Two pink lines stared back at Amanda Furgde, confirming what she had suspected after her period did not arrive when it normally would have. She was pregnant. Twenty years old, fresh off publishing her first book and new to Chicago, she was not ready to be a mother. She and her partner seemed to be on the same page, but the beliefs from her conservative Christian upbringing still lurked in the back of her mind.

So when her partner told her that she didn’t have to be pregnant if she didn’t want to, it gave her pause. Growing up in Mississippi, Furgde had never heard that she “didn’t have to” carry a baby to term. As a preacher’s kid, her sexual education was limited, and all the women she knew who got pregnant had their babies. Furdge did her research, weighing her options before making the decision to go through with the procedure.

The process was quick and smooth. Back home, she might had exited the clinic and been met with protesters shaming her decision. In Chicago, however, she received support from the staff and her partner. She told no one else, knowing that her family back home would neither understand nor agree with her decision.

Poet and author Amanda Furdge was one of the main subjects in part one of the “Water” documentary, in which she shared her child-bearing and abortion journey. Photo by Rory Doyle

Autonomy was a foreign feeling—having control over her own body, making a choice with her own best interest at heart. The women she grew up around did not have the same control over their bodies.

That control and sense of agency was stripped away from millions of Americans in 2022 when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned its 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling, which had protected a woman’s right to have an abortion. In fact, Furgde’s home state of Mississippi would be the one to make it happen by passing a 15-week abortion ban with the goal of getting the issue back to the U.S. Supreme Court with the case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Thanks to the votes of three justices former President Donald Trump had appointed to the nation’s highest court, Roe fell.

States now have the power to broadly regulate abortion access, with 20 states banning abortion or restricting the procedure earlier in the pregnancy. The fallout from the Dobbs ruling inspired the making of “Water: A Reproductive Justice Story” documentary, in which Furdge shared her experience.

“Water: A Reproductive Justice Story” is a five-part docuseries that follows the reproductive-health journeys of Mississippians who encounter restricted access to abortion pre- nd post-Dobbs. Talamieka Brice and Michelle Colon hosted a virtual screening for part one of the documentary on June 24, 2024. Photo courtesy Talamieka Brice

The documentary follows the fight for reproductive justice and the organizations that support the decisions of women and people who can get pregnant. Outside of Mississippi, Brice and crew filmed in Illinois, Missouri and Florida.

“I’ve learned so much that I was already involved in and didn’t know it,” Brice told the Mississippi Free Press. “I didn’t know what my tax dollars were funding. I didn’t know how much strategy went into the womb. I didn’t realize the dynamics of power.”

The filmmaker gave a ton of credit to SHERo Mississippi Executive Director Michelle Colon, who personally reached out to her and asked her to helm this project in March 2022.

“She said, ‘Hey, we have this case in front of the Supreme Court. Roe is about to fall, and we need to show people what’s going to happen to folks that are denied abortion access,’” Brice recounted at the virtual screening for the docuseries on June 24, 2024.

The initial premiere date for the documentary was set for June 2022, but once Talamieka really began the filmmaking process, she uncovered more layers than she could fit in just one documentary.

“It would be a disservice to sum this up in just one documentary, so it kept going, and we just kept learning more and more,” Brice said. “It just grew from one simple documentary to a five-part documentary.”

Michelle Colon had never met Brice when she reached out randomly one day and asked her to direct the documentary. Colon’s partners and funders wanted her to go with someone on the either the west or east coasts, but she knew the South had plenty of talent as well.

“I had a vision, and my vision is that people in Mississippi needed to document the experiences of people in Mississippi who were already existing in a post-Roe world,” Colon said before the start of the premiere. “The rest of the world I don’t think really knows because the rest of the world always counts Mississippi out.”

‘Profit in Pregnancy’

To put into perspective how American society got to where it is today, the first part of the docuseries explains that during slavery, pregnancy was viewed as profitable. Slave owners sought to breed people they enslaved like cattle so that their children would be strong enough to work in the fields. During those times, midwives helped assist women with childbirth since they were often the only medical experts available for miles.

The documentary highlights James Marion Sims, the father of modern gynecology and the developer of pioneering tools and surgical techniques relating to women’s reproductive health. He invented the vaginal speculum and invented a technique to repair vesicovaginal fistula, a common 19th-century complication of childbirth where a tear occurs between the uterus and bladder.

Talamieka Brice (left) and Michelle Colon (right) initially approached the project producing one big documentary, but through the filmmaking process, they uncovered more layers and decided to break the documentary into five parts. Photo by Rory Doyle

Sims can also be at least partially credited for the apathy Black women experience in the medical field, as Sims conducted tortuous experiments on numerous enslaved Black women without anesthesia. Critics say the doctor cared more for his experiments than his patients, allowing and even causing suffering with the mentality that Black people didn’t feel pain.

Today, the United State’s medical industry has not fully addressed its racial bias, which—compounded with other factors—makes the nation rank high in mortality rates. Black women in particular bear the brunt of reproductive injustice, having higher mortality rates than any other racial and ethnic group. In 2021, the maternal mortality rate for Black women was 69.9 deaths per 100,000 live births, compared to 26.6 for white women.

In 1847, doctors banded together to form the American Medical Association, which became the male-dominated authority on medical practices. The association scrutinized reproductive health-care workers, like midwives and nurses, and the obstetric services they provided were phased out, Planned Parenthood explains in a timeline of abortion-law history on its website.

The members believed they should have the power to decide when an abortion could be legally performed. Eventually, the group launched a full-fledged criminalization campaign against abortion and female abortion providers, and state legislatures moved to ban abortion. The backlash started a “century of criminalization,” which would not end until Roe v. Wade in 1973.

By 1880, all states had laws to restrict abortion with exceptions in some states. As abortion became criminalized, the stigma around it grew. By 1910, abortion was outright illegal in every stage of pregnancy in every state. Criminalizing abortion forced it to go underground, which resulted in a high death toll. Unsafe, illegal abortions were the cause of death for nearly 2,700 women in 1930.

Because of this, abortion-reform activist groups began to rise up in a nationwide effort to modify abortion laws in the late 1960s. Health-care providers, advocates, clergy members, and the legal community lobbied state legislatures and went to court to overturn statutes that had been in place since the turn of the century.

Between 1967 and 1973, Alaska, Hawaii, New York and Washington repealed their abortion bans entirely, while 13 other states enacted reforms that expanded exceptions. Those exceptions included pregnancies affecting the physical and mental health of patients, fetal abnormalities, and pregnancies as a result of rape or incest.

The Religious and Political

The 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling was a landmark decision in which the U.S. Supreme Court found that the 14th Amendment protects the right to abortion nationwide. The decision applied to all 50 states, making abortion services safer and more accessible throughout the country.

This decision wouldn’t stop those who had staunch anti-abortion views, however—especially as Christian fundamentalists and white evangelicals became powerful forces in the Republican Party. Conservatives pivoted from battles over racial integration to focusing on cultural battles over abortion, Chris Balmer writes in his book, “Bad Faith: Race and Rise of the Religious Right.”

“Water: A Reproductive Justice Story” explores the implications of the rise of anti-abortion politics, featuring the murder of Dr. David Gunn on March 10, 1993. Anti-abortion extremist Michael Griffin shot and killed the doctor, who performed abortions in Florida and Alabama, during an anti-abortion protest at the Pensacola Women’s Medical Services clinic. It was one of many acts of violence targeting abortion clinics in the early 1990s, as death threats, arson and acts of vandalism grew.

Elizabeth Davidson argues in the documentary that Christian anti-abortion arguments misstate what is in the Bible. Photo by Rory Doyle

Violent acts like these ultimately turned Allison Ferreira, the stepsister of Michael Griffin who is also featured in the five-part “Water” series, into an activist. These displays of terrorism also motivated Elizabeth Davidson, a United Methodist pastor, to start working with Christian denominations to better educate them on the issue of abortion.

She’s the executive director of Faith in Women, based in Mississippi. Despite the issue being so directly linked to Christianity in modern rhetoric, Davidson argued that the Bible has very little to say about abortion.

Part one of the “Water” docuseries concludes with a music video of the title song, “Like Water,” which award-winning artist Teneia Sanders wrote. In the video, the Jackson, Miss., native is dressed in an all-white ensemble, playing her guitar barefoot and convening with nature near Mayes Lake.

‘Didn’t Think They Would Overturn It’

When SHERo Mississippi Executive Director Michelle Colon witnessed Donald Trump first become the president-elect after the November 2016 election, she knew she had to start planning for what she believed would be the worst possible outcome for reproductive rights.

The new administration packed the federal judiciary and U.S. Supreme Court with judges and justices who more closely reflected the anti-abortion views of the political right that had voted Trump into the office. The passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a longtime women’s rights and abortion rights supporter, mere weeks before the 2020 election hit Colon especially hard—particularly when the White House named her replacement.

“Once Justice Amy Coney Barrett got on the court, it wasn’t just about a 15-week ban anymore; it was an all out ban on abortion altogether,” Colon said near the end of the documentary. “It really surprises me that some people in the movement and smart people I know … really didn’t think that they were going to overturn (Roe). And that’s one of those moments where you just want to take something and knock them in their head.”

The documentary is slated for five parts. Brice and Colon have set up a GoFundme to help finance the remainder of the project.

Teneia Sanders (left) and Yolanda Micey Walker (right) pose with filmmaker Talamieka Brice. Photo by Rory Doyle

In later installments, they plan to share the trans experience, the experiences of children forced to give birth, midwifery, the 2017 Women’s March and various other aspects of the reproductive-justice movement, Brice said.

“I hope you’ll stay up to date, following us and things like that,” Colon said of the docuseries. “You’ll be able to see and hear the rest of Allison’s story and the many stories of Missississippians—not only their abortion journeys, but also their child-birthing stories.”

The first part of the documentary had its virtual premiere on June 24, 2024. Part one of the documentary is available for rent on Talamieka Brice’s website, which viewers can find here.

Read original article by clicking here.

‘Water’ Docuseries Spotlights the Fight for Reproductive Justice in Mississippi After Dobbs

‘Profit in Pregnancy’

The Religious and Political

‘Didn’t Think They Would Overturn It’

Local Dining Stream

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