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“UnPlanned” Movie Shows Unvarnished Reality of Abortion

By Julie Roys

I’ll never forget my friend’s description of what happened after her abortion. She said she got wheeled into a room on a gurney. And there in that room were eight to nine other women on gurneys who had also just had abortions. And all of them were crying—hard.

That’s what abortion is like. It’s not a warm, fuzzy experience like the abortion counselor who filmed her abortion and posted it online wants the public to believe. Abortion is almost always lonely. Filled with sorrow. And gut-wrenchingly tragic.

That’s the unvarnished truth presented in the new movie Unplanned. The film, which is set to release in theaters March 29, tells the story of Abby Johnson—a Planned Parenthood director who became a pro-life activist after witnessing an ultrasound-guided abortion in 2009.

Johnson’s description of that experience in her book, Unplanned, is gripping. But it’s especially powerful in the movie, which I saw earlier this week at a pre-screening hosted by the Illinois Family Institute and 40 Days for Life.

In the movie, we see what Johnson saw—an ultrasound image of a baby in its mother’s womb. Then we see an ultrasound image of a suction tube enter the womb, dismember the baby, and suction it out.

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It’s horrifying. This isn’t a movie you watch with a bucket of popcorn. It’s one you watch while emptying the Kleenex from your purse or wiping your eyes on your shirtsleeves. But this is a movie Americans need to see if we’re ever going to end the abortion holocaust.

[pullquote]”This isn’t a movie you watch with a bucket of popcorn. It’s one you watch while emptying the Kleenex from your purse or wiping your eyes on your shirtsleeves. But it’s a movie Americans need to see . . . “[/pullquote]An equally horrifying reality the movie depicts is the toll abortion takes on the women who have abortions. We see Johnson writhing in pain and bleeding on her bathroom floor after her chemically-induced abortion. We see women and girls, some of them looking no older than 12 or 13, slumped in chairs after their surgical abortions with no one to care or comfort them.

In perhaps one of the most tense sequences in the movie, we see a young girl, whose uterus was perforated during her abortion, almost bleed to death as a doctor scrambles to fix his mistake. Meanwhile Johnson is told by her supervisor to fabricate a story to calm the frightened father who’s waiting in the lobby.

As Shawn Carney, the founder of 40 Days for Life who attended the pre-screening, told us, these are not fabricated stories. They’re dramatizations of real-life events. A couple of events are slightly modified. But everything in the movie is real.

Carney is part of the film, as well. He and his wife launched 40 Days for Life—a prolife group that stages 40-day prayer vigils—at the clinic where Johnson worked in Bryan/College Station, Texas. The film shows the group’s tireless and compassionate efforts to win the hearts and minds of both women getting abortions and those working in the abortion industry. And this group has been extremely successful.

Not only did Johnson quit her clinic during a 40 Days for Life vigil. The clinic where Johnson worked eventually closed, largely due to Carney and other 40 Days for Life volunteers. All this is depicted in the movie and gives it a wonderfully redemptive ending.

Something that’s not depicted, however, is the real-life story of actress Ashley Bratcher, who plays Abby Johnson in Unplanned. In an interview with Fox News, an emotional Bratcher told Host Martha MacCallum that during the filming of the movie, her mother told her a secret that her mother had never divulged before—that she had almost aborted Bratcher. Bratcher said her mother was actually on a table, being examined by a nurse, when she decided not to go through with the procedure.

“I get emotional every time I tell this story,” Bratcher said, “because I don’t know that it’s ever going to go away, when you look at your life and you think that everything you’ve experienced almost never happened—just within a few seconds, a few minutes.”  

Video of Bracher’s Interview with Fox News Host Martha MacCallum:

The stakes are so high with abortion. And that’s why this movie is so crucially important. Every year, about 900,000 abortions take place in the U.S. That’s 900,000 girls and boys whose lives are erased in an instant.

The movie received an R-rating from the Motion Picture Association of America. Carney says he believes the rating was a calculated move to deter Christians from seeing the movie. But he says the strategy has backfired.

“We got great, great media coverage from it being rated R,” Carney said. “I’m glad it’s rated-R. Planned Parenthood is rated R. Abortion is rated R.”

Carney is right. Abortion is both violent and evil and a movie that whitewashed that reality would be lying. Certainly, the movie isn’t for younger children. But I plan on seeing it again—this time with my teenage daughter and as many of her friends as we can get to join us.

The movie is scheduled to release in over 1,000 theaters. That’s 600 more than the pro-life movie, Gosnell, and 200 more than God’s Not Dead. (Interestingly, Unplanned was co-written by Cary Solomon and Chuck Konzelman who also wrote God’s Not Dead.)

Carney said his group also hopes that 300 churches and pro-life groups will host private theater buyout events the night before the movie’s official opening. Currently, the group said it needs to raise about $100,000 before the end of the week to hit that goal.

For more information on Unplanned, click here

Unplanned trailer:

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9 Responses

  1. I’m glad you’re promoting this, Julie. Illinoisans especially need to see this, in light of the disturbing abortion laws proposed by democratic Illinois representatives which propose abortion at all stages—the killing of babies, let’s be real—in the name of “health”. I am hoping and praying this will stir up the prolife movement in Illinois because the IL govt has promoted enough corruption. The state has no much potential and they don’t need this in their legacy.

  2. What has not been discussed in the popular press with respect to late term abortions:
    1. In general, it is not in the interest of the health of the mother. The third trimester uterus is primed for delivery and not abortion. The risk of uterine injury is high. There are rare conditions where it might be in the health interests of mother (profound auto-immune disasters, accident, cancer) but those conditions are rare.
    2. While everyone was high fiving the passage of late term abortion in NY, there was NO discussion of the fact that to pass this law, the NY lawmakers had to rewrite the penal code for homicide in NY. Homicide used to apply to persons that included a baby with which a woman had been pregnant at least 24 weeks. That has been reworded to be person who is born and is alive….. (https://legislation.nysenate.gov/pdf/bills/2019/S240)

    Sickening.

  3. In old testament God dwelt in the Holy of Holy’s. Under new covenant now, because what our Lord Jesus did we are the temple of the Holy Spirit , Holy of Holy’s in a sense is in us.
    People say back in bible , how barbaric it was, they went and sacrificed their baby’s to molech.
    I’ve heard people in churches talk of how horrible it was,.
    now we don’t go to molech we sacrifice them right in the Holy of Holy’s , and barely a word spoken on it from pulpit or pew, imagine if we truly seen this from God’s perspective.

    1. Many musical instruments are introduced in the Old Testament. Do you know that where babies were sacrificed to Molech is the only place where drums are descried in the Bible? Drums were noisily used to cover the screams of extreme pain by these babies as they were burned to death in “sacrifice.” All other history of drums are pagan tribes and never in Israel or the church. That’s why I can’t agree to “contemporary” services of alleged “worship” any more. By the way, I was a drummer in my High School band and in a band while in the U.S. Navy. But no more.

      1. Drums, (“Toph”, Hebrew) tambourine and cymbals were used as instruments of praise and mentioned numerous times as such in the bible…at least the bible I read.

        However, it is interesting to note the one instrument that is specifically not mentioned in the bible is the organ. What can this mean? Have generations of worshippers been praising God in vain? Incorrectly? On an unbiblically sanctioned instrument?

        If a mute person who cannot sing their heartfelt praises to God out loud, but wants to…and can express thanksgiving to God by doing so on the drums, is that person sinning?

        Please, please get thee knowledge, get thee wisdom – your worship preferences are sounding more like you misread Matt 28: 18-20. Its about the Great Commission…not omission.

        Psalm 150: 5

  4. Thank you Julie for sharing this. I had become emotional reading this because I know several who chose to have abortions who now regret it and suffer in shame & regret. I became pregnant at 19. I remember the doctor telling me my options because he said with my age .. “I had my whole life in front of me.”
    The thing was …he was right … I really did have my whole life in front of me… it was to be a mom. It wasn’t easy… but nothing ever is. Today not only is he 23 and an amazing young man but his dad & I got married had 2 more kids and we are stronger than ever. Thanks to Jesus!!!

  5. Praise be for life!!!

    To all who are intercessors and spiritual Kingdom Warriors reading this— pray against the spirit of Molech, since that’s one of the entities behind this.

    Our Lord is greater than he who is in the world!!!
    Hallelujah!

  6. My prayer is that this movie will be seen by more than just pro-life folks. I pray this movie will not just become another echo-chamber type event, but that those who are avid on the pro-choice side will actually engage with both the emotions and the facts which will be displayed.

  7. I enjoyed this movie, yet also saw it as a reason to be more compassionate and empathetic to women who do choose to have abortions. So many times, pro-lifers speak of women who are pro-choice or who have had abortions as if they woke up one day, felt being pregnant just “wasn’t their thing” and skipped off happily to the nearest clinic before going on about their day.
    To really talk (and REALLY LISTEN) to women who have had abortions – and even those who remain pro-choice, you’ll realize it is an agonizing, gut wrenching decision that no one wants to have to make. This is why I say, everyone is pro-life. No one WANTS an abortion. Once we start speaking on this subject with compassion, instead of using labels, assumptions and prejudgments against those we disagree with, I think we can move forward to a place of better understanding and support of women who find themselves in awful situations.

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