As America inches closer to another rehearing of Roe v. Wade, there has been a recent surge in films lionizing abortion activists and feminists while taking aim at major figures in the pro-life movement. AKA Jane Roeclaimed that the pro-life movement had exploited Norma “Jane Roe” McCorvey. The mini-series Mrs. America smeared Phyllis Schlafly and other pro-lifers while glorifying her feminist opponents; The Glorias, a hagiography of Gloria Steinem released only months later, drove home the point. With Hollywood’s revisionist history raking in accolades and entering public consciousness, it is past time that someone set the record straight.
A film that premiered at CPAC this year attempts to do just that. Roe v. Wade was co-directed by Cathy Allyn and businessman Nick Loeb, who also stars in the leading role as Dr. Bernard Nathanson, NARAL founder and abortionist turned pro-life advocate. The movie purports to tell the inside story of how America’s most polarizing Supreme Court ruling came about.
For Loeb, the abortion issue is a deeply personal one. Loeb has been in the news again this month as an L.A. court ruled against him in a custody battle over two embryos created in 2013 through IVF with his ex-fiancée, Modern Family star Sofia Vergara. In addition to ongoing concern for those embryos, which Loeb says Vergara is “trying to kill,” two girls Loeb dated in his twenties had abortions. “As I grew older, I would have dreams that would haunt me, of my child at the age it would be now,” Loeb told me. “That happened every year.”
