Angie Young sits at a cluttered desk in the Feminist Studies office, a small room piled high with boxes and books in the basement of Taliaferro Hall. At her feet sit copies of her first documentary pushed up against the side of a trash can.
Young’s documentary, The Coat Hanger Project, is a pro-choice film about abortion and the reproductive justice movement. Young, 29, said she created the film to explore the history of and struggle for reproductive rights. Many young people, Young said, take the services available to them in this country, post-Roe vs. Wade — the Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion — for granted.
“I called it The Coat Hanger Project because I want to educate my generation,” Young said. “A lot of people don’t even know what the coat hanger means.”
The coat hanger is a symbol of “do-it-yourself” abortions, dangerous procedures in which women denied access to safe and legal abortion services would risk their lives to terminate unwanted pregnancies, the film said.
Tomorrow, Young will depart on a tour across Ireland and Poland — two countries where abortions are still illegal except in health-threatening cases — to showcase her film. In 2008, the film played in independent theaters and universities in the United States.
Over the course of the film’s creation, Young interviewed survivors of underground abortions, doctors who provide abortion services, pro-choice organization founders and even a handful of students at this university.
Senior journalism major Shauna Stuart, who appeared in the film, said she chose to participate in Young’s project because she believes abortion is a topic students should know about.
“A lot of the women on this campus are sexually active, but we don’t talk about what we would do if something were to happen,” she said. “We talk about plan B or birth control. But what if it’s too late for that?”
Senior Stephanie Linares, an anthropology and criminal justice major originally from El Salvador, said in The Coat Hanger Project that her teachers and nurses in Salvadoran schools did talk about gruesome “coat hanger” abortions, but only to scare young women into carrying unwanted pregnancies to term.
These stories, Linares said, formed the basis of her activism as a member of Terps for Choice, an on-campus pro-choice student organization, and her interest in participating in the movie.
Young is now working on two more documentaries to debut in 2010.
The first is a documentary about the evils of incest, and the second makes a case against Gardasil, a vaccine used to prevent a strain of Human Papaloma Virus known to contribute to cervical cancer. Recently, Gardasil became a required vaccination for immigrants and for students entering the sixth grade in Washington, D.C. Young argues that the drug was approved too quickly by the FDA and is now using a disproportionate number of minority women as “test subjects.” Additionally, its high cost could pose problems for many.
Young said it was a trip to South Dakota in 2006 which kicked off the creation of The Coat Hanger Project, though she had been a feminist since her college years and served as a hotline operator for the National Abortion Federation.
In 2006, a ballot initiative in South Dakota proposed banning all abortions without exceptions, the most restrictive ballot initiative put forth since the Supreme Court legalized abortion in 1973.
Young, video camera in hand, converged with other activists on the small, mostly conservative state to successfully protest the initiative’s passage.
“I was never a filmmaker before I did that,” Young said. “But I was aware that I had the opportunity to get some footage at a historical time.”
The footage from the trip became the first scenes of Young’s entirely self-filmed and primarily self-funded documentary.
Young works as a business manager for Feminist Studies, a national, independent journal housed at the university. Claire Moses, editorial director of the publication and a professor, jokingly called Feminist Studies Young’s “day job.”
“That’s what pays the bills,” Moses said.
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