From Marcy and Roland D. by email: "BRAVO! We saw the film and could not agree with you more! . . . I wish I could unsee it too. What the heck did she mean by "boiling water"? Of course she did not sit in scalding water. It was painful to watch."
Jul 23, 2023·edited Jul 23, 2023Liked by Roseanne T. Sullivan
Roseanne: Thank you for your thoughtful & excellent review. When Poland was under communist rule people had a standard joke. What is the future under a communist utopia - misery, hardship and a prison. What about the past? simple we don’t know since the party is forever rewriting the past in terms of a socialist utopia. Years ago I watched “A Town without Pity” - movie about a young German girl who was seduced by a GI and she becomes pregnant and because of the cruelty of the people she drowns herself in the local river to show why we need to promote and encourage abortion. The movie Nefarious shows us the power and the deception of the Devil to kill the soul. In this Nefarious movie - a psychodramas to justify safe sex, social irresponsibility, abortion and euthanasia. The movie is a great act of deception. The star of this movie is neither Christ nor His Mother but an atheist woman who returns to Ireland as modern day astute and compassionate psychotherapist who reconciles the oppressed and liberates the sinful from the deception and oppression of the Faith. Today we live with the broken homes, suicides, drug addiction, euthanasia and an inability to define What is a Woman as we live in a dystopian nightmare where good is evil and evil is good. The producer and director of this movie was & is the Devil! Many will be deceived, so thanks Rosanne for a powerful and insightful review.
Thanks for subscribing and for your thoughtful review.
Sound like the German girl in the movie suffered sexual immorality’s consequences made worse by the double standard. Sex leads to babies. Women take the risk of getting pregnant when they engage in the intimacy that belongs in marriage. If they got pregnant, they were ostracized and called whores. The men were not blamed.
The double standard was horrible, but the moral way around it would have been a single standard, in which both men and women were chaste before marriage. It made me sad and resentful as a girl to realize that boys were trying to seduce us even if they ruined our lives.
Instead of promoting morality, society has tried to separate sex from marriage, fostering an attitude between sex partners that “it’s not love unless both of us want it to be love.” And the corresponding attitude towards any babies conceived is that “the child is not a child unless both of us want it,” otherwise it is "a by-product of conception” to be disposed of at will.
We make it possible to prevent some pregnancies with fallible contraception, claiming that sex without consequences is now possible. When women often conceive as they predictably do even with perfect use of birth control they are often blamed. When contraception fails, society offers abortion as the back-up, allowing us to pay killers-for-hire to kill any babies that were conceived “by accident.”
I was shocked watching the scene of these nice Irish women going to Lourdes talking about the foul act of abortion as if it was normal and nice and that hating your own child in your womb enough to kill it is compatible with being Catholic. And the contradiction that the young woman was so upset about the muteness of her beautiful boy, who was a living witness to the life that a woman squelches in abortion. If she had succeeded he wouldn't have been there, and there would have been no grief at his absence? I appreciate your affirmation.
You heard that she was given the pill for pain? How unique. I may be wrong about the age gap, but it didn't seem right to me. Of course I have an issue with abortion! It is a horror that our society allows the killing of babies in their mothers' wombs in businesses in city centers, and people accept it as a good. One objection to the movie is that a group of charming Irish ladies at Lourdes in the era in which the movie is set would not be sitting around talking about how they tried to kill their babies by throwing themselves downstairs. The person who wrote the dialogue had some crack-pot ideas about the ways the worst of women would try to end the lives of their unborn children. Don't you have an objection to abortion? Are you Catholic?
There was no mention of abortion pills in the movie. The abortion described was a medical procedure performed by an unlicensed doctor/midwife. The pills were probably a sedative.
The movie doesn't have any pro- or anti-abortion messages, just because it mentions one. It doesn't have any pro- or anti-suicide messages either. It's about what can happen when you let the beliefs instilled in you by society stop you from making your own decisions in tough times.
Life is complicated, and people make mistakes. You can either shut out everyone in the world who doesn't fit in your ideal reality, or you can learn to see the beauty in people's flaws. The movie is about letting go of strict beliefs that don't leave you any room to change and grow. If you disagree with your daughter's life choices, you can kick her out and hold a grudge for the rest of your life. But you will miss out on seeing the person she was always meant to be. You can write her a letter from your deathbed, but there's no guarantee she'll come back for your funeral. A grudge is a double-edged sword that keeps you stuck. It will hurt you more the longer you hold it. Let go of that hate so you can move on with your life.
You and Cynthia made up your own interpretation of her mention of the pill. The character's mention of the pill is a prime example of the anachronism of the movie, which projects today's abortion-loving values backwards onto a time when abortion was rightly seen as the murdering of a living child by its mother. And it has ridiculous made-up examples of how women tried to abort their babies. Nobody sat in a scalding bath of whiskey as an abortion method. And an otherwise loving mother who would throw herself down the stairs to abort more times than she could count—ridiculous. Maybe a group of prostitutes would be sitting around discussing the ways they've tried to get rid of children they conceived and didn't want. But a group of pious Catholic women in Lourdes, mothers and grandmothers, would certainly not be. If a woman aborted her child, she wouldn't be sharing it with anyone. It was and still actually is a shameful unnatural act.
Never did the movie say that a pill caused the abortion. She was given the pill for pain. Also, maybe you haven't been around Catholic families, they can be huge with 20 year gaps between siblings it is not unheard of for the gap to be bigger between cousins. You seem to have an issue with the topic of abortion more than anything. This might not represent your life but I am sure it represents someones.
Actually, there were "pills" in the 60s (and abortifacient herbs in the Middle Ages). I can attest to that. They weren't the sophisticated medications we have now, but there were various unofficial things that did often work. And, despite its flaws (especially the part about sitting in boiling water), I enjoyed the film. I've spent a lot of time in Ireland in the past 25 years, and things weren't very different to the 60s, even 30 years later. The last "Magdalen laundry" in Ireland closed in 1996. There are many survivors still in care, unable to live independently.
I was a young woman in the 60s and abortions were surgical then. I did run into a floozy, as we used to call someone like her, a promiscuous woman in the Lower East Side of NYC who had six abortions, some of them self-induced with a coat hanger. But she was someone who lived outside of religion and morality. I can attest to the fact that the average church-going married Catholic mother of children living in Ireland wasn't going to be sitting around during a pilgrimage to Lourdes talking sympathetically about abortion.
What do the Magdalen laundry have to do with whether or not a movie promotes the idea there was calm acceptance of abortion in the 1960s? Were the Irish women as jaded as they are portrayed when you were there? "Dear dear, it's all right you tried to kill your beautiful boy, but failed. And don't feel guilty that he doesn't talk. And don't pay any attention to the fact that that darling child would not be in this world if you'd had your way. Nothing to feel guilty about. Why, my dear, I've tried to abort my children more times than I can count."
My reference to the Magdalen laundries was intended to underscore the way that unwed pregnant women (and others who were NOT pregnant but were thought to be inclined toward immoral behavior) were treated in Ireland right up into the 1990s. The film, which is not one of the great works of cinematic achievement, raises nonetheless a lot of authentic issues -- gender differences around household responsibilities, religious beliefs and doubts, friendship and trust, family loyalty and obligations, the nature of miracles, the commercialization of holy sites, and, of course, abortion. The unavailability of contraception in any form except abstinence (try suggesting that to a traditional Irish husband in the 1960s) made large families almost inevitable and often unaffordable (but not necessarily unwanted).
Within my limited experience (solely conversational and anecdotal), the women that I knew who had any connection with abortion (personal, family, friend) were conflicted, ambivalent, distressed, and felt trapped. If being a single parent had been a socially-acceptable option in their own family and community, it would have been a much less difficult decision. If contraception had been available and not forbidden by the church, family size could have been based on income and housing. If it had been more acceptable for married women to work outside the home, larger families would have been more affordable. In essence, the economic and social pressures of the time made it more likely that a woman would consider ending a pregnancy.
The conversation in the film that you cite was, in my opinion, meant to be over the top and wildly exaggerated, as they frantically tried to comfort the mute boy's mother, and meant to be recognized as ironic by viewers, as they were the ones who had been so condemning of the woman who returned after 40 years of "banishment."
MDG by email: Thanks for the warning on that appalling movie!! Yes, warn the public!
From Marcy and Roland D. by email: "BRAVO! We saw the film and could not agree with you more! . . . I wish I could unsee it too. What the heck did she mean by "boiling water"? Of course she did not sit in scalding water. It was painful to watch."
Roseanne: Thank you for your thoughtful & excellent review. When Poland was under communist rule people had a standard joke. What is the future under a communist utopia - misery, hardship and a prison. What about the past? simple we don’t know since the party is forever rewriting the past in terms of a socialist utopia. Years ago I watched “A Town without Pity” - movie about a young German girl who was seduced by a GI and she becomes pregnant and because of the cruelty of the people she drowns herself in the local river to show why we need to promote and encourage abortion. The movie Nefarious shows us the power and the deception of the Devil to kill the soul. In this Nefarious movie - a psychodramas to justify safe sex, social irresponsibility, abortion and euthanasia. The movie is a great act of deception. The star of this movie is neither Christ nor His Mother but an atheist woman who returns to Ireland as modern day astute and compassionate psychotherapist who reconciles the oppressed and liberates the sinful from the deception and oppression of the Faith. Today we live with the broken homes, suicides, drug addiction, euthanasia and an inability to define What is a Woman as we live in a dystopian nightmare where good is evil and evil is good. The producer and director of this movie was & is the Devil! Many will be deceived, so thanks Rosanne for a powerful and insightful review.
Hi Roland,
Thanks for subscribing and for your thoughtful review.
Sound like the German girl in the movie suffered sexual immorality’s consequences made worse by the double standard. Sex leads to babies. Women take the risk of getting pregnant when they engage in the intimacy that belongs in marriage. If they got pregnant, they were ostracized and called whores. The men were not blamed.
The double standard was horrible, but the moral way around it would have been a single standard, in which both men and women were chaste before marriage. It made me sad and resentful as a girl to realize that boys were trying to seduce us even if they ruined our lives.
Instead of promoting morality, society has tried to separate sex from marriage, fostering an attitude between sex partners that “it’s not love unless both of us want it to be love.” And the corresponding attitude towards any babies conceived is that “the child is not a child unless both of us want it,” otherwise it is "a by-product of conception” to be disposed of at will.
We make it possible to prevent some pregnancies with fallible contraception, claiming that sex without consequences is now possible. When women often conceive as they predictably do even with perfect use of birth control they are often blamed. When contraception fails, society offers abortion as the back-up, allowing us to pay killers-for-hire to kill any babies that were conceived “by accident.”
It’s a mad world.
thanks roseanne. i thought the movie was pro abortion too. i was disappointed in it.
I was shocked watching the scene of these nice Irish women going to Lourdes talking about the foul act of abortion as if it was normal and nice and that hating your own child in your womb enough to kill it is compatible with being Catholic. And the contradiction that the young woman was so upset about the muteness of her beautiful boy, who was a living witness to the life that a woman squelches in abortion. If she had succeeded he wouldn't have been there, and there would have been no grief at his absence? I appreciate your affirmation.
You heard that she was given the pill for pain? How unique. I may be wrong about the age gap, but it didn't seem right to me. Of course I have an issue with abortion! It is a horror that our society allows the killing of babies in their mothers' wombs in businesses in city centers, and people accept it as a good. One objection to the movie is that a group of charming Irish ladies at Lourdes in the era in which the movie is set would not be sitting around talking about how they tried to kill their babies by throwing themselves downstairs. The person who wrote the dialogue had some crack-pot ideas about the ways the worst of women would try to end the lives of their unborn children. Don't you have an objection to abortion? Are you Catholic?
There was no mention of abortion pills in the movie. The abortion described was a medical procedure performed by an unlicensed doctor/midwife. The pills were probably a sedative.
The movie doesn't have any pro- or anti-abortion messages, just because it mentions one. It doesn't have any pro- or anti-suicide messages either. It's about what can happen when you let the beliefs instilled in you by society stop you from making your own decisions in tough times.
Life is complicated, and people make mistakes. You can either shut out everyone in the world who doesn't fit in your ideal reality, or you can learn to see the beauty in people's flaws. The movie is about letting go of strict beliefs that don't leave you any room to change and grow. If you disagree with your daughter's life choices, you can kick her out and hold a grudge for the rest of your life. But you will miss out on seeing the person she was always meant to be. You can write her a letter from your deathbed, but there's no guarantee she'll come back for your funeral. A grudge is a double-edged sword that keeps you stuck. It will hurt you more the longer you hold it. Let go of that hate so you can move on with your life.
You and Cynthia made up your own interpretation of her mention of the pill. The character's mention of the pill is a prime example of the anachronism of the movie, which projects today's abortion-loving values backwards onto a time when abortion was rightly seen as the murdering of a living child by its mother. And it has ridiculous made-up examples of how women tried to abort their babies. Nobody sat in a scalding bath of whiskey as an abortion method. And an otherwise loving mother who would throw herself down the stairs to abort more times than she could count—ridiculous. Maybe a group of prostitutes would be sitting around discussing the ways they've tried to get rid of children they conceived and didn't want. But a group of pious Catholic women in Lourdes, mothers and grandmothers, would certainly not be. If a woman aborted her child, she wouldn't be sharing it with anyone. It was and still actually is a shameful unnatural act.
Never did the movie say that a pill caused the abortion. She was given the pill for pain. Also, maybe you haven't been around Catholic families, they can be huge with 20 year gaps between siblings it is not unheard of for the gap to be bigger between cousins. You seem to have an issue with the topic of abortion more than anything. This might not represent your life but I am sure it represents someones.
Actually, there were "pills" in the 60s (and abortifacient herbs in the Middle Ages). I can attest to that. They weren't the sophisticated medications we have now, but there were various unofficial things that did often work. And, despite its flaws (especially the part about sitting in boiling water), I enjoyed the film. I've spent a lot of time in Ireland in the past 25 years, and things weren't very different to the 60s, even 30 years later. The last "Magdalen laundry" in Ireland closed in 1996. There are many survivors still in care, unable to live independently.
I was a young woman in the 60s and abortions were surgical then. I did run into a floozy, as we used to call someone like her, a promiscuous woman in the Lower East Side of NYC who had six abortions, some of them self-induced with a coat hanger. But she was someone who lived outside of religion and morality. I can attest to the fact that the average church-going married Catholic mother of children living in Ireland wasn't going to be sitting around during a pilgrimage to Lourdes talking sympathetically about abortion.
What do the Magdalen laundry have to do with whether or not a movie promotes the idea there was calm acceptance of abortion in the 1960s? Were the Irish women as jaded as they are portrayed when you were there? "Dear dear, it's all right you tried to kill your beautiful boy, but failed. And don't feel guilty that he doesn't talk. And don't pay any attention to the fact that that darling child would not be in this world if you'd had your way. Nothing to feel guilty about. Why, my dear, I've tried to abort my children more times than I can count."
My reference to the Magdalen laundries was intended to underscore the way that unwed pregnant women (and others who were NOT pregnant but were thought to be inclined toward immoral behavior) were treated in Ireland right up into the 1990s. The film, which is not one of the great works of cinematic achievement, raises nonetheless a lot of authentic issues -- gender differences around household responsibilities, religious beliefs and doubts, friendship and trust, family loyalty and obligations, the nature of miracles, the commercialization of holy sites, and, of course, abortion. The unavailability of contraception in any form except abstinence (try suggesting that to a traditional Irish husband in the 1960s) made large families almost inevitable and often unaffordable (but not necessarily unwanted).
Within my limited experience (solely conversational and anecdotal), the women that I knew who had any connection with abortion (personal, family, friend) were conflicted, ambivalent, distressed, and felt trapped. If being a single parent had been a socially-acceptable option in their own family and community, it would have been a much less difficult decision. If contraception had been available and not forbidden by the church, family size could have been based on income and housing. If it had been more acceptable for married women to work outside the home, larger families would have been more affordable. In essence, the economic and social pressures of the time made it more likely that a woman would consider ending a pregnancy.
The conversation in the film that you cite was, in my opinion, meant to be over the top and wildly exaggerated, as they frantically tried to comfort the mute boy's mother, and meant to be recognized as ironic by viewers, as they were the ones who had been so condemning of the woman who returned after 40 years of "banishment."