'A Skillfully Marketed Product'

When Carol Everett speaks of the horrors of abortion, you listen. Not only did she abort three of her own children, she went on to abort 35,000 more in the early 1980s as director of several abortion clinics in the Dallas area. She was on track to earn $1 million a year—earnings that today she calls Blood Money (independent), the title of a documentary now on DVD. (It's also the title of a book that Everett wrote nearly two decades ago.)

Just 80 minutes long, Blood Money covers a lot of ground, fully delivering on its subtitle—The Business of Abortion—by letting people like Everett and others tell their stories. Everett, who left the business in 1983 after a conversation with a pastor, is now a strong voice for the pro-life movement. "Abortion is a skillfully marketed product sold to a very frightened person in crisis," she says in the film. She tells how her clinics' telephone counselors—whom she described as "telemarketers"—used a script to convince teen girls and young women to get abortions. The "counselors" were evaluated on how many abortions they "sold," and those who sold the most got the biggest bonuses.

The film is narrated by Dr. Alveda King of the Catholic pro-life group Priests for Life and niece of the late Martin Luther King Jr. She notes that her uncle was all about justice and the right to life—the same ideals embraced in this film. While religion clearly motivates many of the principal figures here, it's not a "Christian" movie. But faith clearly runs just beneath the surface.

Blood Money follows a fairly linear narrative, beginning with scientists and biologists stating in no uncertain terms that life begins at conception. Experts and scholars then discuss how the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 not only defied scientific evidence and state laws, but the Constitution itself, denying the inalienable right to life—to babies in the womb.

There's a gripping segment about the history of Planned Parenthood, its founder Margaret Sanger, and the organization's alleged history of targeting African Americans for abortions. Planned Parenthood was originally called the American Birth Control League. Its publication, The Birth Control Review, edited by Sanger, included this motto beneath the masthead: "Birth Control: To create a race of thoroughbreds." Sanger was once quoted as saying, "We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out the idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members."

But is such talk just old history? African American pro-lifers in the film don't think so, and the statistics seem to back them up: Since Roe v. Wade, 10 percent of white pregnancies have ended in abortion, compared to 28 percent for blacks. African Americans make up 12 percent of the U.S. population, but account for 36 percent of all abortions. One black minister said that such a disproportion "doesn't happen accidentally. Abortions happen when people are targeted."

Everett agrees. She says her "telemarketers" went after frightened girls and young women at their most vulnerable moment. In the film, many women share their heartbreaking stories about giving in to such pressure. They talk of boyfriends and family members urging or coercing them to end their pregnancies. They recall post-abortion trauma and years—even decades—of guilt, regret, depression, recurrent nightmares, and suicide attempts. After her abortion, one says, she came home, curled into fetal position, and pulled out her hair while wailing, "What have I done?"

Through tears, another says, "We all have that moment where we realize that we are moms, and we killed our children. It's a pretty sick feeling." And another: "When the truth has come out about what abortion does to women—let alone the unborn babies, our dead babies—it'll be over."

May her words be prophetic.