By Joel Brind, Ph.D.
Finally, there is it on the screen: a full two-hour documentary on the long-term harm abortion does to women. The documentary reports; you decide.
No, it’s not the Fox News Channel, but the investigative journey of a “pro-choice” woman film-maker through the testimony of experts on both sides of the abortion issue. Writer-director Punam Gill wants to find out the truth that no one seems to want to talk about, what important facts always seem to bring a hush over the international conversation about women’s health issues.
Appropriately, Hush is the title of the film.
Punam narrates the documentary herself from beginning to end, giving you the sense of taking the journey with her to find out the truth about abortion’s effects on women’s health.
Along the way, she shares her heart-rending story of the son she lost to a third-trimester miscarriage, and how that affected her own emotional being and her own future health risks. The documentary maker’s art shows most clearly in her ability to make her journey your journey.
The film examines the links between abortion and breast cancer, premature birth and psychological/emotional damage. More time is spent on the first than the others, likely due to the availability of more scientific experts (yours truly included) engaged in breast cancer research.
With the expert interviews skillfully and artfully interwoven with biologically accurate and clear animations, Hush presents an extraordinary amount of evidence and testimony (including that of post-abortive women) on these subjects. Thus the viewer is provided an almost encyclopedic summary of a very broad field in an understandable and engaging way. (The DVD of Hush is a must have resource for every pro-life reference library.)
Along the way, it is also telling how little evidence of abortion’s purported safety to women is offered by “pro-choice” experts. Abortion practitioner and advocate Dr. David Grimes is there to offer his opinions that abortion is safe for women in the long term.
But for this he cites, as authorities, the ObGyn societies that represent the abortion industry and well known public health and voluntary institutions. Punam is left to dig for it for herself for the actual evidence that would purportedly counter the evidence that abortion increases a woman’s health risks. The absence of counter-evidence speaks volumes.
It is also easy to catch yourself, along the way, expecting a conclusion that the pro-lifers are right after all, and that the film-maker herself has moved toward a pro-life conversion herself. But she never lets on, either way which is perhaps the greatest testimony to this master storyteller’s art.
She refuses to insult the viewer’s intelligence by telling us what to think. She does something that is much more valuable long-term.
Punam lifts the veil off the secret world of post-abortion consequences, gives us lots to think about, and allows the viewer to reach his or her own conclusion.
Editor’s note. This appeared in the July digital edition of National Right to Life News, the “pro-life newspaper of record.” You can read the entire edition online at www.nrlc.org/uploads/NRLNews/NRLNewsJuly2016.pdf and forward it to your family and friends.