quote:

hardly anyone actually understands the state of the law.

The case that answers your question is PP v. Casey, which expanded Roe to legalize abortion to the point of "fetal viability".

The Missouri House has passed a "heartbeat bill". It hasn't yet made it through the Senate, but it probably will. Arkansas, North Dakota and Iowa have passed similar heartbeat abortion bans, but have faced injunctions and court orders preventing them from enforcing the bans.

A heartbeat can be detected around 6-8 weeks. These states are challenging the notion of "fetal viability" which will eventually put the issue back before the Supreme Court.

‘Unplanned’ Perfectly Captures Culture War Fight

Here's why the media yawned over the unprecedented attacks on the pro-life drama.

he pro-life film “Unplanned” over-performed this weekend against all odds.

The film earned $6.1 million from roughly 1,000 screens, about one-fourth of the number some mainstream movies receive on opening weekend. (For comparison’s sake, Disney’s “Dumbo” simultaneously opened on 4,259 screens).

“Unplanned” tells the true story of Abby Johnson (Ashley Bratcher), a Planned Parenthood director who becomes a fierce anti-abortion advocate. Pure Flix, the film’s distributor, says an additional 600 theaters will be added for its second weekend. The movie earned an A+ rating via CinemaScore.

Most movies these days face their fair share of struggles en route to theaters. Even alleged sure things can under-perform or flat-out flop. “Dumbo” falls in the former category. Last year’s “Robin Hood” reboot epitomizes the latter.
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Consider what the team behind “Unplanned” had to endure beyond the usual roadblocks.

Scattered scathing reviews from left-leaning media outlets
A dearth of TV advertisements (more on this shortly)
A modest budget ($6 million)
No A-list talent to buoy marketing efforts

That’s just a partial list. The filmmakers shot “Unplanned” in secret so as not to generate blowback due to its pro-life subject matter.

It gets worse.

Team “Unplanned” got turned down by a number of TV networks who refused to show ads for the film. The list of high-profile channels includes Lifetime, The Hallmark Channel, USA Networks, The Travel Channel and HGTV.

Just snagging music for the film proved a chore.

Blake Kanicka, music supervisor for Unplanned, a feature film being made by some of the same people who turned God’s Not Dead into a surprise box office hit, tells The Hollywood Reporter he was prevented from licensing any music from a half dozen of the largest music companies….

“There was a pattern of denial with our quote requests,” says Kanicka. “Our team has never seen such a uniform denial across the board regardless of price, genre, usage or type.”

The film also earned a bizarre “R” rating for abortion-related imagery. “Unplanned” has no mature language, sexuality or graphic violence. The abortion sequences are tense at times, but hardly graphic enough to warrant an R rating.

Horror movies like “Happy Death Day 2U,” by comparison, often snare an audience-friendly PG-13 mark despite their frequent gore.

And, most recently, Twitter temporarily suspended the official “Unplanned” Twitter account smack dab in the heart of its opening weekend. Studios rely heavily on that weekend to build momentum, make up production costs and set the stage for a robust theatrical run.

Losing Twitter during that critical span, even for a short spell, can’t be dismissed.

Media outlets covered some of these obstacles in a sober fashion. Few mainstream outlets connected the Twitter outage to the company’s repeated attacks on right-leaning voices.

What’s missing in the coverage? We’ve yet to see any outrage about the unusual obstacles facing the film’s release.

Now, compare that to “Captain Marvel.”

The latest MCU adventure, starring outspoken progressive Brie Larson, forced RottenTomatoes.com to change its policies regarding pre-release buzz.

The New York Times’ headline on the subject says it all, “When Captain Marvel Became a Target, the Rules Changed.”

Most critically, it eliminated prerelease audience reviews. It also stopped displaying the percentage of moviegoers who say they “want to see” a film in favor of using the raw number of people. And it removed the “not interested” button.

The media collectively cheered the move, deriding so-called trolls in the process. Any criticism of the film, its trailer or its star became problematic.

YouTube joined the fight, too. The online video portal tweaked its algorithms to downplay those critical of the film. CNET.com cheered, “not all heroes wear capes” as a result.

Just a few days ago, Netflix went to bat for Larson, too. The Oscar winner is the director of a new Netflix original film, “Unicorn Store.” When just one person on Twitter questioned Larson’s directorial qualifications the network quickly struck back.

“Captain Marvel” is part of the MCU’s new woke agenda, a shift directly supported by Larson. Reporters rallied to its cause as a result. It’s undeniable.

So is this:

Where were these reporters as “Unplanned” faced a wave of over-the-top attacks? Why would media outlets rush to defend one film but not another? Does anyone think it’s fair that Twitter would shut down a movie’s official account on opening weekend? Can you imagine the outcry in the press had that happened to Captain Marvel’s Twitter account?


https://www.hollywoodintoto.co...planned-culture-war/

‘Nobody Ever Said Abortion Was Pretty’

Unplanned depicts the gruesome reality of the ‘right to choose.’

After a day on the job at Planned Parenthood, Abby Johnson greets her young daughter — who stares in concern and asks her mother why there’s blood spattered on her white sneakers. Abby replies that she helped a woman who had a nosebleed.

But her husband knows better. “Nobody ever said abortion was pretty,” she tells him defensively after their daughter has left the room.

That scene, which comes about halfway through the gut-wrenching film Unplanned, gets to the heart of what the movie accomplishes so well. Its resounding success, despite its low budget and controversial subject matter, stems from its willingness to expose the unmistakable reality of what takes place in every abortion procedure.

The film depicts abortion unflinchingly — earning it an R rating — and predictably has been dismissed by mainstream sources as “propaganda” and “an unabashed hit-job.” But unfortunately for critics, the character Abby Johnson is based on a real person of the same name, a former Planned Parenthood clinic director who now directs a pro-life organization.

There’s no question that the film demonizes Planned Parenthood and glorifies pro-lifers who pray on the sidewalk outside clinics. It’s unlikely that an abortion-rights supporter could sit through the entire movie, let alone come away convinced that abortion is immoral. But perhaps that isn’t the film’s goal. Perhaps merely depicting the grisly truth of abortion is enough.

The narrator promises at the outset that her story will be difficult to watch, that it doesn’t come wrapped up in a tidy bow, that it will probably “make you squirm a bit.” And it does. The initial 15 minutes feature Abby’s first experience holding ultrasound tools while a Planned Parenthood doctor performs a surgical abortion. We’re shown the torturous visuals of her own chemical abortion, which she suffers through at home alone in her bathroom. And we witness the bloody aftermath of a botched abortion performed on a teenage girl who didn’t want an abortion in the first place.

None of it is easy to watch. But none of it is a lie.

Lying about abortion is what its defenders do best. There is a legitimate debate about how to balance the competing rights at stake in abortion — the right to life of the unborn human being and his or her mother’s right to autonomy, even over the life inside her.

But that debate can flourish only when the terms are accurately defined, when both sides admit that every abortion takes an innocent human life. Instead of acknowledging that scientific reality, those who support abortion prefer to talk about women’s rights and women’s health care, and bodily autonomy, and reproductive freedom, and the right to choose.

But the right to choose what? That’s what Unplanned shows anyone with the courage to look.

“I saw it,” Abby says after witnessing an abortion on an ultrasound. “And it moved. And it was like it was twisting and fighting for its life. It was this tiny perfect little baby. And then it was just gone.” It was the moment she knew she had to leave Planned Parenthood. Seeing the truth changed everything.

The film takes great pains to reveal the sinister agenda of the Planned Parenthood officials, at times coming across as heavy-handed. But Unplanned is not, ultimately, about Planned Parenthood. It’s about abortion, and about how those who support it so often ignore or deny or obscure its reality.

“At this stage, between six and eight weeks, it’s just fetal matter, a lump of tissue, not much more than a polyp or a blood clot,” Abby tells a pregnant woman while she’s still working at Planned Parenthood. Before her own medical abortion, a nurse assures her the pill won’t do anything more than “gently empty out your uterus.” There are several references to “terminating pregnancies.”

But in the film’s most poignant moments, those euphemisms are punctured. Abby is instructed by her supervisor to join her in the “POC” room. “Do you know what that stands for?” a co-worker asks.

“Products of conception,” Abby replies, using the standard jargon.

Her co-worker smirks: “Pieces of children.”

In the POC room, clinicians carefully count every piece from every aborted fetus, to ensure each one has been safely removed from his or her mother — they have numbered all my bones. We watch as Abby lifts a miniature arm from a petri dish. It is, as promised, difficult to watch.
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There was some debate before Unplanned’s release about whether it deserved its R rating, and it probably did. What does that say about the violence of abortion, that we must be warned to look away?

Those powerful visuals, though, aren’t the film’s most compelling moments. The most haunting shot in Unplanned isn’t the blood on the floor or the abortionist’s scalpel or even that tiny, perfectly formed fetal arm — it’s the ultrasound image of a woman’s empty womb when her abortion procedure is over.

https://www.nationalreview.com...abortion-was-pretty/

Ghouls....