While it’s been clear that America, like other parts of the world, has endured a rise in support for the hard right, the overturning of Roe v Wade (legislation that constitutionally enshrined women’s right to an abortion in the country, passed 50 years ago) still sent shockwaves around the globe this June. One lingering, depressing question now hangs in the air: How the hell did we get here?
Directed by Cynthia Lowen, Tribeca Film Fest ‘22 competitor Battleground aims to provide the most comprehensive answer yet, tracing anti-abortionists’ tireless campaigning in the States from 2016 to now. Featuring interviews with some of the key movers and shakers on both sides of the aisle – most prominently the Susan B. Anthony List’s president Majorie Dannenfelser and Pro-Life SF’s founder Terrisa Bukovinac – for pro-choicers, it’s a hair-pullingly infuriating but necessary watch.
The recurring cornerstone and most shocking evidence Lowen includes are audio recordings of Donald Trump meeting with leaders of the evangelical church (which most of the movement either stems from or is associated with – though not all, such as rare Democrat pro-lifer Bukovinac), who essentially promise him the election win should he push their agenda. While Trump, previously pro-abortion, admitted he would stop short of defunding Planned Parenthood – the largest women’s reproductive healthcare provider in the US – he did pledge to stop it from terminating pregnancies. This, Dannenfelser and Students For Life founder Kristen Hawkins readily admit, was enough for the movement to overlook the considerable objections they had to backing him in order to see their end goal realised: abortion not just outlawed in America, but made “unthinkable”.
Watching Battleground, I couldn’t help but recall feeling a similar way as I did watching flat earthers in Behind The Curve. Depending on your own stance on the issue (and it’s hard not to have one, even if you don’t have the capacity to get pregnant), you’ll either heartily nod along with them, listen in bewildered puzzlement or, as I did, want to throw something at the screen. For those in the latter camp, it may even feel torturous to have to swallow the gleeful way some of these women talk about a woman’s body “not being her own” once she becomes pregnant, and the earnestness with which they believe they are saving “millions” of future lives by condemning others to potentially carrying a full unwanted pregnancy to term – some of them victims of rape and/or incest, others too young or ill to even survive childbirth. “Trump actually delivered on more promises than he made,” Dannenfelser claims with beaming satisfaction. “It’s mathematically impossible but it’s true.”
One particularly WTF moment has Hawkins – the most crusadery of all the non-existent life protectors – broadcast a foetal heartbeat from a heavily pregnant young woman’s belly during a Students For Life protest. Another has the same group co-opt the Black Lives Matter movement’s slogan and protest tactics in the wake of George Floyd’s death to goad the police into arresting them; this allows then-Vice President Mike Pence to make martyrs of them at a press conference, laying bare any supposed solidarity with BLM as an obvious publicity stunt. As Planned Parenthood CEO/President Alexis McGill Johnson points out, trying to wed ‘All Lives Matter’ with ‘pro-life’ in unholy union is a particularly harmful exercise when Black women in America have historically had the least bodily autonomy of almost any group due to the legacy of slavery.
Outside of these grassroots groups, there’s a wider and more lasting point that Battleground makes, and that is the fallacy of America’s lawmaking system. The pinnacle of democratic power it may think itself, yet Roe v Wade – a law that affects hundreds of millions – was overturned by an unelected council of nine (the Supreme Court), only three of which are women. New polls conducted by the Pew Research Centre in June say that 61% of US adults think abortion should be legal in all or most cases – an increase on 2019 results from Gallup, where that number was about 10% lower. Anti-abortionists, therefore, are in the minority as far as public opinion goes. And yet, here we are.
But perhaps the most revealing testimony of all in the docufilm comes from a doctor on the frontlines at a Texas women’s health clinic – who confirms that when it comes to an emergency, liberal or conservative, women who might otherwise believe abortion is morally wrong find it to be morally acceptable when it affects them. When the political suddenly becomes personal, abortion does too. Though not the most cinematic of films in the genre, Battleground is nevertheless a digestible and educational documentation of a turbulent period in feminist herstory, and a darkly regressive time in American politics.
Dir. Cynthia Lowen (105 mins)
Battleground is in select theatres and available through Watch Now @ Home virtual cinema release. Info: here
words HANNAH COLLINS
