PUTNEY — On May 31, 2009, Dr. George Tiller of Wichita, Kan., one of the few doctors in the United States then performing third-trimester abortions, became the eighth American abortion clinic worker to be assassinated after Roe v. Wade.
Four American doctors openly provide the procedure today: LeRoy Carhart, Warren Hern, Susan Robinson, and Shelley Sella, who risk their lives to do work that many believe constitutes murder but that these doctors and their millions of supporters believe is profoundly important for their patients' well-being.
A feature-length documentary, “After Tiller,” follows these physicians as they conduct their work against the constant threat of intimidation and violence from anti-abortion extremists.
Weaving together in-depth interviews with scenes inside their clinics as these doctors counsel and care for patients, “After Tiller” illuminates the experiences of women who seek late abortions - and the reasons why they do so.
Directed by Martha Shane and Lana Wilson, and edited by Greg O'Toole, “After Tiller” had its world premiere at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival.
On Thursday, April 24, at 7 p.m., Next Stage Arts presents a special screening of the film with Wilson in attendance to answer viewers' questions after. Seating is by general admission, with suggested donation of $10 ($5 for students).
Oscilloscope Laboratories, an independent film distributor started by Beastie Boys member Adam Yauch and former THINKFilm executive David Fenkel, released the film in theaters in more than 50 American cities in fall 2013.
The film promptly won the Sarasota Film Festival's Documentary Jury Prize; the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival's Kathleen Bryan Edwards Award for Human Rights; and the Port Townsend Film Festival Audience Award.
The National Board of Review named it a Top 5 Documentary of 2013.
“After Tiller,”scheduled for broadcast later this year on PBS's “POV” series, attempts to turn down the volume on the debate over abortion, says Wilson.
The Brooklyn-based filmmaker holds a B.A. in film studies and dance from Wesleyan University, and was the film and dance curator for Performa, the New York biennial of new visual art performance. There she produced performances by filmmakers, choreographers, and artists, and curated thematic film retrospectives.
“As a Performa curator, I was helping artists get their work produced and seen,” she says. “However, I was eager to get to the other side of the fence and start creating work myself. I had studied filmmaking in college, and so when I resolved to make a feature about Tiller's death, I contacted Martha Shane, who had more experience than I did, and invited her to co-direct the film with me.”
Driven to tell the whole, complex, and human story
Wilson's impetus for making this documentary came from watching television coverage of Tiller's murder, which she says was all over cable news under the combative title “The Abortion War.”
“Almost every story on Tiller said he was a controversial abortion doctor, got talking points from both sides of the abortion issue, and ended it there,” she wrote on the film's website, aftertillermovie.com.
She explains she was “frustrated with what little information was provided on this man, and with how the news was covering it in such a politicized way, always treating Tiller as a dramatic symbol of controversy rather than as a complex human being. Soon I realized that, because of the polarizing nature of this topic, it was just something the mainstream media wasn't ever going to go into any sort of depth with.”
Watching everyone shouting at each other as they debated on television, Wilson felt that the issue had become so politically divisive that it was important to calmly figure out the reality behind the screaming matches. And so she began planning her film.
Wilson says she believes that some of the difficulty in the discourse on abortion is that the positions are often much too abstract and philosophical rather than specific and human. Talk on the subject often begins with difficult-to-answer questions such as, “When does life begin?''
“The answer to that will vary from individual to individual, as well as culture to culture,” says Wilson. “When people insist on discussing the issue in such ultimate terms, ignoring real-life complications, people are driven to extremes on both sides.”
Although Wilson had always considered herself pro-choice, she did not make the film as a polemic about women's right to choose.
“I merely wanted to humanize those doctors who were being demonized in the media like Fox News,” she says.
“Tiller of was a faithful churchgoer [indeed, he was assassinated during a Sunday morning service at his church] and a father of four. One of the most interesting things we discovered through interviewing the doctors is that they all recognized the moral and ethical complexity in doing this work better than anyone - in fact, they struggle with the issues at the heart of this debate every day.”
Wilson says she realizes that people can become very passionate about abortion, but with the increased level of violence these emotions are out of control.
For some, the subject will always be painted in black and white, she says. In contrast, she and her team wanted to explore the often-ignored grays - how abortion actually can be a much more complicated issue for both sides of the debate.
“By moving away from the position that makes it a political issue, we hoped to see how the people who wrestled with the moral dilemma of abortion - and everyone seems to wrestle with it - are involved in a very human dilemma,” she says.
Painful truths in some women's third trimester
Wilson and Shane focused on third-trimester abortions because those were the ones that cause most people the most discomfort on any number of levels.
“Late abortions comprise less than 1 percent of all abortions that occur in the United States each year, according to the Guttmacher Institute [a non-profit organization that works to advance reproductive health including abortion rights],” Wilson wrote.
“A late abortion is usually defined as an abortion taking place in the third trimester of pregnancy, so because a full-term pregnancy is 40 weeks long, the third-trimester begins at about 25 weeks,” she explains.
“The big thing people often wonder is, Why do such women wait so long to get the abortion?” You hear things like, 'That girl was just lazy,' or 'She wanted to be able to fit into her prom dress.'”
In making “After Tiller,” Wilson says, she found that in reality no one put off having an abortion: Sometimes the girls were very young and did not understand what was happening to their bodies; sometimes they were afraid to tell their parents, whom they believed would throw them out of house; others lived too far from a clinic, and by the time they could raise the money for the operation they were far along in pregnancy.
Still others had discovered catastrophic health problems with their babies, which they had not able to detect until the third trimester. And even had they realized those problems, they had to consider difficult decisions: How much would the child suffer were the pregnancy carried to term? How to pay for costly, lifelong care? What burden would such a delivery place on siblings much later in life?
Often, expectant parents decided initially to keep the baby, but reconsidered after thinking long and hard of the reality of the situation.
Walker found herself also beginning to understand the thinking of those who firmly believe abortion is wrong.
“As we traveled across the country showing the film, we discovered that everyone, from all points of view, turned out to be very thoughtful on the subject,” Walker says. “Audience members from both side of the issue would come up us afterward and say, 'Wow, I had no idea the issue was this complicated.'”
Wilson made her film believing that everyone has good intentions.
“I discovered anti-abortionists to be incredibly compassionate people,” she says. “Many anti-abortion extremists are simply not educated enough to understand the complexities of the issue. That is why you so often see teenagers or young adults in their 20s protesting in front of abortion clinics - those who had not had the life experience to fully understand all that is involved in the choice.”
During filming, young protestors might exclaim of the clinic, “Those walls are covered in blood.” And the filmmakers would try to explain, calmly, that they had just inside, and that no wall had any blood on it.
'Health services, sex ed would sharply reduce abortion demand'
Wilson says she believes that the endemic problem of abortion in America is the direct result of the failure of sex education in this country.
“The most effective way to lower the rate of abortion is very simple: to provide free health care and compulsory sex education,” she says. “I guarantee you that once those services are in place the rate of abortion would precipitously drop.”
She adds: “Whether people are willing to face it or not, we now live in a society where too many young girls do not understand their bodies and their sexuality, and consequentially find themselves in situations they did not plan or can begin to understand.”