Director Dawn Porter has made a name for herself as a documentarian interested in fighting injustice with her camera. Her documentary Gideon’s Army focused on three public defenders and received raves and several awards, and her fascinating Spies of Mississippi exposed an anti-civil rights spy agency in Mississippi, a dark and little-known part of civil rights history.
The former attorney and owner of Trilogy Films returns to Mississippi (as well as Alabama and Texas) for her latest documentary, Trapped. Focusing on TRAP laws (Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers), the film is a compelling look at the frustrating and devastating additional hurdles patients and provers have to take in order to obtain legal abortions in these states and the Supreme Court case trying to fight them. Porter’s film begins its release this week and will screen in Texas next week as part of the SXSW festival—perfect timing for Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt Supreme Court Case, currently hearing arguments in Washington.
Lesley Coffin (TMS): First of all, congratulations on the SXSW screening coming up. Seems especially fitting considering Texas is one of the state’s highlighted.
Dawn Porter: Yeah, we are incredibly excited. And not only because it is a great festival, but one of our main characters is from there and we are going to try to have her at some of the screenings.
TMS: How did this topic for a documentary first come to your attention?
Porter: I was traveling through Mississippi, working on another film. And I read in the paper that there is only one abortion clinic in the state. And I just couldn’t believe what I had just read, so I called them up and said, “Can I come over and talk to you about this.” And they were starting to get some press interested to begin with, because of that case you mentioned, so this wasn’t a crazy request. But I met Dr. Parker and started the conversation that went on through lunch, and hearing about what he did and what his life had been like because of these laws, and I was just amazed that a doctor that lived in Chicago would come to Mississippi because there weren’t enough doctors. And initially, I was just interested in telling his story and making a character based story. And he asked me to come to Chicago to meet with him, and we just started filming. But the thing about making a documentary is, you have to go where your curiosity takes you and you really can’t have a grand plan. And interesting things kept happening and interesting people kept popping up.
TMS: Just for my timeline, when you started filming, did they know the courts were going to hear the case?
Porter: No. To back-up a little bit, I made contact early on with the Center for Reproductive Rights. And I’m a lawyer and know the process of cases. And at the time, the center was litigating 14 different cases across the country. And I did an interview with Nancy who said, and I’ll never forget this, “in due time one of these cases will go before the Supreme Court, but there is no way of knowing which one it will be.” They had a guess, but they couldn’t have known, so I just had to follow them. And after a little while it became clear that Texas would be that case, although they were also very focused on Alabama. So I had no idea which case would be heard, so we just got lucky that we had a film that happened to feature the people that would go on to argue the most important case at the Supreme Court.
TMS: Had you heard about TRAP laws before? They are under reported on a national level.
Porter: I had not heard about them at all, which I’m almost ashamed to say. Because I’m a woman who is pro-choice and politically active, but learning that these laws were being passed just floored me. And to tell the truth, I was really interested politically in how this could be happening. How can states intentionally pass laws which intentionally seem to violate the constitution? So if you are a lawyer geek, that is very interesting, and I also happened to find these fascinating real-life characters living through this reality. But I had no idea about these laws until I met Dr. Parker and the clinic owners.
TMS: You have the footage of the filibuster with Wendy Davis that took place, and she points out that the people voting on the law and the people in the audience cheering for her don’t make up the same demographics. Is there a statistical correlation on the gender make-up of state representatives where these laws are passed?
Porter: I’m not sure about the numbers, but I am positive that in 2008 President Obama was elected, and then in 2010 there was a very conservative Tea Party representative elected to state government. And it is very clear that that correlates with the increasing popularity of these laws. They made one of their first objectives to overturn Roe v Wade, which is why there are hundreds of laws being passed over that 6 year period. That Tea Party objective made an impact, which tells you how important midterm elections are. If you elect a member of a very determined group with an ideology and they are empowered by state government, they can create havoc.
TMS: When working on the film, did you try to contact some of the people behind these laws to include their rational?
Porter: We contacted every legislator from Alabama, Texas, and Mississippi. And everyone turned us down except for one person, but by the time he said yes, our film had moved on and we didn’t have it in our schedule to go back. But I thought it would have been nice to hear in their own words a defense of these laws, but then we found footage of a legislator in Mississippi speaking on the floor, and he was pretty clear in his defense of these laws.
TMS: The film makes the point that the people who being affected by these laws the most are predominately young women of color who come from low income families and who either can’t afford to have a child or already have children and can’t afford to have another. And it is so hard to hear about the added hardships they are burdened with in order to obtain an abortion. How did you react to that information when that is stated in the film?
Porter: I was shocked and outraged that it is often the people who have the least political power who are the most impacted. And that is part of the reason I wanted to call the movie Trapped. Of course the laws are called TRAPs, but I feel the women are being trapped. They are often uninsured or underinsured, have little access to birth control and medical care. So they are were women who, because birth control pills are so expensive, would try taking the pill every other day or are women who used birth control at considerable personal expense, and it failed and now they’re stuck. There is nothing like watching someone you know without much money for food and rent that then has to count out $400 to pay for an abortion because she can’t feed the family she already has. It filled me with a deep anger. And the other thing that became so clear is, when you look at this beautiful, shiny operating room they have set up in Texas during our healthcare crisis, there seems to be so much waste. Because no one will build a facility like that one in a poor neighborhood, so they simply won’t have an abortion clinic there at all. And Texas has all kinds of terrible disparities in health care and education, and to pass laws which require medical resources be wasted is maddening.
TMS: And it should be mentioned that TRAP laws are specifically laws which pertain only to abortion clinics, so they aren’t new medical standards for all doctors which happen to affect abortion, they single out abortions. There was something about the language in these laws which reminded me of some of the laws passed before the Supreme Court ruled on Same-Sex Marriage, and the laws seem so blatantly unfair and might end up helping define these as clearly unconstitutional. To me, they seemed like clear violations of civil liberties, but do you think of this as a civil rights issue?
Porter: It’s interesting, because the right to an abortion is grounded in the right to privacy rather than equal protection. So it falls under the 14th Amendment. If we had passed the Equal Rights Amendment, the conversation would be completely different. It would be about a woman’s right to control her own future, instead of privacy. And falling under the right to privacy makes abortion seem like something we should be ashamed of. So while I’m not part of the litigation, I don’t see this as a civil rights action because we don’t have that Equal Rights Amendment in the Constitution. So at this point, the way the legal arguments are being shaped are under those rights to privacy. But you are exactly right that he glaring and obvious disregard for the law is a big mistake on the part of anti-choice activists. And this will remind people, the same way we saw legislators making laws that violated the rights of gays and lesbians, when the people passing the laws say “I want to stop abortion” they make it clear that these are not laws for health and safety, they are laws for a different political purpose. And that is a good thing if you are pro-choice, because the courts do not accept that as a legitimate reason.
TMS: Because the topic of abortion can be so controversial, personal and even threatening, did you have difficulty finding people to participate?
Porter: It was definitely difficult to find women to speak with us and we understood that and never pushed. We would ask them when they came in, and if they said no, we did not ask again. Which is unusual for a filmmaker, because we are usually pushy. But this is not something to be pushy about. We were the interlopers at a medical office. A number of clinic people were fine and happy to participate, although some of them had families that didn’t know where exactly they worked and asked not to be on camera, and we respected that. And some were legitimately afraid for their safety. But I was really heartened to have so many employees say we could film them and say they were proud of what they do. But it was mostly the women coming in who said no, because not everyone but some were in a state of crisis or trauma at the time and didn’t want a filmmaker in their face, which I completely understood. But I’m so grateful to the women who did open up on camera, because people have a strong reaction to their stories. And one of the things I’ve noticed are how emotional people are getting during the screenings, more than I thought they would.
Lesley Coffin is a New York transplant from the midwest. She is the New York-based writer/podcast editor for Filmoria and film contributor at The Interrobang. When not doing that, she’s writing books on classic Hollywood, including Lew Ayres: Hollywood’s Conscientious Objector and her new book Hitchcock’s Stars: Alfred Hitchcock and the Hollywood Studio System.
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