Opinion

October 18, 2012 (Unmaskingchoice.ca) – Hannah begins to shake… everything is blurry.

It’s opening night – she is playing one of the lead roles in her school’s play – and yet… she cannot control the shuddering.  Her spirit, mind and body are all under attack. As she falls to the stage writhing uncontrollably, her thrashing takes on the appearance of a desperate attempt to escape… but escape from what… or from whom? She is a defenseless victim; voiceless, vulnerable, and slowly slipping away while a theatre full of spectators watches.

Do you recognize the feeling? Probably not, but Hannah does. To her body, the experience is painfully familiar. Her body remembers the haunting memory of what had occurred years earlier in a place which should have been the safest haven for a baby.

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Fast-forward to Hannah lying on the stage in present day, and the circumstances are different… but the body’s reaction the same.

So begins Hannah’s story in the long awaited (and at last released!) film, October Baby. Hannah is an average teenage girl freshly starting college, and to the outside observer she appears to have it all together. Yet beneath the surface, Hannah feels a constant uneasiness about who she is and desperately yearns to figure out where this anxiety comes from.

October Baby shows a glimpse of the paralyzing pain experienced by a young girl, as she realizes how close she had come to being the victim of an abortion. As Hannah is hit with the understanding that an abortionist’s failure resulted in her survival, she is overcome with a wave of disbelief, unimaginable mental anguish and a fervent desire to find an explanation.

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She feels hurt, betrayed, and confides in her best-friend Jason that she wants to begin a journey in search of answers but doesn’t know how where to start. What Hannah doesn’t realize is that the journey began years ago, within the dangerous walls of her mother’s womb. The nightmares, asthma and seizures she has suffered from over the years do not stem from genetics, but rather they are all connected with that fateful day when the abortionist slipped up. 

Hannah feels a yearning in her heart; a desire to know more.  A desire to meet her birth-mother, find out why she wasn’t wanted,  and whether her mother ever wonders what happened to the daughter who, by the world’s standards, should never have been. 

And so Hannah continues the journey.

A journey which started when destiny stepped in and misguided the abortionist’s forceps.

Despite the movie’s serious subject matter, there are still moments of comedy (go Truman!),  and plenty of emotional outbursts (hello teenage-girl angst) which show that Hannah is at the end of the day just a teenage girl, dealing with a lot of the same issues and insecurities faced by millions of other adolescents.

There is also some romance sprinkled into the plot, and although it is a little cliché (think snow on Christmas day!), it still leaves the viewer with that warm and fuzzy feeling we get when despite all odds, love prevails.

October Baby is definitely a movie worth watching, and flawlessly shows the virtue of family, faith, and most importantly, forgiveness.

Reprinted with permission from Unmaskingchoice.ca