With the U.S. Supreme Court’s 6-3 overruling of Roe v. Wade, eliminating a woman’s constitutionally ensured right to a legal abortion, America has been presented with the trailer for the movie of its own future. It is a film promising to make the pre-Roe, 1963 setting of “Dirty Dancing” look pretty good for women.
One man, of course, gets top billing in this movie. A statement Friday from New York gubernatorial candidate Andrew Giuliani called him out by name, thanking “the enduring legacy of President Donald J. Trump” for Friday’s victory.”
Just as everything in politics is local, every mention or dramatization of abortion in the movies is unavoidably political. It has been so since the very first film to address abortion: the 1916 silent drama “Where Are My Children?”, controversial in its day for its tacit endorsement of birth control. Yet like so many “social problem” films, then and now, there’s more than one political impulse at work in writer-director Lois Weber’s groundbreaking effort, now a part of the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress.
