Cathal BarryTwo Irish film-makers have revealed that their work on an up-coming movie about notorious abortion doctor Dr Kermit Gosnell lead them to rethink their support for abortion.
Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney, a film-making couple based in Los Angeles, warned abortion campaigners “to be careful what you wish for” after their experience filming a movie and writing a book about Dr Gosnell, a US abortion doctor who performed illegal abortions past the state’s 24-week limit. His abortion “technique” was to have the babies born alive and then to stab them to death with scissors.
Writing in The Irish Times, the married couple said that “those seeking to remove the constitutional ban on abortion believe the best way to do it is to bring it out of the shadows in the hope that when people hear the details, they will support the liberalisation of abortion in Ireland”.
“Two years ago, we might have agreed with them,” they said.
The couple go on to admit, however, that their “experience of the Gosnell case is that anyone who has learned more about the reality of abortion – the pulling apart of the foetus, the injecting of poison into the heart, the ‘comfort care’ – has come away with only negative feelings about the procedure. It may be a case of be careful what you wish for,” they added.
Admitting to being “fairly disinterested” about abortion in the past, the couple wrote that they “would have agreed with those who have called in The Irish Times and elsewhere for more honesty and openness about abortion in the belief it would lead to a more liberal abortion regime in Ireland”.
However, they said their recent experience would suggest that campaigners might want to “rethink” such a strategy.