…in which a shuttered abortion clinic in Mobile, Alabama affords an opportunity for memory and reconciliation.
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 TWO. Marty Carrel, in-person interview, Mobile, Alabama, 17 July 2024 - Hazel Felman, whom Carl Sandburg lauded as “adaptive, pictorial, [and] imaginative,” arranged the frontier song “What Was Your Name In the States?” for The American Songbag (Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1927) - F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925) - Augustine, Book X of The Confessions, trans. by Maria Boulding, O.S.B. (New City Press, 1997) - “How Americans Understand Abortion: A Comprehensive Interview Study of Abortion Attitudes in the U.S.” (McGrath Institute for Church Life, 2020) - “Despite Bans, Number of Abortions in the United States Increased in 2023” (Guttmacher Institute, 2024) - Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Holmes, 22 April 1820 - Walt Whitman, section 52 of “Song of Myself” from Leaves of Grass - Tammy Cox, phone interview, 3 July 2024 - Though no longer updated, the website for Claire’s Hope is still active, and includes Tammy and Billy’s moving diary of Claire’s 56 days - “Children” by Harry Lyman Koopman, from his collection Orestes; a dramatic sketch and other poems (Moulton, Wenborne, 1888) - Music by the Cimarron Kings.
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