As the abortion industry struggles to stay relevant to the increasingly Pro-Life mainstream, they turn to indie film and theater with a consistent cultural message: that Pro-Lifers are bad/weird/stupid, and that people should feel sorry for the abortion industry. Productions such as MOM BABY GOD, After Tiller, Obvious Child, Grandma, Misconception and, now, Trapped, have all been created with this flavor of abortion advocacy in mind.
Trapped is named for the ominous-sounding nickname that abortion zealots have given Pro-Life health and safety laws: TRAP laws, or “targeted regulation of abortion providers.” These laws, including the provisions of House Bill 2 which require abortionists to possess hospital admitting privileges and abortion mills to meet the safety standards of legitimate medical facilities, are a bane to the abortionist’s existence. You can watch the trailer for the documentary here.
In keeping with the doc’s predictability, Wendy Davis is circuiting to promote the propaganda piece. Good timing, too: with key safety provisions of HB 2 headed to the Supreme Court of the United States next week, abortion rhetoric needs help from someone who has proven herself willing to stand for death even when confronted head-on with legion evidence that her position hurts women.
Ambulatory surgical center (ASC) regulations appear to be the main focus of the TRAP laws scrutinized by the documentary. These regulations, which gained traction after the public learned that abortionist Kermit Gosnell was butchering women in his “house of horrors” doctor’s office-style abortion mill. ASC safety requirements cut deeply into profit margins by requiring abortionists to upgrade or relocate their facilities to safer locales – locales the abortionists inexplicably chose not to utilize from the inception of their abortion businesses in spite of the documented risks associated with operating surgical abortion mills out of doctor’s office settings.
In spite of the abortion industry’s predictable wordplay surrounding the laws, the rules exist solely to protect women. Further weakening the abortion industry’s attempt to blame Pro-Life advocates for trying to “block access” to abortion is the fact that so-called TRAP laws do nothing to protect the preborn. They exist to protect the health and safety of women seeking elective abortions. There is intense irony in the abortion industry’s attack on women’s health and safety, since that is exactly what they purport to stand for. In fact, documentaries like Trapped simply substantiate the belief that abortion workers are more concerned about profit than women’s health.
And where profit is concerned, there is a lot at stake. An abortionist featured prominently in the film, Willie Parker, travels between Chicago and Mississippi, committing abortions in both locales. In Mississippi, Parker commits 45 abortions per day. With an average price tag of $500 to $1,500 (with later abortions costing $10,000 or more), Parker would stand to lose his share of tens of thousands of dollars every day if one of his abortion mills closed.
Likewise, Whole Women’s Health abortion chain owner Amy Hagstrom Miller is featured. She can be seen in the trailer peddling the fallacious argument that no one benefits from health and safety laws surrounding abortion (“I just want more people to start asking who’s benefiting. Who benefits?”) So, while a steady stream of abortion-promoting documentaries are busy casting abortion mill owners, workers, and abortionists as “heroic” and “courageous” “champions of women’s health,” consider the outrageous amounts of money their “heroism” demands.
To obfuscate the profit motive, abortionists and their accomplices in the media subvert the conversation in two ways: they galvanize activist-types by framing dialogue around the so-called “right” to “reproductive healthcare” (aka abortion, abortion, abortion), and they rally sympathy for industry cronies rebranded as heroic medical practitioners. The rhetoric is a sham, plain and simple. Sophistry – no matter how clever – can never explain away the blood of millions of children and the betrayal of countless women at the hands of the abortion industry.