A Powerful Pro-Life, Pro-Woman Film: 'Crescendo

My mother struggled to explain it to me. I was only eight years old, but had seen something on the news that made no sense to me, which I insisted on asking about. She lit a cigarette, sighed, and tried again:

“The Supreme Court, those are the biggest judges in the land, just made a decision that changes all the laws. Now when a woman has a baby inside her, and she doesn’t want to give birth to it, doctors can come in and take it out.”

“So then it can live?”

“No. The baby will die.”

“And they just made that legal?”

“Yes.”

“So killing is legal.”

“Yes.”

Never, not since that moment, have I accepted this. I’m still in denial. I can’t really believe that every year at least a million women in America are driven to act against their most basic human instincts and destroy their preborn children. Nor can I fathom that a nation whose foundations are basically good—better than those of any other regime on earth today—still pretends that the “right” to eliminate unwanted children was somehow written between the lines of its Constitution…for judges to discover some 190 years later. And it staggers me that the politicians who favor such medical assaults on the bond between mothers and children are the ones who are called “pro-woman.” My mind is too primitive and too logical to assimilate such perversions.

But a recent film helped me to understand why some people make this mistake. The beautiful short film “Crescendo” depicts the anguish and pain of women in crisis pregnancies through the story of one such woman, in 18th century Germany, who is trapped in a desperate marriage to a drunken, brutal abuser. You can read in her face and voice that this is a person whose life has ground her down, nearly destroyed her, to the point where she thinks and acts like an animal in a trap. So she turns to a vendor of abortifacient drugs…. And I won’t give away any more about this powerful, passionate film, which portrays the pain of a crisis pregnancy so movingly that it won some 20 awards from major Hollywood festivals, including the prestigious Los Angeles and Toronto festivals. What most of those viewers missed, at least at first, is the film’s real message.

Because “Crescendo” is a pro-life film. It was made with the help of Patti Mallette (Justin Bieber’s mom) with the purpose of raising money for crisis pregnancy centers that help mothers in need to choose life for their babies—and in special screenings it brought in more than five million dollars for such centers. Ms. Mallette carried Justin to term in one of those centers, and making this film was her way of paying forward the help that she got when she needed it most.

Now this amazing film is available free on Youtube. Please watch it, and share it with your friends—pro-life and pro-choice alike. It will help pro-lifers realize how deep the need is for money and volunteers at pregnancy centers across America, which fight on the very front lines of the war for human dignity. It will plant in the hearts of pro-choicers, who despair that it is possible to serve both women and children, a seed of hope. It will show them that the way to help women in crisis is not to hire doctors to kill their children. Women in need deserve much more than that, and if we wish to live in a decent and human society, we will find ways to give it to them.

John Zmirak is co-author, with Jason Jones, of “The Race to Save Our Century.”

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