‘No mad minas, but virtuous Marys!’, is what the participants in the March for Life call themselves with a chuckle. In the sympathetic two-part Powned report Refutation Rutger Castricum is on the road with combative reformed youth. Among them Jolinde (20), who fights against abortion, or as she would rather say, ‘for life’. And other young people who ‘see a lot of things going the wrong way’, such as refo-youtuber Florian. ‘Why do you want to pour out this deluge of patronizing young people?’ Castricum asks him, and with that teasing Castricum approach he comes an arm’s length closer to the refo youth.
Yet the planets are again light-years past each other when it comes to fundamental issues. Jolinde dreams aloud about an abortion ban. ‘But what about rape?’, Castricum tries – the well-known emergency measure. ‘It’s not just about the mother, there is also a child involved,’ says Jolinde. She sees women undergoing abortions as ‘mothers who need help’.
Refutation Fortunately, he is not tempted to pretend that a conservative spring is imminent here too, such as in America, where a few judges recently canceled the national right to abortion from 1973. ‘In the Netherlands we are certainly not that far yet’, says Jolinde pining for the US.
A viewing tip in that context, certainly also for refo young people, is The Janes, the documentary released this month on HBO Max that paints a chilling picture of the practice of an abortion ban. Jane was an underground network of women from Chicago who helped perform illegal abortions in the years up to 1973, mainly because they wanted other women to have less degrading experiences than themselves. ‘Pregnant? Call Jane’ was the code. Before Jane, amateur abortions were often performed by the mafia. A “Jane” says that the organization allowed her to choose between Cadillac ($500), Chevrolet ($750) or Rolls Royce ($1,000), each with matching barbaric treatment.
The Janes performed 11 thousand affordable, safe abortions in five years. But they couldn’t control the situation either: that sweet doctor who aborted for them for years turned out to be not a doctor but a bricklayer—a skilled abortionist, indeed. And hospital sepsis wards were still full of amateur abortion victims every day. The women who suffered (and died) from the abortion ban were mostly black, poor women.
You can’t ban abortion, you can only ban safe abortion, it’s written on many pro-abortion banners for a reason. What seems far away and long ago can suddenly become close and current again: The Janes was made as a warm-blooded hero’s portrait, when abortion legislation was still firmly in place, but now mainly outlines how the anti-abortion wind that blows overseas plays with women’s lives. And so the film suddenly colors not only the past, but also the potential future.
