12th and Delaware, a documentary about a “crisis pregnancy center” and a women’s clinic that share an intersection, premieres tonight. And it might just be the most astute statement made about abortion in America in a very long time.
Directors Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing‘s last feature, Jesus Camp, profiled an Evangelical Christian summer camp, and 12th and Delaware, too, is a kind of portrait of contemporary American religious practice. The documentary rarely departs from its three main areas of interest: What goes on inside the Christian-run Pregnancy Care Center, where director Anne Lotierzo, a thin-lipped, childless woman, tells clients that condoms are only 85% effective, and that abortion is linked to breast cancer and infertility; its neighbor, A Woman’s World Medical Center, where owner Candace Dye, a rotund woman in scrubs, tries to undo all the misinformation; and the demilitarized zone of the street that separates the two centers, where all the sidewalk ministry, harassment, arguments, rosary-saying, pleading, placard-waving, and protesting goes on.
What the film doesn’t do is include much input from the noisy meta-debate about abortion in this country. Aside from one footnote at the end which discloses the number of abortion clinics (816) and so-called pregnancy centers nationwide (4000), the film presents no statistics other than those quoted by the subjects in casual conversation, there are no talking head interviews, there are no politicians or op-ed writers or “experts.” Everything proceeds in a very natural-seeming manner — as with the films of Frederick Wiseman, if there is an argument in 12th and Delaware, it is one that emerges from the framing, the editing, the willingness of the filmmakers to wait for the evocative moments, and the politicized subject matter itself. The film strives to present the facts and experiences of its subjects neutrally, but it’s interesting to note that while Candace Dye and her husband, Arnold, support the film, seeing their activities so faithfully rendered seems to have displeased Lotierzo and the Pregnancy Care Center, who bought the domain “12thanddelaware.org” to “debunk” the movie.
The women — Lotierzo, Dye, and the many unhappily pregnant women they attempt to treat — are the real focus here. There’s 15-year-old Widline, too scared to take her mother to her appointment at the Pregnancy Care Center, who brings her older sister instead. She rolls her eyes when Lotierzo shows her a plastic model of a fetus. “You can hold it,” Lotierzo says. It’s not a request so much as a command. There’s Britney, 19, considering her second abortion. She brings her boyfriend to her appointment, and the nurse at the Pregnancy Care Center writes, “Hi Daddy!” on her ultrasound print-out. At A Woman’s World, Dye asks a woman who speaks broken, heavily accented English, why she wants an abortion. “I always tell him, please be careful,” she says. “I’m so stupid.” “No, you’re not stupid,” interrupts Dye. “You just gotta be more careful.” She already has two children. One anonymous patient at A Woman’s World starts to cry during her counseling session with Dye. “I’m 46, and if I have this baby I’ll be 47,” she says, her voice breaking. “When that baby’s 20, I’ll be 67. And those are the reasons I’m doing this. Simply age. I don’t know if I’ll be physically able, in my 50s, to handle a toddler. I wanna do it now, before the child gets older in my womb.”
“I just want to make sure that this is definitely what you need to do,” says Dye. “Not ‘want’ to do, nobody ever wants to do this. Okay? Nobody ever wants to do this. But if it’s what you need to do, and it’s your decision only, nobody is forcing you to do this—”