Last night, I saw 4 months 3 weeks & 2 days at the Belcourt. I’ve written before about the difficulties of discussing abortion, and this movie puts those difficulties front and center in examining a scenario in late 1980s Romania under a repressive regime that outlawed abortion.
An anti-choice friend of mine once described abortion to me as “an inconvenience,” and I wonder what her perspective of this movie would be. There’s no exploration of how the pregnancy in question occurred, only that it is unwanted and leads to desperate measures. I think the lengths to which it is implied that women in this era would go to get an abortion strikes right at the heart of the notion that unwanted pregnancy is a mere “inconvenience.” It’s not a comment on a moral absolute, but it is a strong comment on the desperation that affects people experiencing more than “an inconvenience” on their own terms, if not those of the anti-choice community.
Considering the amount of overlap between the anti-choice and anti-immigrant communities (at least in terms of voting blocs), I’m curious about whether there is enough compassionate conservatism to accept the unwanted children of poor foreign nations? This is the same community, after all, that constantly votes to undo our welfare state. To me, there’s a lack of consistency in the democratically expressed world view of the anti-choice community.
I remain, by my own definitions, vigorously pro-life. And continue to wonder at how those who use that term for different purposes condone so much warmongering and gun-love from their elected leaders.
Anyway, I’m disappointed that I missed last year’s Lake of Fire, which also played at the Belcourt, as I understand it was a nice accounting of both sides of the debate. Still, for a thought-provoking look at abortion in a context that seems designed to evoke empathy, 4 months 3 weeks & 2 days is worth a careful look.
Unlike the poor protagonists from this movie, I think we will discuss this again.
