‘Silent Scream’ : Abortion Film Stirs Friend, Foe

The narrator speaks:

. . . Now this head, which I am outlining here, is simply too large to be pulled in one piece out of the uterus. . . . The abortionist will attempt to crush the head . . . and remove the head piecemeal from the uterus. . . .

The voice of Dr. Bernard N. Nathanson is a clinical monotone. But the millions of viewers around the world who have watched “The Silent Scream,” a controversial X-ray-like film depiction of an actual abortion, are anything but calm.

They flinch. They cringe. Many of those who believe they are viewing a murder are filled with outrage, as are others who charge that “Silent Scream” is a sensationalized distortion.

Seen by Millions

Accurate or not, the 28-minute film--translated into six languages and seen by millions on television news reports and religious shows and in private screenings before school and church groups--has intensified the longstanding fight over abortion and turned it into a high-tech propaganda war.

The “pro-life” forces are spending millions of dollars to persuade the public that abortion is nothing less than murder. “Pro-choice” advocates have responded with a gloves-off, multimillion-dollar campaign of their own to press their view that abortion is a woman’s right.

In the battle for public opinion, the two sides ultimately hope to influence the Supreme Court as it decides whether to overturn its 1973 decision in Roe vs. Wade, which established the legal right to abortion. The Reagan Administration has already jumped into the fray on the anti-abortion side with its July 12 request that the Supreme Court overturn Roe vs. Wade.

Suction Abortion

The Administration swiftly embraced “Silent Scream,” which depicts a suction abortion of a fetus described as 12 weeks old, when it appeared in January. But pro-choice advocates condemned the film as distorted, misleading and error-filled.

Through ultrasound, which uses sound waves to produce a picture of the inside of the uterus, the film shows a live fetus--Nathanson says it is sucking its thumb--as it succumbs to the abortion equipment.

“It is kind of the atom bomb of the pro-life movement,” said Donald S. Smith of American Portrait Films, the Anaheim-based documentary film company that produced it. “And, just like two bombs were dropped in Japan, we’re going to have that much impact.”

The film exploded on the pro-choice movement, which hastily abandoned its behind-the-scenes public relations efforts and launched an emotional counteroffensive. Women appeared in national newspaper ads and stood in front of microphones in public places around the country, discussing their abortions in a new, highly personalized campaign. Many read letters they had written to President Reagan:

My name is Frank Mendiola. On Nov. 18, 1971, my twin sister, Rose Elizabeth, died at age 14 of an illegal abortion after she was very brutally raped by six men. . . . It was performed in a shady part of town in the back room of a garment sweatshop. . . . She bled to death on a kitchen table. Yes, Mr. President, on a kitchen table.

Mendiola, now 27, traveled from Los Angeles to Washington to join hundreds of pro-choice supporters in the public reading of letters to Reagan on May 21. It was the last stop of a 30-state speak-out dubbed “Silent No More” and organized by the National Abortion Rights Action League.

PR Advice

Separately, “Silent Scream” inspired a group of 80 communications specialists--editors, reporters and advertising and public relations agents--to form a group called Communications Consultants for Choice to give public relations advice to the pro-choice movement. The group, whose members decline to be identified for fear of employer recriminations or retaliation by anti-abortion activists, has prepared a training film for pro-choice advocates--particularly doctors--scheduled to go on television.

Pro-choice advocates recognize that the anti-abortion forces are gaining momentum and capturing new public sympathy. “They have been stronger on emotion, reaching people in their hearts and guts, while we were strong cerebrally,” NARAL Director Nanette Falkenberg said.

Anti-abortion activists believe they have a realistic chance of reversing or at least altering Roe vs. Wade. They regard Sandra Day O’Connor, Reagan’s only appointee to the Supreme Court, as on their side and express hope that future Reagan appointees also will be.

“All we need is one more justice, and there are four about ready to retire or resign,” said Nathanson, who has become a leading voice of the anti-abortion movement. “We will bring a case back to the Supreme Court not on the peripheral issues, but on the central, gut issue of abortion: Is abortion acceptable or not? I say it’s not. I believe we will prevail.”

Sequel Planned

To keep their momentum alive, Nathanson and American Portrait Films plan a sequel to “Silent Scream.”

“In the next film, you are going to hear an abortion speak to you,” Nathanson announced at the recent National Right to Life convention. Late-term fetuses occasionally survive abortions and, in “Silent Scream II,” he said, “I have interviewed one of these abortions who survived, and she will tell you her story.”

Nathanson has proved a powerful celebrity-spokesman for the anti-abortion movement. A New York obstetrician-gynecologist, he was a co-founder of NARAL and director of what he calls “the largest abortion clinic in the Western world” until medical advances in fetology, the study of the fetus, turned him against abortion.

As Nathanson became acutely aware, with ultrasound, doctors can see fetuses and treat them before they are born. Such technical advances enable smaller and smaller babies to survive outside the womb.

In a movement often associated with zealotry and strong religious beliefs, Nathanson is an atheist who, foremost among physicians and scientists opposed to abortion, lends scientific credibility to the emotion-charged crusade.

‘Atheist Religious Hero’

“America seems to need personalities,” said former Nathanson associate Larry Lader, also a co-founder of NARAL and now head of a group called Abortion Rights Mobilization. “Bernie has become an anti-abortion hero. He has cut a new and distinct figure: the atheist religious hero.”

On the other side, pro-choice “personalities” are in short supply. A member of Communications Consultants for Choice, noting the recent wave of abortion clinic bombings, death threats to doctors who perform abortions and other forms of harassment, said: “Terrorism and related activities mean that it is harder to find a Nathanson counterpart.”

Instead, pro-choicers focused their “Silent No More” drive on individual stories.

“The voices of women who had personal experiences were missing from the debate,” NARAL director Falkenberg said. “We needed to provide a mechanism for those women to come forward. The focus was so totally on the fetus that we felt like people were beginning to accept the stereotypes, that women who have abortions are selfish, that they do it for cavalier reasons.”

40,000 Letters

In its “Silent No More” campaign, NARAL rounded up 40,000 letters from people who have had experiences with abortion--from a rabbinical couple who had aborted a deformed fetus that would have died at birth, to women who had dangerous, illegal abortions as teen-agers--and asked some of the letter writers to read them at community meetings that attracted crowds of 100 to 400.

Falkenberg pronounced the campaign “extremely successful.”

But anti-abortion activists thought that 40,000 letters--out of approximately 1 million women undergoing abortions each year--and only a few hundred people at each event did not compare to the impact of “Silent Scream.”

Borrowing a page from Nathanson’s book, Planned Parenthood hopes to release a half-hour documentary in October featuring women in their homes talking about their abortions.

Planned Parenthood also produced and distributed thousands of copies of “The Facts Speak Louder,” a nine-page, purple-covered critique of “Silent Scream.” It reports medical experts’ refutations of various points made or implied in the film--that a 12-week-old fetus can feel pain, for example, and that it purposefully tries to avoid abortion instruments.

Full-Page Ads

During the “Silent No More” campaign, Planned Parenthood spent $300,000 to run full-page newspaper ads featuring women revealing their abortions, with full names and photographs. The group is planning a $600,000 series of magazine ads.

Last October, Catholics for a Free Choice raised a stir when it ran a full-page ad in the New York Times listing many Catholic nuns, priests and theologians who called on the church for an open dialogue on abortion. The Vatican asked nuns who signed it to retract their statement or leave their religious orders; so far, neither has happened.

Planned Parenthood Federation President Faye Wattleton plays down the potential impact of “Silent Scream.”

“We’re not spending a lot of time wringing our hands over ‘Silent Scream,’ ” she said. “It’s one more piece of propaganda. The American people are not duped by it.”

Health Communications & Marketing Inc., a health-care consulting firm in Washington, showed the film to a “focus group” of eight women and four men who did not belong to any abortion group and reported their reaction to be largely negative.

Weather Map

“I’m an air traffic controller,” said one participant, “and I gotta tell you, that might have been a fetus up there (on the screen). But it looked like a weather map to me.”

But the film has clearly triggered the burst of pro-choice campaigns, and it has visibly buoyed the anti-abortion movement. At the recent National Right to Life Committee convention in Washington, which dealt extensively with mastering the art of persuasion, “Silent Scream” was shown dozens of times to the 2,000 attendees.

Local groups planning televised screenings of “Silent Scream” were advised to let viewers call for further information to phones staffed by members of Women Exploited by Abortion.

Individuals and groups were shown how to finance their own anti-abortion billboards like those that have sprung up around the country depicting the finding in February, 1982, of 17,000 aborted fetuses in Woodland Hills, Calif.

Using the Media

Workshop sessions dwelt on how to use the media and stressed, in NRLC public affairs director Kay James’ words, that “the media is not the enemy.”

Apart from the NRLC, former Benedictine monk Joseph Scheidler, another emerging anti-abortion leader who heads Chicago’s militant Pro-Life Action League, is planning a campaign of civil disobedience and harassment aimed at doctors who perform abortions. He has dubbed the campaign “The Year of Pain and Fear.”

“The idea is to make the abortionist very keenly aware that abortion should not be a painless thing,” Scheidler said. “The idea is, do the abortionists feel pain when we lose business for them, picket their homes, point out to the community that they have violated their medical oaths?”

This fall, Scheidler plans to stage anti-abortion “trials for crimes against humanity” in a town called Nuremberg, Pa. “We’ll bring in women who have been sterilized, (aborted) babies who have been born alive, things like that,” Scheidler said. “It’s gimmicky, and it’s captured some fancy.”

Death March

Americans Against Abortion, based in Lindale, Tex., has much the same objective for a nationwide march through Washington to Slaughter Beach, Del., which began last month with a tiny wood-and-brass coffin containing an aborted 18-to-20-week fetus. “ ‘Baby Choice,’ ” the group says, was “once a lovely preborn little girl.”

The anti-abortion movement draws its financial support not only from individuals nationwide but from large corporations, foundations and myriad Catholic and fundamentalist Protestant groups. The National Right to Life Committee budget for the current fiscal year is $4.5 million, $1.6 million of it for “educational outreach.” And the National Right to Life Political Action Committee, according to its chairwoman, Sandra Faucher, more than doubled its income in two years--from $300,000 in 1982 to $750,000 in 1984.

The reason for so much activity on both sides is not hard to find. Jerry Mander of San Francisco’s Public Media Center, the advertising agency that orchestrated the “Silent No More” campaign for the pro-choice movement, said abortion “is an inherently dramatic situation that makes good video, good television, the kind of black-and-white moral issue that makes for good media. It makes a great Newsweek cover. It’s one of the few social issues that gets both a liberal and conservative audience fascinated.”

Profile of Dr. Bernard N. Nathanson in View.