
https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2019/04/01/wetwork-a-review-of-unplanned/?utm_source=The+Catholic+Thing+Daily&utm_campaign=3c374300f3-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_12_07_01_02_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_769a14e16a-3c374300f3-244213773. .