TV REVIEW : ‘Choices’ Looks at Both Sides of Abortion Issue

Perhaps it’s a measure of how the nation’s debate over abortion could trigger a civil war that the HBO “America Undercover” special “Abortion: Desperate Choices” (at 10 tonight, repeating May 11, 14, 26 and 31) is scrupulously fair to both sides.

That doesn’t mean that the film by Susan Froemke, Deborah Dickson and Albert Maysles is skittish in the face of conflict; it is more like a caring observer, trying to understand everyone’s point of view and feelings. The desperate choices of the title are not those of the pregnant women alone.

Analysis and political rhetoric are jettisoned for an immediate approach--the “direct cinema” style pioneered three decades ago by Maysles and his late brother, David. We’re plunked down right in the middle of the Women’s Health Services clinic in Pittsburgh during a week in January, 1991, when anti-abortion activists peacefully picketed in front while single women and couples walked past them. There is none of the Bastille-type actions of recent months, in which opponents face off in the streets. The battles here are inside the mind.

Froemke, Dickson and Maysles cut back and forth between Mary and her Christian cohorts as they urge clinic patients to “think again” about their decision to abort, a telling array of women who go through the painful but speedy abortion procedure and mini-portraits filmed in black-and-white of women recalling everything from back-alley abortions to adoptions.

Mary’s friends, whether huddling in a coffee shop or around a burial spot they helped build for “The Unborn Child,” are genuinely sincere and kind, far from the fiery brimstone of their male comrades. The pregnant women all embody the notion that nobody “likes” abortion, just like nobody “likes” an operation, but it’s clear that some of them, such as 17-year-old high school dropout Melissa, would have dark futures without the abortion option.

The memories in black-and-white become grisly, emotional prisms through which to see life before Roe vs. Wade, but, even here, the coat-hanger horror stories are balanced by a story like Mary Jane’s, in which she reunited in 1989 with the 20-year-old she put up for adoption.

“Abortion: Desperate Choices” becomes a montage of private journeys, reminding how nearly impossible a genuinely public resolution of the abortion wars may prove to be.