When Abortion Was Illegal: Untold Stories (1992)

5

This Academy Award-nominated film features compelling first-person accounts which reveal the physical, legal, and emotional consequences during the era when abortion was a criminal act. Remembrances include those of women who experienced illegal abortions, doctors who risked imprisonment and loss of their licenses for providing illegal abortions, and individuals who broke the law by helping women find safe abortions.

About making the film, director Dorothy Fadiman said, "While a student at Stanford, I had become unintentionally pregnant. I had no money, no committed partner and my family was 3,000 miles away. I could neither find or afford a skilled provider. Abortion was illegal in California (1962), so I paid $600 to a person whose face I never saw to terminate my pregnancy. I was blindfolded throughout the procedure. Soon afterward, I began to hemorrhage and ended up on the intensive care ward of Stanford hospital with a fever of 105. I could have died, like so many women who risked the back alleys or aborted themselves. In 1973, a Supreme Court decision affirmed that most abortions would be legal. 1991, now a documentary filmmaker, I realized that some members of the Supreme Court were so anti-abortion that they could vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. Most people had no idea what the dangers of the back alleys had been. I decided to make a documentary based on what had happened to me, and to so many other women." 

Trending Videos
The Most Sustainable City In America
12 min - Over the last few weeks, I reached out to sustainability experts around the world, crunched a bunch of numbers, and asked all of you for help finding the most sustainable city in America. Here's...
Our Obsession with Economic Growth is Deadly
26 min - We are surrounded by stuff. We buy and buy and buy - it’s the foundation of how our economies run, how they grow. But all this buying, all this economic "growing", is devastating people and our...
Here’s How We Escape Climate Apocalypse
22 min - A look at the importance of speculative climate fiction, sci-fi, and utopias for political movements, from Our Changing Climate.
Everybody's Gotta Learn Sometime (2006)
72 min - Released in 2006, this is still one of the most compelling films outlining the disturbing and heavily censored facts associated with the worst terrorist attacks in American history. The film...
Rediscovering Our Sacred Wholeness
On Demand Films Now Streaming For Free
Films For Action
Recommended

Films For Action hosts a subscription service that currently offers 55 highly-curated, solutions-oriented feature documentaries to Patron subscribers donating $5 per month. 

Subscribe here. Your support helps grow our 5000+ video library, which is 99% free and contains no ads thanks to our patrons.