This DVD just got released on March 27th a couple of weeks ago, and therefore is probably being measured a lot by the labels, etc. for it's sales numbers now after initial release. With the supreme court decision this week that affect women's freedom on abortion rights, this seems like the right time for ALL of us to buy a copy of this and perhaps push it to the top of the sales list to send a message to the Supreme Court and the "Forced Birth" crowd what a tragedy this is likely to become.
The title of the film is "Leona's Sister Gerri".
Here's the cheapest place I found to buy it:
http://www.deepdiscount.com/viewproduct.htm?productId=8592904and here's another site page which describes it more with the following description:
http://www.dvdempire.com/Exec/v4_item.asp?item_id=1307596"We never knew theistory, or we didn't until Leona's Sister Gerri...searingly effective, forceful, intimate, unpretentious, devastating." - Janet Maslin, The New York TimesThe tragic and grisly photograph--a woman on a motel floor, dead after an illegal abortion--stirred a nation and inflamed a movement. Now,
Leona's Sister Gerri tells the powerful and thought-provoking story of the anonymous woman behind the image and how she became an extraordinary icon for the ever-controversial abortion issue. Through tears and laughter, Gerri Santoro's tale of desperation in the days before legal abortion "unfolds in an intimate, unpretentious style" (The New York Times) as told by her family and friends.
Gerri was a tree-climbing kid who grew up on the family farm, then a spirited adolescent, a young wife, and later the devoted mother of two little girls. But she was also a battered wife who suffered years of abuse before eventually leaving her husband and returning to Connecticut. There Gerri became pregnant by a lover who agreed to perform an abortion and then left her when the operation went awry. Nine years later, in 1973, Ms. magazine published the heart-wrenching photo, which even now cries out from protest placards as a potent symbol in the struggle for a woman's right to choose.
Directed by Jane Gillooly, rousing and all-too-real,
Leona's Sister Gerri cuts through the leaden rhetoric of one of America's most divisive issues to pay respects to an extraordinary woman and her tale.
I just got my copy today in the mail and I'm sending a note to our Dem Club to perhaps try and get a showing of it here locally in San Diego in the coming weeks.