A Movie Reflection: Unplanned

This will be the first time I'll be reflecting on a movie on this blog. Now, this is not a movie review as I won't be going talking about acting, story telling and all that jazz. I'll purely be putting out my thoughts on what the issues that the movie presented but I won't be explaining anything seen or heard in the movie.

Unplanned does a great job in opening up the topic it wants to tackle - abortion. Back when the RH Law was still a bill, proponents of the bill really wanted to highlight the access to information about a woman's choices about family planning. If the same people want to push for legalization of abortion here in the Philippines, they should be honest and show this movie to the woman who wish to have an abortion. Unplanned shows, as graphically as it's allowed to, how abortions are carried out and what actually happens during abortions - both surgical and chemical.

Those scenes, which actually show what abortion really looks like can be very chilling. I had to remind myself that I wanted to see this movie so I can put the test my convictions (I am pro-life) and so I had to force myself to watch the everything. And it can be a trial for someone like me who gets grossed out very easily.

I appreciate the honesty of the movie, in that, it shows that almost everyone, pro-life and pro-choice, truly believed they're doing the right thing. The clinic even had some Catholics working in the abortion industry. I am not surprised in the slightest. I belong to a charismatic community (BLD) and one of the people I look up to in that community mentioned to me that he supports the RH Law even though it has been pronounced by the church as against church teaching. It's the common dilemma of, "I don't want to take this choice away from other people," which does indeed sound noble and as such, many religious people will fall into that trap.

The movie does also show the negative sides of both pro-life and pro-choice sides and especially criticizes the negative side of the pro-life movement going so far as putting into the mouth of one of the main characters that they weren't with "them", officially distancing herself from misguided pro-lifers who think calling other people "murder" would get other people on their side.

It also does expose the abortion industry for what it is - an industry. As such, it's goal is to make money. It claims to be a protector of women's rights but mostly, they really are just a business trying to make more money money for themselves. It would be like a 5-star restaurant claiming to be a champion for feeding the poor and disenfranchised with what's on their menu. Organizations like Planned Parenthood have quotas to meet. The line, "safe, legal, and rare" no longer hold.

I did a bit of digging into this and it really doesn't take much digging at all. Right in the Planned Parenthood website, you'll find statistics into the effectiveness of different kinds of contraception. This was one of the talking points in pushing for the RH Law in the Philippines. The only figure we really hear about is that condoms are 98% effective. This is what pro-RH Law politicians claim is the solution to over population especially in poorer areas.

https://www.plannedparenthood.org/learn/birth-control/condom/how-effective-are-condoms

Since the 98% figure is all we hear, we assume right away that if a poor family has 5 unexpected pregnancies, that had the couple used a condom, they wouldn't have those children. The truth, however is that over the course of a year, if couple continue to use a condom, due to all factors including improper use, there is a 15% chance of getting pregnant. So while a single sexual contact has only 2% failure rate, continued sexual contact actually has up to 15% failure rate. I can break this down in another post as I can actually attempt the math on this.

In other words, condoms promise 98% efficiency (I'm being generous here) while delivering 85% efficiency with continued use. This is actually how abortions are sold. You already have a couple who bought into the deception that they won't get pregnant. It only takes a little chiding to convince them they're not ready to be parents and actually sell an abortion.

It's a clever business model and one which was bared in the film though not mentioning this much detail. Now, this film won't convince everyone to be pro-life but what it can do is spark the conversation. And it does that very well. One thing everyone I hope can actually agree on, is that abortion providers shouldn't be treated as champions of women's rights. They should be treated as businesses (a health care provider) and they should be held liable to every human being who comes into their facility.