Trapped Film Night

The Film Night

The Film Committee in association with the Women’s Caucus collaborated in the screening of Dawn Porter’s Trapped, a powerful and riveting film about women’s right to choose. Trapped relates to how states’ legislation has attempted to restrict women’s access to abortion through the Trap laws, Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers. In the guise of health and safety regulation, these laws were put in place to limit access to abortion clinics. The film focuses on abortion providers and campaigners in three clinics in Texas, Alabama, and Mississippi, where these harsh regulations threaten to close them down.  

When talking about the film in The Guardian, Dawn Porter says, “If you are pro-choice, you can’t be silent. You’re joining people who would disenfranchise people or sentence people to parenthood and take over their bodies.”

Winner of the Sundance Film Festival’s Special Jury Award for Social Impact Filmmaking, this film’s production values are high and the narrative arc is engrossing. The quiet courage of the doctors and staff, who struggle to keep their clinics open in order to provide access for women in desperate need of their services, makes the film an uplifting one, despite the difficult subject matter. 

Trapped was made made shortly before the Supreme Court’s favorable decision in June. It allows us to visit the background to the landmark decision and contemplate what might happen to it after the election. As Robert Reich commented on the BBC after the debate on 20 October, “Trump appealed to the Republican establishment to appoint Supreme Court justices of a ‘conservative’ bent, who would overturn a key ruling that made abortions legal in the U.S. …”  Whereas Hillary Clinton said in the same debate, “The government has no business in the decisions that women make.”  With stark differences between the candidates and the electorate, this issue will not go away. 

Trapped demonstrates how abstract political debate can lead to negative consequences in the lives of both the patients and healthcare professionals. There is a point in the film where we’re told that a clinic is forced to turn away a 13- year- old rape victim who had to travel for four hours to get to her nearest clinic.

As Gloria Gray of the West Alabama Women’s Center in Tuscaloosa, says in the film,  “Closing the clinics is not going to stop abortions. Women are going to have abortions; it’s just that they are not going to be safe and legal.”

About The Film Night Speakers

Allison Gilbert is from Concord, New Hampshire, where she acted as the Community Organizer for NARAL Pro-Choice New Hampshire.  She has a Master’s Degree in Political Communications and has written about feminism and the political unconscious in European and Central European countries. 

Christa Bosch is a lawyer who, until moving to the UK last year, worked in the areas of immigration and human rights.  She served one term each on the New York City Bar Association’s LGBT Rights and Sex and the Law Committees, where she worked on issues including marriage equality, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, comprehensive sex education and reproductive rights. Her earlier legal experience includes work at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and research on sexual violence in armed conflict and the laws of war. Christa started her career as sexual health educator and clinic worker for Planned Parenthood of Northeast Pennsylvania.  She earned her BA in Government from Smith College and her JD from Suffolk University Law School.

Nick Beard is a doctoral candidate at the University of Sussex in law and sociology. A native of Wilmington, Delaware, Nick was active with Planned Parenthood of Delaware.  One of her fondest teenage memories was attending the 2004 March to Save Women’s Lives and feeling the shared passion of women to protect abortion rights. Nick later became involved in the Irish choice movement as an undergraduate at Trinity College Dublin. Nick is currently a phones and social media assistant for the Abortion Support Network, which helps women in Ireland and Northern Ireland travel to Britain to access abortion services.