Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, November 3, 1995 TAG: 9511030034
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ROBIN DOUGHERTY KNIGHT-RIDDER/TRIBUNE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Director Jane Gillooly's provocative and intelligent inquiry into the life of Gerri Santoro - now a poster child for the abortion-rights movement because of her death from an illegal abortion - looks at the second tragedy that occurs when someone is forever defined by one terrible moment in his or her life.
In 1964, Gerri Santoro was a battered wife who had recently left her abusive husband in California and returned, with her two small daughters, to her family on the East Coast. She had an affair with a married man and found herself pregnant. Without access to a medical abortion, she tried folk remedies; when they didn't work, she decided to give the baby up for adoption. That plan exploded when she learned her husband was coming back East.
Six months pregnant and fearing for her life, she talked her lover into finding an abortionist. He took her to a motel, where she bled to death when the abortionist botched the procedure. Her body, naked and slumped in a pool of blood, was found by the chambermaid. Explicit police photos captured the horrible scene.
Nine years later - in 1973, the year that Roe v. Wade became law - one of those bone-chilling police photos was used to illustrate a Ms. magazine article; it also showed up in the book ``Our Bodies, Ourselves.'' The image was seized by the abortion-rights movement to combat the anti-abortion movement's graphic photographs of dead fetuses.
As Ms. writer Roberta Brandes Gratz put it, ``It said so much about what we were trying to say.''
That photo became Santoro the symbol, but abortion-rights advocates confronted by filmmaker Gillooly were baffled about Santoro's life.
Asked about the source of the photograph, Gratz says, ``It was so gruesome, I don't think any of us wanted to know.'' Ms. magazine publisher Patricia Carbine admits, ``It did not occur to me that we were invading her privacy.'' (The November/December issue of Ms. carries Gratz's re-examination of the story after two decades have passed.)
Santoro's family saw things differently.
In the documentary, her sister, brother, and two grown daughters express emotions ranging from outrage to activism. Her children are appalled that her naked and blood-drenched image appeared on a political poster.
``How dare they take my beautiful, beautiful mom and put this in the public eye?'' asks her daughter, Joannie Griffin.
At least one member of the family has reclaimed the image of Gerri for herself: Santoro's sister Leona Gordon is seen marching in a Washington, D.C., abortion-rights rally, carrying a poster illustrating the dead woman. Inscribed below it are the words: ``This is my sister.''
The beauty of ``Leona's Sister Gerri'' is that it portrays Santoro as not just symbol or victim, but as a person. Her sister recalls her as a ``tree-climbing kid.'' Gillooly shows us snapshots of her as a drum major, a high-school student with a best friend, as a bride, as a mother with her babies.
Santoro's daughters recall the way their mother smelled (``like Juicy Fruit''). The dresses she wore. The fantastic Halloween costumes she made for them.
Gillooly's film was made several years ago, but it's timeliness is eerie. It's hard not to think of Nicole Brown Simpson, whose children will now see her as both a symbol and a mom.
``Leona's Sister Gerri'' makes us see that, with any tragedy, there's more at stake than the obvious. For Gerri Santoro and for her family, death was only the first casualty.
by CNB