…in which we begin our encounter with America in the age of abortion.
Produced and directed by Brian Kennedy, produced and engineered by Jonathan Hunt. Executive Producers Sean Dudley and Rachel Kennedy.
Conceived in the epic tradition of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, and Richard Rhodes’s The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Praise Her in the Gates - Dispatches for a Pro-Life Nation is a longform (multi-episode, multi-season) audio journal chronicling America in the age of abortion and emphasizing the response of the pro-life movement as an unparalleled model for social and political resistance.
Combining reportage, travelogue, oral history, archival research, an original score, and sophisticated techniques of sound collage, Praise Her in the Gates is a multi-faceted artistic exploration of American character and culture in the post-war era, decades in which abortion-on-demand became the mother tongue of the national imagination. Yet despite intense opposition, an ever-growing number of ordinary citizens made ending abortion their primary concern, and through their efforts inherited the mantle of ‘counterculture’ in a manner entirely unforeseen.
NOTES, EPISODE ONE. Matthew 14:26, Mark 6:49, Luke 24:37 - That the thirteenth generation since the American founding (called 13ers, or Generation X) is the most aborted generation in American history is taken from Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584-2069 by William Strauss and Neil Howe (Morrow, 1991) - The golden records carried by the Voyager spacecraft in 1977 included, among other compositions and performances, three selections from Johann Sebastian Bach, as well as Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” and Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground” - The names Michael, Jennifer, Christopher, and Amy were selected from the top five most popular baby names in the era as recorded by the United States Social Security Administration - “Who is the third who walks always beside you?” is drawn from the fifth section of T.S. Eliot’s modernist masterpiece “The Waste Land,” first published in the United States in The Dial, October 1922 - Russian proverb is drawn from the first volume of the Whitney translation of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (Harper & Row, 1974) - “Ten Leading Causes of Death in the United States, 1977” was published by the US Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Contol in July 1980 - “Abortion in the United States, 1977-1978” by Jacqueline Darroch Forrest, Ellen Sullivan and Christopher Tietze appeared in vol. 11, no. 6 of Family Planning Perspectives, published by the Guttmacher Institute, 1979 - Irish patriot Pádraig Pearse published the essay “Ghosts” on Christmas Day 1915, only months before the 1916 Easter Rising and his subsequent execution by firing squad – Jane Doe’s op-ed “There just wasn’t room in our lives now for another baby” appeared on page A27 of the New York Times on Friday, May 14, 1976 - Responses to the op-ed, including Jane Doe’s reply, are taken from the Friday, June 11, 1976 (page A23) and Tuesday, May 25, 1976 (page 34) issues of that newspaper - Linda Bird Francke’s The Ambivalence of Abortion was published by Random House, February 1978 - Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale was published by McClelland and Stewart, 1985 - Matthew 9:24, Mark 5:39, Luke 8:52 - Columbia Pictures released On the Waterfront in July 1954, with story and screenplay by Budd Schulberg, for which he subsequently won an Academy Award - Proverbs 31:31 - “Only chance could save you” is taken from Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoir Hope Abandoned, as quoted in Clive James’s Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts (W.W. Norton & Co., 2008) - “We must make what inventory we can on the irreparable” is taken from George Steiner’s In Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture (Yale University Press, 1974) - The fifth edition of Te Linde’s Operative Gynecology, edited by Richard F. Mattingly, M.D., was published by J.B. Lippincott Company, 1977 - Manhattan’s Center for Reproductive and Sexual Health as “the largest abortion clinic in the Western world” is from Bernard Nathanson’s obituary in the New York Times, February 22, 2011 (Section B, Page 14) - NARAL’s President Lee Gidding told the National Observer in February 1973, “Before you know it this will be past history and abortion will be just another medical procedure. People will forget about this whole thing,” as quoted in Daniel K. Williams’s Defenders of the Unborn: The Pro-Life Movement before Roe v. Wade (Oxford University Press, 2016) - “Sine Nomine” performed by the Cimarron Kings, music and lyrics by Brian Kennedy.
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