In 1973, after the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Roe v. Wade, the president of one of the nation’s largest organizations advocating legal abortion told the press:
“Before you know it… abortion will be just another medical procedure. People will forget about this whole thing.”
But she was wrong.
The pro-life movement became the most significant cultural crusade in American history. From its inception, the movement recognized in abortion the principal moral concern of American democracy in our era, and in pressing the cause for abolition reshaped the nation.
But you wouldn’t know this from the coverage.
If Roe was “an exercise of raw judicial power,” the dearth of comprehensive or celebratory accounts of the pro-life movement in the public identity of the United States – its successes and failures, its principal figures, its grassroots enthusiasm – is an exercise in raw neglect, if not outright hostility. The popular image of the movement remains – more than fifty years post-Roe, and now post-Dobbs – that of a mob of religious fanatics, backward in their sensibilities, shaking their fists at the modern world.
For the pro-life movement in the wake of the Dobbs decision, there is rightly a sense of victory and achievement after a half-century of struggle. But how to secure this victory, as proponents of unrestricted abortion seek to codify the practice wherever possible?
“Dwell on the past and you’ll lose an eye,” a Russian proverb counsels. “Forget the past and you’ll lose both eyes.”
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, its acceptance seemingly inevitable and irreversible. Yet despite intense opposition, an ever-growing number of ordinary citizens made ending abortion their primary concern, and in their efforts inherited the mantle of ‘counterculture’ in a manner entirely unforeseen.
Told initially through a series of crisscross journeys along the highways and byways of the American West, Praise Her in the Gates is not only a history of the pro-life movement, but also a vision of the movement’s concerns brought to their fruition – of a nation at last able to abandon its ideology of desire in favor of family, sacrifice, and the gifts of human frailty.
Coming soon from Lydwine – Imagination for the Remnant.
Praise Her in the Gates (Teaser Trailer)