A good documentary is one that doesn’t leave you as soon as the lights come up; you get in your car to go home with an unsettling feeling of what you just watched still lingering.
Expect to feel this way with After Tiller, the controversial documentary from directing duo, Martha Shane and Lana Wilson. After Tiller profiles the four remaining American doctors who perform third-trimester abortions, and their daily struggle with the public scrutiny they face.
The women Shane and Wilson profile who are seeking out these late-term abortions are not the “16 and pregnant,” careless girls you may expect. Most of them are women who desperately want to have a family, who are mentally ready to become parents, yet discover their unborn child has birth deformations that would severely affect their quality of life or ability to sustain life at all. Bones that won’t bend and lungs that will never work on their own are just some of the futures these unborn children would face, and while every child deserves a chance to live, what is life if you’re bound to machinery from a hospital bed from birth?
No matter what side of the fence you sit on, After Tiller does a great job of providing insight and compassion for the other side.
After Tiller paints an incredibly emotional picture of women struggling with the biggest and most painful decision of their lives, as well as how extremely difficult this job is for the doctors that perform the abortions. From their perspective, these doctors believe that if they are not able to safely help women perform abortions, some women may become desperate and try to do it on their own. In this sense, the filmmakers are very fair with their representation of abortion; there is no clear “left” or “right” views forced into the audience’s mind.
What was most captivating to me was the day-to-day life the doctors lead; when they walk out of their office, they expect to be assassinated. They receive death threats in the middle of the night. They’re constantly living in fear for their lives, yet they continue to go to work every morning, truly believing that they are helping women who need them.
No matter what side of the fence you sit on, After Tiller does a great job of providing insight and compassion for the other side. You may not leave the theater with a different view, but that’s not the point. A good film is one that starts a conversation and provokes thought, and After Tiller is certainly one of those films.
