After Tiller

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Since starting college I have taken up watching a lot of different things of Netflix. Most of the time I watch TV shows and movies that I like or think might be interesting. I have also watched some documentary films on Netflix’s as well. I’m not sure on how many documentary films I have watched, but there was a few. The few that I did have the pleasure to watch was because I thought the topic was interesting, or I was bored and had nothing else to do; most of the time it was both. I do not have a favorite. I do not have much of a favorite of really anything. I either love it, like it, or don’t like it. I have never really liked picking a favorite because how can u pick one when you know later, somewhere down the road it is going to change. And when it does change, like it always does, what happens to the old favorite. Do you give it boot out the door telling it to “take a hike”, or do you place it in the doghouse with all the other old favorites, while you bring home the new puppy. So you see picking favorites is a messy business. That and I liked the documentaries for different reasons. Picking one would just be demeaning to the reasons why I liked the others.

Documentary films come in so many different subjects that they help everyone learn about so many different topics. Everyone should be able to find a documentary to keep their interest. Documentaries also so have the amazing power of making the audience think of something that they would not have thought about otherwise without making too hard to understand. They also can show more than one point of view to the subject. Sometimes documentaries even show more than just two sides of the argument. Watching documentary films will help not only writers, but people in general, grow as individuals as well as in there writing by making them think about different subjects that they normally would not be exposed too.

For the Documentary Film Project I decided that I was going to watch something controversial. So I chose to watch the documentary “After Tiller”. No matter where you stand on the subject, you get to see these people making the hardest decision of their life. In the film, one the staff members in one of the clinics said the question is not only about the life, but of the quality of that life. The Doctor of that same clinic also surprised me by saying that “no-one wants an abortion”. The Doctor also mentioned to her 16-year-old patient that there is only three options; birth the baby and taking care of a baby, birth the baby and give it away, or abortion. The one thing that really surprised me by the end of the film is that they never showed the faces of the patients. Their bodies and maybe the side of their heads were shown, but never the full face. The film brought into question where the patients would go to if all of the states made these abortions illegal. And what would happen to the quality of life for all those affected; what about the emotionally affects.

What I would like to know is how did this help or hurt the patients in the long run emotionally. How many looked back and regretted it but remembered why they did it and the reason they were there in the first place and still would do it all over again? What about the people that wanted it but could not, for any reason, and regretted not doing it? One of the things that were mentioned as arguments against abortions was the argument of fetal pain. I would like to research that a little more to see if I think it has any weight to it. The most problematic concept that I came across in the film is that with the ever increasing restrictions on legalized abortions, how many more woman will go to extreme lengths to end their pregnancy.

At certain part in the film “After Tiller” I had to stop watching and walk away from it because it was just getting too emotional for me. It was during one of the parts where the woman’s baby had an abnormality that was going to kill the baby painfully. So she decided that she was not going to let her baby suffer any more than he need too.