Movie Spoiler OCTOBER BABY (2012) - after short review

[Warning: if you are Christian and easily offended, then you will object to my style of writing, so please stop reading here.  Thank you.]  October Baby is Hannah, a young girl, born under the highly unusual circumstance of being an abortion survivor, who decides to go on a journey to confront her birth mother. Hannah suffers from physical and emotional ailments related to the procedure which resulted in her birth and the story aims to sort out of the latter to offer the young woman reconciliation. Her fluke of existence is a bizarre story that many right-wing Christians are going to hump like Gospel. Despite the politics involved, if this were less manipulative propaganda and had a more substantial script with actual character development and decent dialogue, I could have given it more of a chance. But the dumbed down conversations for narrative expediency was pretty offensive to the senses. The poor screenwriting undermined its integrity and could have been edited down severely to a dramatic short.  While the biological mother is "forgiven" by both the main character and the filmmakers, she's clearly demonized in a film that would have benefited by depicting her storyline during the incident in question and giving the whole endeavor a fair shake.  The crux of the film would have been more inspiring had it been about a girl who deals with the revelation as an affirmation of life, rather than judging her biological mother.  As the lead, Rachel Hendrix is adequate, but it’s Jasmine Guy (aka Whitley the rich snob and my hero from A Different World) who acts for her life in her one cameo scene. Surprisingly, the film grossed $5.4M at the box-office and few people know this. Frankly, I'm surprised the movie industry isn't gobbling up more stories like these, because there is money in them there hills.  Seriously.

Movie Spoiler 
Hannah (Rachel Hendrix who has a Rachel Bilson look to her) performs as “Annabelle” opposite “Desmond” in the opening scene to some anonymous play with a full house in attendance, including her parents and good friend Jason (Jason Burkey), who is super hot. She has an asthma-related attack and faints. She recovers and later returns to the theatre to find her part has been recast by some trollop. In a meeting with Dr. Stewart (Lance E. Nichols) and parents Jacob (John Schneider), who is also a doctor, and Grace (Jennifer Price) Lawson, she learns her sickness is attributable to her 24-week premature birth. Her emotional health is also discussed as her parents had been sifting through her private journals. The parents reveal to the college-aged Hannah that she was adopted. Why they waited this long is beyond me (weak excuses are offered later, and it's never brought up if they were ever going to tell her; the bottom-line: she was out of high school, a functioning adult, and had a right to know, at the very least, for medical reasons).  They further tell her that she her emotional and physical well-being has been comprised because she is an abortion-survivor.

She tries talking to Jason on the phone who is at a party and ends up staring at her secluded Alabama lakefront view. During a discussion with her parents, she expresses a need to meet her birth-mother. Hannah shares her confusion and fears in an intimate conversation with Jason. Jason reassures her and then takes a call. Later, when his annoying ginger friend Truman (James Austin Johnson) reveals an old VW bus “Evelyn” as their method of transportation for a Spring Break road trip, Jason makes some unnecessary, inexplicable insults in the vehicle's direction. At the library, they both try to convince her to join them for Spring Break. If her options couldn’t be worse, we meet another one of the friends, Bmac (Chris Sligh), in the next scene. Jacob confronts Jason about the trip, before also insulting the VW and leaving. Hannah decides to take the trip without her parent’s permission.

In the bus, we get a scene of everyone together, including one girl and a blonde named Alanna (Colleen Trusler) with a stick up her ass, probably because Jason cares so much about Hannah. Bmac takes the van onto a sand preserve and gets stuck, resulting in a cop (Robert Amaya) threatening impounding. Hannah plays the adoption card and talks her way out of a ticket and offers the officer money (which I think is illegal). A tow trucks helps them get back on the road. Hannah gets put in the same room with super-cunt Alanna and she predictably treats her like a piece of shit. She decides to get her things and leave and Jason, who conveniently walks outside, fails to stop her at the last minute. Jason rents a car and finds Hannah walking along the road the next day. Cue montage of them enjoying diner hamburgers and playing on the beach. They hold hands and run into the water at one point, reminiscent of their time together as kids (um, do you think they're going to get together at the end?). In an awkward scene, Hannah spills her money on the counter of a hotel clerk (Walker K. Jordan) to rent a room. The kids ends up sharing the same room, leaving Jason to sleep on the floor, because, you know, two fully-clothed college students of opposing genders (one of them a virgin) can’t maturely share a queen-size bed. She has a fit and ends up accidentally breaking a lamp on her way out of the room. Both of them end up sleeping on a couch in the lounge. Back at home, the parents talk and we learn there’s even more that Hannah doesn’t know. In trouble with the law for a second time, Hannah and Jason are arrested for breaking and entering the abandoned hospital she was born in. When Hannah shares her story, she escapes the rule of law yet again, and Sgt. Dodd (Tracy Miller) shares the name of the nurse who delivered her at the abortion clinic. There is a also a subtle allusion to the clinic having endured abuse from protesters, suggestive that pro-life activists were fully responsible for the shut down of the medical center, not through due process, but by public spectacle.  The ambiguity doesn't make a distinction between doctors who operate safely within the rule of law and those unscrupulous surgeons who disregard their Hippocratic Oath.

She visits nurse Mary Rutledge, who happens to be played by Jasmine Guy aka Whitley the southern belle from A Different World. Nurse Mary is very forthcoming with a great memory she has of the day of the abortion procedure. We also learn that Hannah’s biological mother was a slut and what an evil man the doctor was. Something had gone wrong on the day of the procedure, and the woman left after a botched attempt resulting in extracting “non-viable tissue” only to return the next day. She “went into labor” and first delivered Hannah’s armless twin brother. Nurse Mary quit nursing. Hannah’s brother died four months later. Nurse Mary also spotted Hannah’s mother recently, who got that education and career, and hands her business card to Hannah. She leaves, cries, and contemplates seeing her mother by looking at the card she ripped up while watching an ocean sunset with Jason.

They make the big trip to the law firm where biological mother Cindy Hastings (Shari Rigby) works set to a sappy ballad. She creeps around her empty office and learns she has a child. Cindy enters the office and she’s a card-carrying cunt who is in a hurry. When Hannah drops the bomb that she’s her aborted child, Cindy has enough of a heart to clear her next hour. Unfortunately, her do-gooder husband shows up and Cindy immediately pretends she doesn’t know her and sends her on her way. She watches Cindy get into her fancy car as her little blonde angel waves to Hannah. It’s a wake-up call that she had everything she needed from her real parents this whole time and there was a reason why Cindy went to get an abortion. Not before Jacob shows up to drag her ass home. Jason tries to stand up for her, but Jacob reams him for lying. She lays into him about keeping the truth from her and he makes up a bunch of an excuses. Jason reunites with friends in New Orleans. The slightly more tolerable Truman reveals he got into a fight as well as in trouble with the law. Jason breaks up with that bitch Alanna and apologizes to Jacob over the phone.

 Grace (remember her?), who hasn’t gotten much screen time, visits Hannah in her room, where she surprisingly has a Play Bill for Hedda Gabler on her wall (a rather specific reference after performing in some non-existent play). She reveals that she miscarried twins before Hannah. Baptist Hannah goes to a Catholic church to pray to God (because they have the better looking places of worship, duh) and, wouldn’t you know it, strikes up a conversation with a priest (Rodney Clark). She lays out all her dirty laundry. The priest shares a story about St. Paul and consoles her, “Hatred is a burden you no longer need to carry.” Later, Jacob drops a plane ticket in her lap and then they visit the grave of Hannah’s brother Jonathan. They have a tearful reconciliation and fly together to the law office of Hannah’s birth mother. There, baby-killer Cindy Hastings finds a note forgiving her. Jacob calls Jason and encourages him to go after Hannah. They go out on a date, which includes helping Hannah learn her lines for the part of "Annabelle." They share a kiss and the next scene is Nurse Mary handing a newborn baby to an older looking Hannah/Grace (?) and some old guy (who is supposed to be a younger version of Jacob?). Cindy shares Hannah’s note with her husband. The Lawsons drop Hannah off at another year of college.

If you want to learn more about abortion survivors, you can visit The Abortion Survivors Network. There, you can read several testimonies of purported abortion survivors including Gianna Jessen, who inspired October Baby. However, if you are looking for concrete data, TASN cannot accommodate your needs and there is no official database documenting abortion survivors.  Statistics are sketchy at best. However, the MAJORITY of the testimonials, I noticed, are from WOMEN born in the 1970s with an activist edge who are survivors of INSTILLATION abortion, which has fallen out of favor over the years. Just an observation.  As of 2007, the procedure accounts for 0.1% of all U.S. abortions.