America’s Divide: The US Battle Over Abortion

RT (2022)

Film Review

https://odysee.com/@RTDocumentary:4/Abortion_America%E2%80%99s-Divide

This is the first of two RT documentaries about the abortion debate. Filmed just prior to the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v Wade, it highlights states’ increasingly restrictive abortion laws, as well as profiling aggressive campaigns on both sides of the issue.

It starts with the Texas 2021 Heartbeat Act. This bans abortion after six weeks pregnancy and allows no exceptions for rape or incest. The new Texas law triggered  massive protests in Washington DC and many other US cities.

The filmmakers interview several pro and anti-abortion advocates, including a woman who sought abortion after being raped at 13. They also highlight a significant increase in illegal abortions in states that restrict access to abortion.

For some reason, the anti-abortion campaigners seem mainly concerned about late term abortions. The latter, comprising 1-2% of abortions, nearly always occur to save the mother’s life.

The documentary also points out that the Republican party has made restricting access to abortion one of their major planks to win votes from evangelical Christians. My mother, a life long Republican, always supported abortion because it reduced the number of unwanted children on the welfare rolls, as well the number of intellectually impaired children born to women forced to carry unwanted pregnancies who were incapable of restricting their use of alcohol, cigarettes and drugs.

Likewise the Democrats have increasingly made Roe v Wade a campaign issue as they abandon traditional policies beneficial to the working class. A favorite ploy has been to guilt-trip populist activists who vote for third party candidates, blaming them for the success of Republican presidents who add conservative judges to the Supreme Court.

Democratic support for abortion has always been extremely feeble: witness their refusal to enshrine abortion rights in legislation instead of relying on a revocable Supreme Court finding. Since 1977 and the passage of the Hyde Amendment (which Democratic presidents like Clinton, Obama and Biden refused to overturn), only well-to-do women have enjoyed a right to abortion. The Hyde Amendment bans states from using Medicaid funding to pay for abortions.