…in which the sidewalk saints of a southern city storm the gates of hell.
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 THREE. Vicki Klein & Robert Reed, in-person interview, Mobile, Alabama, 18 July 2024 - “Here, it was too late…” from Studs Terkel’s interview with Claude Lanzmann, originally broadcast 9 January 1986 - For the rise of the free-standing abortion clinic, as well as the importance of ecumenical cooperation in the early history of the pro-life movement, see Daniel K. Williams’s Defenders of the Unborn: The Pro-Life Movement before Roe v. Wade (Oxford University Press, 2016) - Acts 16:14-15 - Sarah R. Weddington, oral reargument of Roe v. Wade, 11 October 1972 - Sean Dudley, in-person interview, Mobile, Alabama, 17 July 2024 - Terry Jones, The Saga of Erik the Viking (Pavilion Books, 1983) - “Abortion Doctor’s Slaying Is Baffling Police in Mobile” appeared on page 24 of the New York Times on Sunday, August 29, 1993 - Matthew 26:52 - Music by the Cimarron Kings.
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