New York Times critic Jeannette Catsoulis didn't even try in her brief review to render an objective look at the pro-life movie "October Baby," as her copy seethed with anger and evident indignation that pro-lifers still existed in this day and age (note to Catsoulis: by some poll numbers, there are more pro-lifers that pro-abortion believers). Catsoulis's political views are of the simplistic left-wing variety, as she has demonstrated on several occasions in past reviews. She wrote in Friday's Times:
More slickly packaged than most faith-based fare, “October Baby” gussies up its anti-abortion message with gauzy cinematography and more emo music than an entire season of “Grey’s Anatomy.” But not even a dewy heroine and a youth-friendly vibe can disguise the essential ugliness at its core: like the bloodied placards brandished by demonstrators outside women’s health clinics, the film communicates in the language of guilt and fear.
Young Hannah goes off to find her birth mother after learning she survived a botched abortion, and pro-life terror ensues:
But this G-rated road trip is only an appetizer: the film’s pièce de résistance arrives in the haunted form of Jasmine Guy, playing the clinic nurse who assisted at Hannah’s birth. Her pivotal speech, a gory portrait of fetal mutilation and maternal distress, conjures a vision of medical hackery that is clearly intended to terrify young women -- and fits right in with proposed state laws that increasingly turn the screws on a woman’s dominion over her reproductive system.
Catsoulis concluded with a cri de couer for abortion:
“Hate the crime, not the criminal,” a friendly police officer advises Hannah. Except that abortion is not a crime, no matter how fervently some people continue to wish that it were.
