This low-budget, limited-release abortion doc isn't exactly on many people's radars right now, but Unborn in the USA is one of the best documentaries released so far this year, and regardless of your stance in the abortion debate, you owe it to yourself to see it. All too often, documentaries like these preach to the choir. (Outfoxed and Uncovered director Robert Greenwald has turned such programmed outrage into a virtual cottage industry.)
Maybe that's why Unborn in the USA feels like it was made by space aliens. Directors Stephen Fell and Will Thompson examine the pro-life movement with a fair-minded perspicuity that offers both sides some hard truths.
Unborn in the USA begins with footage of a training session run by Focus on the Family. An instructor shows his students footage of a sidewalk debate/shouting match between a rape victim who's had an abortion and two pro-life men. As the instructor points out what the pro-lifers are doing right and wrong in the debate, we keep waiting for the filmmakers to move in for the kill, to mark this instructor as an object of ridicule. But they never do. The guy is making perfect sense. He criticizes the two pro-lifers for ganging up on the pro-choice woman, for refusing to show any sympathy for the fact that she was raped and for being generally loutish. He's an articulate, intelligent, calm presence. Suddenly, a chill creeps up your spine: I hope there are people on the pro-choice side who are equally perceptive and balanced.
It would be silly to call Unborn in the USA itself balanced, of course. This is a movie about one side. And yet, that side has been so unfairly represented over the years that there's something bracing about seeing it get a fair shake. Fell and Thompson train their cameras on the ground level of the pro-life movement. They're not here to interview senators and congressmen and judges. They have diligently catalogued the various factions of the pro-life side, from moderate activists seeking genuine legal reforms, to artists who've given their work over to effecting change, to the wild-eyed loons who think killing abortionists is heroic. Sure, these folks sometimes get to spout on without anyone there to represent the other side. (Anyone convincing, at least; most of the pro-choicers here are passers-by not trained to debate, and they often wind up angrily skulking off after prolonged shouting.) But isn't it about time the respective sides listened to each other before getting polemical? — Bilge Ebiri