America’s abortion behemoth, Planned Parenthood, has funded a new film that purports to represent what an average woman entering an abortion mill can expect to experience on the sidewalk outside. The overt aim of the film, Across the Line, is to vilify Pro-Life advocates, who are portrayed in the film’s purported “reenactments” as vitriolic and even dangerous.
The Sundance Film Festival, which selected Across the Line for the 2016 Festival, describes the Planned Parenthood-funded film this way:
This immersive VR [virtual reality]experience puts the audience on the scene with anti-abortion extremists trying to intimidate patients seeking sexual and reproductive health care. Using documentary footage and a montage of real audio, viewers gain intimate knowledge of the harassment outside and compassion inside health centers across the country.
In an interview at Sundance, Planned Parenthood’s VP, who is also an Executive Producer of Across the Line, claims that the audio is real, although Planned Parenthood does not appear to attempt to provide any proof of this (i.e., video of the purported protesters taken in conjunction with the audio recordings). The film’s co-creator also reveals that the audio is a montage that was interwoven so that the viewer hears a series of audio clips that were recorded independently of each other and then spliced together.
Can you say “deceptively edited”?
Perpetuating the poorly-supported narrative of Pro-Life hostility through this film (a longstanding objective of the anti-Life movement) is a convenient boon to Planned Parenthood’s marketing efforts, which have undoubtedly been wounded by truth-telling campaigns and Congressional investigative exposés over the past year. In short, the worse Life advocates look to potential abortion clients, the greater chance Planned Parenthood has of making the abortion sale.
The co-creator of the film also bizarrely claims that the film is intended to engender peaceful conversation about the abortion choice, which she believes is hampered by “vitriol and anger” from abortion opponents. However, LifeNews’s Micaiah Bilger astutely observes that such tactics, far from cultivating conversation, serve only to “frighten vulnerable young women away from exploring life-affirming options for their babies and themselves.”
If the audio recordings used in Across the Line are real (though we know they aren’t presented in their original, unedited form), they certainly do not represent normal Pro-Life abortion mill presence. On the contrary, the overwhelmingly vast majority of sidewalk counselors and demonstrators at abortion mills act peacefully and with the well-being of both mother and child in mind. We find irony in the fact that Planned Parenthood feigns concern that the women entering their abortion mills might encounter an impassioned protester when Planned Parenthood commits the ultimate betrayal of women by killing their children for a profit.