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Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

My mother's 10 rules to live by
Take them with a grain of salt, but just one grain or you'll bloat.
By Elissa Schappell
[05/12/00]

Sentimental hogwash
In or out of the mental hospital, my mother always found a moment to write the note that would excuse me from Mother's Day.
By Douglas Cruickshank
[05/12/00]

Perfect for this world
Scarlett O'Hara taught my mother to make a velvet dress out of the living room curtains. And my mother, before she died, taught me that I must win at all costs.
By Avital Gad Cykman
[05/11/00]

Supplicant
My mother gave me up before either of us knew the value of a mother. After her death, I no longer confuse longing with love.
By Kathryn Harrison
[05/11/00]

ILOVEYOUTOO!
Let's take a moment to appreciate the brutal sexual politics of the love virus.
By Jonathan Poletti
[05/10/00]

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But when Candy's boyfriend returns from the war paralyzed from the waist down, the film exposes its contradictory politics. (Did you wonder why the boyfriend couldn't have been blinded or maimed?) His injury, contracted not honorably in battle but by contamination from disease-bearing mosquitoes, insures that Candy will have no children, beautiful or otherwise. Maybe now she and her boyfriend will experience the regret they never seemed to feel about the aborted fetus -- in hindsight, their one chance to have a child.

Then, of course, there is Rose Rose (Erykah Badu), the young African-American woman whose pregnancy is the result of incest with her father. It is Rose's pregnancy that finally convinces the film's young protagonist, Homer Wells (Tobey Maguire), that it's OK to perform abortions. (Watching the young white woman die as the result of an illegal abortion somehow wasn't convincing enough.)

Rose runs off after stabbing her father. We can only guess what will happen to her. Homer asserts that Rose will be OK, that she knows how to take care of herself, which would be convincing had the movie not turned on the fact that Rose could not take care of herself: She had been made pregnant by her father and would have been unable to secure an abortion had it not been for Homer's help.

After tormenting all the women who have abortions, "The Cider House Rules" finally kills off the doctor who performs abortions.

Dr. Larch dies as the result of an ambiguous overdose of ether. His addiction is elliptically referenced in the film as the byproduct of his dedication -- exhaustion has made it difficult for him to sleep. But the image of Larch's ongoing nighttime battle with ether conjures two anti-abortion taunts: The abortionist cannot sleep at night or the abortionist cannot live with himself. In either case, the film's treatment of Larch hardly works as an endorsement of his good works.

Young Homer does return to the orphanage to continue to perform abortions, but this move does not dispel the pall cast by this film. Abortion seems to make everyone in this movie miserable, except perhaps the quirky and happy orphans who exist, it would seem, to illustrate yet another tenet of the anti-abortion agenda: If it weren't for the difficulty of securing an illegal abortion, these orphanage kids wouldn't exist at all. "Don't abort us!" these kids seem to shriek out to the audience. "We're too cute to die!" Hence the orphan Homer's ambivalence about the morality of abortion.

Admittedly, it is odd to want to celebrate "High Fidelity" for its three-minute act of creative courage, especially when we are expected to praise the more sober and eminently rational "The Cider House Rules." But whatever else "The Cider House Rules" may do, it doesn't deviate from the basic script that says women who exercise the right to choose are inexorably stained and deserving of punishment.

"High Fidelity," with its brief depiction of Laura's abortion as distressing but surmountable, actually delivers the more radical message that abortion doesn't have to be the stuff of tragic melodrama. It can be, and often is, simply one compelling anecdote in the overall narrative of life.
salon.com | May 15, 2000

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