About
the Films Each year, an estimated 30 to 55 million women throughout the world obtain induced abortions. More than half of these abortions are illegal and an estimated 84,000 of them result in death. This cross-cultural survey shows how abortion transcends race, religion and social class, and how differences in the practice and perception of abortion are mainly in the degree of secrecy and danger accompanying it. Featuring interviews filmed in Ireland, Japan, Thailand, Peru, Colombia and Canada, the film lends a voice to women throughout the world. Winner of the American Film Festival Blue Ribbon, First Place Winner of the National Council on Family Relations Film Festival and the San Francisco Film Festival Documentary Grand Prize.
This documentary brings to the foreground the problem of widespread sterilization as a means of population control among Puerto Rican women (the highest incidence in the world) through the use of personal testimony, newsreels, and government propaganda excerpts. The procedure is so common that more than one-third of all Puerto Rican women of childbearing age have been sterilized. Begun in the 1930's as a means of curbing the surplus population, it continues to be reinforced politically and socially in the Puerto Rican communities. So common is the operation that it is simply known as ‘la operacion.’ Also covered is the experimental use of contraceptive pills that were up 20 times as strong as those available today.
The last in a trilogy titled From the Back Alleys to the Supreme Court and Beyond by Fadiman, the Fragile Promise of Choice features vignettes from around the country, news footage, and interviews combined in an examination of how restrictive legislation, funding cutbacks, and anti-choice violence affect abortion's availability and how activists and clinicians are working to preserve abortion access. Gives an accurate portrayal of abortion today, including the recurrence of home remedies as an alternative to visiting clinics inundated with protesters.
InCite Pictures’ latest project and a recent entry for the Sundance Film Festival, The Education of Shelby Knox is a coming of age story about a teenage girl who joins a campaign for comprehensive sex education in the high schools of Lubbock, Texas, a town with one of the highest STD and teen pregnancy rates in the nation. As Shelby is swept into the fight, she begins to question her deeply conservative Southern Baptist upbringing; when the campaign broadens to include a fight for a gay-straight alliance, Shelby confronts her family and her pastor, in the end declaring herself a feminist and a liberal Christian.
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