In the wake of the True/False Film Fest, the directors of “After Tiller” — a film documenting the lives of the few doctors in the country who perform late-term abortions — participated in a panel on Monday in Stotler Lounge.
“After Tiller” directors Lana Wilson and Martha Shane joined psychology professor Phillip Wood and spiritual leader Nancy TannerThies for the discussion, which sought to open a dialogue about the reproductive rights of women in America.
“Since the assassination of Dr. George Tiller in Kansas in 2009, only four doctors in the United States continue to perform third-trimester abortions,” the film’s [website](http://aftertillermovie.com) stated.
The panel was sponsored by Planned Parenthood, Faith Aloud, Missouri NOW, MU’s School of Social Work, Law Students for Reproductive Justice, the Women and Gender Studies Department and the Feminist Student Union.
“I feel like we’re so caught up in ‘You’re pro-choice’ or ‘You’re pro life’ and, you know, most people are somewhere in the middle,” Wilson said.
Each speaker brought their own thoughts on abortion. TannerThies spoke from a spiritual point of view and discussed how each person’s worldview is colored by their religion.
“When we begin to struggle with life and death issues, our religious perspective is primary in how we do that,” TannerThies said. “When we cast doctors with broad strokes, we don’t see their personal struggles. When we cast patients with broad strokes, we don’t see their personal struggles, and for me that’s the point where religion is part of the whole thing.”
TannerThies said Barry Johnson’s “Polarity Management: Identifying and Managing Unsolvable Problems” has helped her to reconcile the opinions of the pro-choice and pro-life movements.
“There’s not going to be some beautiful consensus about what we ought to do,” TannerThies said. “I need to be compassionate and open to conversation and try to find ways not to be confrontational, but to be open to that exchange that comes from managing polarities.”
Wood spoke of his personal experience with late-term abortion and his encounter with Dr. Tiller. Wood and his wife, after visiting doctors in three states, were told that their unborn twins would not survive. At 22 weeks, Wood’s wife was left with very few options, the nearest of which to their Columbia home was Tiller.
“I was used to these hushed, quiet tones,” Wood said. “His first words to my wife were, ‘My God! What did you do, swallow a basketball?’”
This incited raucous laughter from an otherwise somber crowd. The directors said they hope to use the film not only as a piece of storytelling but also to educate people on the issue of third trimester abortions.
“There’s been a kind of vacuum around this, and when there’s a vacuum it just gets filled in,” Wilson said. “The anti-abortion movement’s just been a lot more aggressive with the media and getting stuff out there.”
Both Wilson and Shane said they hope to release the film into classrooms, saying their distributor had made plans to make the film available to colleges and universities before releasing it on DVD.
“We came to it with the curiosity about what type of people these doctors were, more than the advocacy agenda,” Wilson said. “I think it’s about humanizing the doctors.”
Wilson mentioned her excitement at screening the film to increasingly diverse audiences, and how each could use its human stories to cross partisan lines.
“Life is complicated, and I think we all know that personally, but it doesn’t always help for advocacy platforms,” Wilson said. “As you see in the film, these aren’t black and white cases. It’s very gray, and that’s just the reality of women’s lives.”
