On One Florida Corner, "12th & Delaware" Finds Microcosm of Abortion Battle

Last week I had the privilege of watching some truly amazing documentaries at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. "12th & Delaware," directed by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady ("The Boys of Baraka," "Jesus Camp"), explores the battle raging on a Fort Pierce, Florida corner where an abortion clinic and a pro-life pregnancy center sit across the street from each other.

Just before daybreak, a single pro-life protester awaits the arrival of an abortion provider to the clinic. When she sees him coming -- covered in a white sheet, sitting in the passenger seat of a bright yellow Mustang -- she lets loose a steady stream of supplications and accusations that continues until the car is safely inside the garage. "You don't have to do this." "Think of your grandchildren." "Shame on you." Throughout the film, we will see different permutations of this opening scene over and over again: protesters openly accosting clinic workers and clients, who hide behind jackets, curtains, and security cameras, their safety and privacy compromised.

Inside the abortion clinic, the covered up clients become real women, each with a different story and different reasons for being there. Some feel they're too young to have a baby, others too old, others too financially unstable. As they consult with the clinic counselor, the women often agonize over their decision to end their pregnancies, even when certain it is the right decision to make.

Across the street at the pregnancy center, we find similarly conflicted women facing a different ordeal: hearing from the center counselor that their risk of breast cancer and infertility increases after having an abortion, seeing ultrasound images on top of which technicians type "hi mommy," receiving teary-eyed looks and stony silences when they express an inclination to abort. These women often come in to the center accidentally, mistaking it for the abortion clinic at which they had an appointment. The staff at the pregnancy center attempts to undermine the women's resolve to abort instead of redirecting them across the street.

I was blown away by the film's stunning access to all of this -- not only to the people who run the abortion clinic and the pregnancy center, not only to the zealous protesters who stand vigil there every day, but above all to the women arriving at 12th & Delaware seeking help. The film's power comes from its intimate -- and heartbreaking -- depiction of these women becoming, in Ewing and Grady's words, "pawns in a vicious ideological war with no end in sight." They are fed empty promises and outright lies, their private choices are publicized and judged, and strangers impede their pursuit of a perfectly legal procedure.

This documentary should serve as a wake-up call to women who take their reproductive freedoms for granted. It paints a bleak picture of crisis pregnancy centers as a dangerous front on the abortion battleground, a place where choice can be greatly diminished through inaccurate or incomplete counseling. The film begs the question, what good is the right to a legal abortion if protesters create an environment in which women are too intimidated to enter clinics and doctors are too scared to perform the procedure? We need to fight not only to increase women's access to safe abortion, but also to complete and factual information about all of their reproductive health options, in all of the places where they might seek guidance, from abortion clinics to adoption agencies to crisis pregnancy centers.

Photo courtesy of Loki Films