c. 1997 Cox News Service
In one key scene in ``Citizen Ruth,'' Laura Dern takes a rarepause from the poverty and drug-ravaged jumble of her life andenjoys a hot bath. She looks at her long, skinny feet and tries tomake sense of the quizzical appendages, closing one eye, then theother. The point is that it's all a matter of perspective.
Now, take that point and apply it to the most galvanizing issuefacing America today—the abortion debate—and you have ``CitizenRuth,'' a rich, wry and rewarding effort from first-time directorAlexander Payne.
In a way, Payne has created a movie that says everything aboutthe struggle between abortion opponents and abortion rightssupporters at the same time as it ignores the matter completely.For Citizen Ruth is not so much about abortion as it is aboutfanaticism, the forces that drive people to take sides and theprocesses that result from their partisanship.
But if that sounds awfully weighty, rest assured: Payne, whoalso co-wrote the generally amusing script with Jim Tay, lightensthe load considerably. He gives us a protagonist, Ruth Stoops(Dern), who symbolizes the opposite of commitment to a cause. Sheis crude, rude and reckless, an anti-heroine of trailer-trashproportions. She is also the film's satirical center of gravity.
When we first meet Ruth, she stoops very low indeed. In thefluid opening sequence, she manages to sleep with her greasysometime boyfriend, pry a few bucks from her brother and inhale apaper bag of aerosol fumes, her preferred cheap high. All thisresults in her arrest—and her discovery that she's pregnant forthe umpteenth time. A judge hints that unless she has an abortion,she could be subject to a test-case conviction for endangering herfetus.
Enter the abortion opponents, led by Gail Stoney (Mary KayPlace), a twisted saint of suburbia. She brings Ruth to a``clinic,'' where a fake doctor and nurse nearly convince her tokeep her unborn child. But Ruth ends up in the hands of a renegadegroup of abortion rights supporters, led by Diane Sieglar (SwoosieKurtz), a righteous earth mother sort.
The clash of the abortion titans proceeds from there. For everyoutrageous yin, Payne comes up with a bizarre yang. While Stoneyand her cohorts sing protest songs that resemble flaccid hymns,Sieglar and her lesbian lover offer a paean to the moon goddess.It's an equal opportunity spectacle in which the real issue _Ruth's future—becomes obscured and trivialized. If you haven'tgot the message, Payne's brilliant conclusion brings it all home.
As does Dern's performance. Looking much younger than her 29years, the wiry actress smartly avoids making Ruth a sympatheticcharacter. Instead, she's a self-interested whiner, incapable ofunderstanding the consequences of her actions. As she goes back andforth between sides, she soaks up ideology like an old kitchensponge absorbs water—that is to say, just barely.
But there's still something terribly real and desperate aboutRuth that Dern captures—and that Payne then nicely contrasts byeliciting appropriately cartoonish performances from Place andKurtz and their followers. Burt Reynolds also has an effectivecameo as a well-groomed abortion opponent, televangelist type.
At times, Payne's fresh-from-film-school auteurism rears itsamateur head. That scene in the bathtub is mirrored one too manytimes. Other devices, particularly close-ups, become similarlyrepetitive. But Citizen Ruth is a bold statement about a subjectthat's been mostly ignored by filmmakers. One can hardly wait forthe young director to tackle another hot-button issue.
(Charles Passy writes for The Palm Beach Post.)
c.1997 San Francisco Examiner<
SAN FRANCISCO—Partial-birth abortion is not about saving life.Partial-birth abortion is about killing—Rep. Henry Hyde, R-Ill.
This Republican Congress doesn't want a ban—it wants an issue.This isn't about abortion, this is about election-year politics _Rep. Nita Lowey, D-N.Y.
Because the so-called debate is taking place in a grandstanding,male-dominated Congress, it isn't easy to determine just what theargument over late-term abortion is about.
Killing babies? Or a monstrous invasion of privacy during anuncommon but horrible time in the lives of a few thousand women?
The issue is stupefyingly simple if you listen to members ofCongress—most of them Republicans—who lead the fight tocriminalize a heartbreaking abortion procedure known as intactdilation and extraction: For reasons of no interest, an unspecifiednumber of women are simply choosing to murder their own babies intheir wombs. The doctors who help them do this (for whatever theirreasons) are criminals and should be imprisoned.
While the members of Congress can't be bothered with the whybehind intact dilation and extraction, they are extremelyinterested in the how. In hammering home their ``pro-life'' point,they meticulously lay out the details of a last-resort medicalprocedure that is a living nightmare to the women who undergo it.
Nowhere in their repeated descriptions, in their exhortationsagainst murder and inhumanity is an ounce of curiosity about thepregnant woman—let alone any consideration of her as somethingmore complex than a container.
But understand, the woman is an adult female who wants a baby. Awoman who hopefully and joyfully carries a developing fetus in herwomb until she finds out—well into the last third of herpregnancy—that the baby is so deformed, her trusted physicianadvises abortion.
The physician is a doctor who went to medical school and decidedto specialize in obstetrics and gynecology. A woman or man who tookthe Hippocratic oath to do no harm, and who, each day, saves lives,heals and brings children into the world.
Together, the pregnant woman and her doctor weigh their horribledilemma and ultimately choose what seems the lesser of a pair ofguaranteed horrors.
If this emotional process were not trauma enough, the woman andphysician must go through the motions of delivery. The woman'sseverely malformed baby is pulled feet first from her womb, throughthe birth canal and far enough out of her vagina so the doctor canextract the fetal brain, causing a collapse of the skull.
Pro-life or pro-choice, no one on the face of the Earth can callthis procedure anything but hideous.
And yet, the most vociferous ``pro-life'' members of Congresswould have us believe that they are the only people who recognizeand understand the hideousness. Thus they are the people who aremorally qualified to legislate what a woman may or may not do witha pregnancy gone terribly wrong.
What does that demand that we believe about women who choosethis terrible procedure?
We must believe that they are utterly out of touch with not onlytheir maternal instincts but with their humanity. That, at best,they are astoundingly ignorant; at worst, they are monstrouslyselfish.
Likewise, we must believe that the physicians who tend to thewomen have no heart. No reverence for life. That they, who bringlife into the world, are plain blind to the gravity of what they dowhen they perform a late-term abortion.
If we can imagine all that and believe it, then the ``pro-life''legislators are right: The issue of late-term abortion is simple;it's about immorality and crime. And lawmakers thus have everyright to fight their moral battle inside the bodies of a fewthousand most unfortunate women.
^Stephanie Salter is an Examiner columnist.@
c.1997 The Arizona Republic (Undated)—Those who commit acts of conscience on either sideof the abortion debate deserve credit for showing the gumption toget involved: Too many Americans let the events of the world washover them like an uncontrollable tide. But people who use their constitutionally given rights to walktheir talk have duties as well as rights. These are the kind of moral duties that anti- abortion protesterstalk about when they say women should ponder the beating heart thatis silenced during an abortion. These are duties that members of the anti-abortion groupOperation Rescue forgot when they launched a thoughtless nationwidecampaign earlier this month. The strategy involves standing in front of high schools beforeclass with large, graphic pictures of dismembered fetuses. The purpose, says local Operation Rescue volunteer Jim Kaiser,is education. ``We're showing the truth about abortion.`` Why show it to a captive audience of children who are reporting,as required by law, to school? An audience that includes childrenwho are not even sexually active? Children who might not beemotionally ready to see such disturbing pictures? ``It's easier to educate them at that level than at theclinic,`` says Kaiser, a man who hopes the hideous image on his3-by-5 foot poster is ``burned into their minds.`` Kaiser and three volunteers began their ``education`` in frontof Mesa High School on Monday. He says they will continue atdifferent schools until the end of the school year. Jim Weinstein, professor of law at Arizona State University,says Operation Rescue has a ``valid and strong First Amendmentright`` to do what it is doing. Weinstein is a free-speech expertwho supports choice, but has defended the rights of abortionprotesters. He says, ``It is at least possible that they are nottrying to offend people . . . they are trying to pursuade.`` But their efforts at pursuasion for the sake of the fetus showan offensive lack of respect for children. Children are bombarded with violent images from popular culture.Many attend schools where the halls are warzones. They don't needany more graphic images of violence thrust into their faces. ``Children can become emotionally desensitized,`` says MichaelBell. He is a professor of early childhood education at theUniversity of Houston at Clear Lake. He is also a formeradministrator of early childhood programs for Fife Symington'sGovernor's Office of Children. Bell says the images on Operation Rescue's posters are ``onemore piece (of violence) that children don't need to see in theirlives, one more shock to their consciousness.`` It shouldn't take a degree in early childhood education tofigure that out. And it didn't. Kaiser knows his posters mightfrighten children, especially young ones. ``Personally I don't think it's something a 5-year-old shouldhave to look at,`` Kaiser says. When young children do see whathe's displaying, ``the mother has to explain it away,`` he says. That callous answer reveals a disturbing disregard for childrenand parents. Why should any mother be forced to engage in adiscussion of abortion with her kindergartener? How dare ananti-abortion rights group decide that its message is moreimportant than a parent's desire to keep early childhood innocentof such horrors? The Constitution gives Operation Rescue the right to beoffensive. I wouldn't deny or alter that right. But earning a spoton the moral high ground requires more than a cursory thought tothe consequences of one's behavior. Go back to SOCIOLOGY 260 -- Sociology of Marriage and the Family Page If you have any questions or comments please email:OPERATION RESCUE STUNT HURTS CHILDREN
By LINDA VALDEZ<