45 Years of Women Make Movies
Birthright: A War Story
Dir. Civia Tamarkin, US, 2017, 100 min.
Co-sponsored by Penn Medicine, PEACE: Comprehensive family planning and urgent pregnancy care
Followed by a Q&A with health care providers and film director Civia Tamarkin
Birthright: A War Story is
the real-life version of “The Handmaid’s Tale.” In America today, a radical
movement has tightened its grip on state power, seeking to control whether and
how women bear children. In this crusade, pregnant women are subject to state
control, surveillance, and punishment. Even women who don’t want an abortion
face shocking risks—like the pregnant woman in Alabama who faced criminal
charges for taking half a Valium. Or like the grieving woman in Nebraska who,
already devastated by a bleak diagnosis at 22 weeks, was forced to continue an
unviable and dangerous pregnancy because of a new "fetal pain" law. Birthright: A War Story tells these
stories of women caught up in a frightening new legal system, which criminalizes
and physically violates women, threatens our lives, and challenges our
constitutional protections.