By FIONA RAE
If the hardest decision facing some pregnant women is whether to terminate or not, then the second hardest must be going on television to talk about it.
Although Rachel Stace, the producer of tonight's Inside New Zealand: The Hardest Decision (8.30pm, TV3), knew it would be difficult finding women to talk about abortion, even she wasn't prepared for just how hard it would be.
"We tried to have things like all-women crews and so on, and we did talk to the women in the crews about their attitudes towards abortion beforehand so that they could relate to the women and the women would feel comfortable and so on, but it was just really, really tricky finding women, especially women who were pregnant and were considering termination, that was the hardest part."
Abortion is, of course, a sensitive subject which has polarised us since it became possible, and many women were reluctant to be filmed because they hadn't told anybody about it. Some didn't want their partners identified and some feared a backlash if they were publicly identified.
But Stace and her team did find women prepared to have crews around while they wrestled with their unwanted pregnancies. Mostly, Stace says, they spoke up because they thought abortion should be out in the open and we don't talk about it enough.
"We should talk about it and we should recognise that it is happening - we know that it's happening because of the statistics.
"I don't think that people understand what it's like to be in that situation and I think that women give it a lot of thought and it affects them deeply during and afterwards.
"And it's not something they do lightly, at all. They think about it very carefully and they will only tell closest friends later on what they've done."
With 16,400 abortions performed in New Zealand last year, and rising, it's hardly an uncommon experience for women.
"If you start talking about it in a group of women, you'd be amazed how many women have actually done it," says Stace. "Unless you brought up the topic, you wouldn't ever have known."
There is, however, a veil of silence about abortion, from doctors and counsellors down, she says.
"No counsellors want to be identified, and come out in public because they'll quite likely get vilified. We talk to abortion doctors, who are doing it now, who haven't even told their colleagues in the surgery that this is what they do."
The documentary takes a neutral stance, merely recording the women's decision-making process, or discussing the effects of their decisions. The outcome in one case is not termination, and an anti-abortion protester and a pro-life doctor are interviewed.
But Stace is expecting some response.
"You'll never please either end of the spectrum. They will both think, I suspect, that it's favouring the other end. We just wanted people to understand what it was like when women were faced with this dilemma, the kind of things that they went through."
Pro-life, pro-choice and personal reality
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