Trapped is an eighty-one minute documentary about how TRAP (“Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers”) Laws affect medical professionals and their patients. While it is a preach to the choir film, because it primarily focuses on the lives of American individuals, not the theoretical, political debate, any viewer drawn to human interest stories should like it regardless of his or her political views.
Trapped is a popular title for films so if you are interested in seeing this documentary, you can also find it by searching for Independent Lens: Trapped because after it was released in theaters, the movie aired on PBS. It was made in 2016, and Dawn Porter directed it. I did not know about Porter before watching this film, but she is an attorney turned filmmaker and a black woman. How cool is she?
Trapped does not make this point, but I am curious whether or not the same people in favor of regulations that don’t actually promote the health of the patient would probably be the same people who hate regulations in other contexts such as the oil industry, which actually would promote public safety. Businesses are privileged over and have more rights than actual people. To be fair, the regulators think anything is fair game because the purpose is to save a theoretical life, which is only laudable if that theoretical life is equally valued and protected once the child is born and becomes a living, breathing person in the real world.
Trapped primarily focuses on clinics in Texas, Alabama and Mississippi—states where TRAP laws have successfully been passed and implemented although the legality of these laws are being challenged in court because they impose an undue burden. The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) defined an under burden by explaining that while abortion may be legal, the clinics are so heavily regulated in unnecessary ways that it is too expensive or impossible for them to exist, which is the point; thus making abortion nonexistent. For these states, the last hope is in the courts.
Going to a judge to fight these regulations or to ask for consent to get an abortion theoretically sound like reasonable exceptions until you think about the reality of it. Trapped was filmed before the nation knew about Roy Moore, who ran to become US Senator for Alabama. This documentary ages very well with the benefit of hindsight. Moore was one of those judges that women or underage girls would have to go to for permission to get an abortion. So if the allegations about his behavior are accurate, these regulations are the equivalent of having a fox guarding the hen house. It is one stop shopping for an alleged predator. Vulnerable women and girls come to predators in power so the predators in power doesn’t even have to look for them then the same alleged predator has more power over their bodies and can give them permission to have an abortion when it suits him. If he is not interested in them, he can get on his hypocritical high horse and lecture them about their behavior, and they just have to take it because he is an authority figure without having the reciprocity of scrutiny on his life. We know that when the tables are turned and the lives of those in power are put under a magnifying glass, despite the advantages of money, power and status, they flounder worse than those that they are used to ruling over. Now imagine that each citizen in the US must rely on a justice who has a similar shadow over his life in the highest court in the land. I didn’t know that we had kangaroos outside of zoos in the US. It is galling and highlights that our justice system is only as good as the people who serve it and as imperfect and fallible as any human being, especially in states in which the judicial branch is also an elected one, not appointed, so vulnerable to popular opinion and majority rule when judges are supposed to be objective and rooted in the law.
Trapped gets viewers invested by profiling the women who go to the clinics, the people who work at the clinics, specifically Dr. Willie Parker, a Christian black man who regularly attends church and chose to move to one of the TRAP law states so abortions can still be available to women in that region. Some people love to say that they don’t see race or correctly claim that there is only the human race yet somehow I suspect that if one drew a Venn diagram of those people and the protesters who are outside the clinic, there would be considerable overlap. The protesters love to throw in Dr. Parker’s face that he is black and claim that he is killing black babies. If those babies got just slightly older, some of those same protestors would be looking for any rationale why it is totally legal and rational to kill those black babies for walking with a bag of skittles while wearing a hoodie.
Trapped was filmed during 2013. The medical professionals are ordinary people and mostly Southern, which means that the long-term professional relationship with the government agencies has suddenly soured, and they don’t know how to adjust. They seem shocked by it. It is that fake niceness and insidious cultivation of polite society that had one clinic owner feeling reluctant to fight back through litigation because she felt as if she was attacking the people that she knew while not immediately recognizing that they did not have any similar qualms about destroying her life or the lives of others. People who attack first always expect you to thank them for hurting them and if you do not, they clutch their pearls and talk about their feelings. Frack your feelings! These legislators are destroying someone’s ability to earn a living and provide legal services to the public.
My mom is pro life, and she enjoyed this documentary as much as I did although I doubt that it changed her mind. I enjoyed it, but it is too depressing to think of one of the many passing stories in Trapped of the underage girl who was gang raped and probably had to have that baby because the clinic had to turn away people. This documentary may have raised awareness, but I don’t think that it will change lives or minds. How can you tell people that they need Jesus if they think that they already have Him and are doing His work by interfering in people’s lives more than He did?