If These Walls Could Talk, They Would Be More Honest

Yesterday I watched a movie entitled, “If These Walls Could Talk.” Two quick notes – if you’ve not seen it, and want to watch it, you’d best leave now. I will be giving away the plot. If you are a pro-life veteran, you already know everything there is to know about the film, I’m sure. I had never heard of it. Repression is a skill, and I am an expert after 25 years.

The film is done in three parts, each focusing on the residents of the same house over forty years – hence, the walls that could talk. The first is set in the fifties. A young widow, played by Demi Moore, has sexual intercourse with her younger brother-in-law while under the influence of grief and alcohol. She conceives as a result. Her in-laws are her only family and financial support. She cannot scandalize them by having the child. The vignette ends with her in a pool of her own blood after a kitchen-table abortion, phoning for help.

Part Two brings us to 1974, featuring a wife and mother played by Sissy Spacek. She already has four children. She’s going to college, and has aspirations to be a poet. A baby will require her to sacrifice her plans for herself, and possibly for her daughter, who wants to go away to college but will have to settle for a state university if another child is brought into the family. This ends with Spacek’s character opting to have the baby. Why? They don’t spell it out for me, and I guess I needed them to do just that.

The final part features Ann Heche in 1996 as a college student impregnated during an affair with one of her professors. This pregnancy will require her to give up – something, I’m not sure what. She wept over the mistake, questioning if she would have to be punished for it forever. The focus of this story is on the gamut the young woman had to run through protestors and sidewalk counselors to gain access to the abortion clinic. We come full circle in transparent symbolism to the young woman on the floor in a pool of blood, but this time it is the abortionist’s blood, because a nutcase got in and shot her – but only after the procedure was finished.

Why did I subject myself to this? There were enough details in the abortion procedures to make me physically ill, particularly in the final scenario when aspiration is used. They showed the jars, but they didn’t show their contents. In the first story, Demi Moore’s character is bloodied and there is a pail on the floor that suggests some horror, but it isn’t shown. And the sounds were simply untenable for me. I thought I would just climb out of my skin and round about the walls, until strangely enough, it began to hail outside. I live in the desert, and we’ve been in a ten-year drought. We don't get a lot of hail. But the pounding on the roof was a welcome filter with perfect timing.

Again, I ask myself why I wanted to watch it. I still don’t know whether its message was pro-life or pro-abortion, although if pushed, I would pick the latter. The second scenario, in which the woman chose to have her child, was weak. Her reasons for considering abortion were transparently petty. Why didn’t they present a scenario in which a woman sacrificed something important in order to choose to have the child? Spacek’s character did not have a life out of control. She was only unfulfilled in her self-absorption. Or why not show someone who made the same decision not to abort in spite of the fact that she had no husband, or home, or job, or other children?

The ending of the movie, with the blood and tears of the abortionist (played by Cher), was also puny as irony goes. It would have been honest, and the irony more dramatic and meaningful, to portray the post-abortive young woman of 1996 sitting in a pool of her own blood, unattended in an abortion mill where they run them through as quickly as possible to obtain the most profits. I’ve read a lot of testimony to this abortion experience. Full circle, folks – in some cases, we have sterilized the procedure, but the buckets of blood and gore are still kept hidden, out of sight – don’t look at it, it’s too awful to bear, even in a movie that purports to show us the truth. The people at Priests For Life (www. Priestsforlife.org) say the gruesome pictures they use to show people what abortion looks like are effective. I don’t know if I can agree, but they are more educated than I. I don’t need the pictures – they are already in my head and I can’t get rid of them.

Why do I read pro-abortion arguments and the testimony of active abortionists? So I can argue with phantoms in this forum? Most of my readers are probably already pro-life, so who am I trying to convince? Am I just trying to impress someone with my ability to put a few words together? If so, there’s a perfect example of a narcissistic and useless exercise in self-absorption.

I hope instead that I do it because I want people, especially post-abortive women who are in denial as I have been, to understand the title of this blog – abortion hurts. It solves no problems, cures no social evils, frees no persons from bondage to anyone or anything. There is not a post-abortive woman alive who, when she learned she was pregnant, can honestly say she did not have at least one split second of thinking of what would be. It is what drove you to the abortion mill. You had that moment, that thought, the insight – and the knowledge will destroy you in the long run if you do not face it. You may remain avidly pro-abortion your entire life as my mother did. But the knowing will be manifested in all you feel, think and do, even in the smallest things: a little more indifference to the suffering of others, perhaps; a little more reliance on chemicals, alcohol, maybe recreational drugs; a little less respect for your own sexuality. I would love to see the research because I would wager big money that many of you suffer from undiagnosed or somato-emotional illnesses – fibromyalgia, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, on and on – illnesses so vague and difficult to diagnose that physicians argue over their very existence, but they are on the rise and they strike primarily at women.

I won’t impose suffering on you. I don’t have to. If I could believe you were actually here reading this, you probably would not recognize the truth, and would slip instantly back into denial in spite of my clumsy efforts. You might pity me, and wonder if there are many women like me (there are – they are you). But your repression will keep you from sites like mine. I am too strident. I compare you to Nazis and slaveholders. I am harsh. But I am exactly like you. I don’t want to punish you. I am not unkind or unsympathetic, or unaware of the problems that made you choose to abort. I want you to recognize the truth, and see the flimsy constructs that support the Great Lie of abortion – it has not been a help to us.

Like the Nazis, I killed to further my own interests. Like slaveholders, I made decisions about someone else’s life with callous disregard and impunity. I am just like them, and I am just like you, but I wear my misdeeds and their resulting wounds on the outside where you can see them while you keep yours hidden. But hidden wounds are still wounds, and there is no need for all of this hurt. I steep myself in your illogical arguments and pseudo-compassion because I have to know your delusions in order to penetrate them with the truth. Abortion hurts. Some mistakes cannot be undone, and the Great Lie of abortion is that they can be. I believe we can do better for ourselves as women, and as human beings. We can do much better than this, but we have to start by properly identifying what is wrong and then seek viable solutions that do not do more harm than good.