Protests against award for pro-abortion British film

Madrid, Spain, Sep 13, 2004 / 22:00 pm

The Associations of Victims of Abortion in Spain lamented this week that the Venice Film Festival gave its top award to a film that does not tell the whole truth about abortion.

The film which won this year’s Golden Lion is “Vera Drake,” a story about a midwife who performed clandestine abortions in London in the 1950s.  Last Saturday during the awards ceremony, the films director, Mike Leigh, said he was in favor “of a woman’s right to choose if she wants to have a child or not anywhere on the planet.”

The Association said the film does not show the truth about abortion nor all of its implications, and that therefore it is a misleading promotion of the procedure.

“When there is no true information about what happens after an abortion and about other real alternatives, there is no freedom, but instead pressure from society and the State towards that one way out,” the group said in a statement. 

According to the Association’s president, Carmina Garcia-Valdes, “by presenting Vera Drake in this film as a good person, a gentle mother and a helpful neighbor, one can get the wrong message that abortion is something good for women, when we know today that it has grave physical and physiological consequences that have been scientifically proven.”