My husband and I just got back from seeing the Gosnell movie. It was better than I expected it to be. We had the theater all to ourselves, which (although bad for movie sales) was kind of nice because we didn’t have to worry about talking when we had a comment to make.
In the interest of full disclosure, I made a contribution to Indigogo in May 2014 to help fund this movie, in exchange for a DVD.
For people who don’t know, Kermit Gosnell ran an abortion clinic in Philadelphia for decades. He went to trial in 2013 after a raid on his facility, which was meant to find drug trafficking (writing scripts for things like Oxycontin and percocet), discovered a dirty, dangerous facility with the bodies of dead fetuses lying in refrigerators and on the floor.
What I found most interesting about this movie was that it wasn’t necessarily a pro-life or pro-choice movie. It stuck to the facts of the case and didn’t seem to make a judgement either way. I would like to think that very few people would be on Mr. Gosnell’s side. If you’re pro-life, then you wouldn’t really want him practicing, but if you’re pro-choice, then do you really want women going to an unsafe facility which spread STDs and killed at least one patient?
I really liked how they showed the condition of the facility. This is the first part where I was really glad that my husband and I were the only people in the theater. There were cats roaming the facility (one agent serving the warrant stepped on cat feces). Trash was all over the place. When they opened the fridge, there were biohazard bags in there along with milk cartons. This movie is not for the squeamish.
Later, the police serve a warrant in Gosnell’s house. His personal home was really bad as well (minus the cat feces and blood). When investigators went into his basement, there was a dead cat on the floor covered with bugs. They had to run out of the place. This part was like watching a horror movie (perfect for October viewing). Gosnell isn’t a horror movie, and there is a lot of courtroom stuff that goes on later in the movie, but this part did feel like one.
After watching this movie, I feel a little sorry for the guy, even though he did some evil things. I think he’s slightly insane. There were many times when he’d admit to something without realizing the wrongness of it. One example: he mentioned that the cats in his facility got over 100 dead mice for him. He expressed concern for his turtles, which he admitted (in court) were endangered species. As they raided his home, he played the piano like nothing was going on. He thought he was doing the women in his community a favor because he would take on riskier abortion procedures (even though they were illegal).
I thought Gosnell was well-done and I’m glad I went to go see it. I think they tried to make the story as true-to-life as possible. During the credits, they showed actual footage of the filthy clinic, Gosnell playing piano while his home was being raided, the refrigerator, the jars of baby feet that were kept in a cupboard and other actual pictures from the case. It’s too bad that more people aren’t seeing the movie, and might see it as controversial. There shouldn’t be anything controversial about wanting people to have access to safe, clean medical facilities.
That leads me to the other Legendy part of my day. It really was a great day for me. I participated in Camp NaNoWriMo this year, with a goal of 20,000 words. I also decided to do a fun little (okay, little is a little bit of a misnomer) challenge over at the Archive of Our Own Writers Group over on Facebook. They had a little game called “fandom roulette” where they would roll a specific type of story for me to write. I was challenged to write a gen fusion fic in my current fandom.