Professor discusses Roe v. Wade

The feminist movement of the ’60s and ’70s revisited Pitt last week. Anne Fessler, an author… The feminist movement of the ’60s and ’70s revisited Pitt last week. Anne Fessler, an author and filmmaker, showed her documentary film analysis of the decades’ pregnancies, adoptions and abortions in the Frick Fine Arts building on Monday. The yet-to-be-titled film was based on a non-fiction book she wrote about women who put their children up for adoption before abortion was legal. Sex education was virtually ignored in the United States before the Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in 1973, so single women didn’t know what to do when they found out they were pregnant. Fessler, who was adopted, said she wanted to reveal the ‘gap between recorded history and lived history,’ so she interviewed more than 100 women who put their children up for adoption and compiled their accounts into a book, ‘The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade.’ ‘The mediums are conducive to the story-telling,’ said Fessler. ‘I always think it is interesting how one person’s story is a microcosm for a larger issue.’ ‘I wanted to really show how the misrepresentations in the media [of the ’60s] impacted … people in their intimate relationships,’ she said. Fessler, a professor at the Rhode Island School of Design, didn’t always want to write books or produce films on adoption. Fessler was teaching at the Maryland Institute College of Art when she went to visit one of her student’s exhibitions. Another woman at the event caught her attention. ‘I couldn’t remember where I saw her, and I couldn’t remember when,’ she said. ‘When I asked several people who she was, no one knew.’ The mysterious woman approached Fessler saying, ‘You could be my long-lost daughter. You look like the perfect combo of me and the father of my child.’ Fessler and the other woman were both speechless. When they recovered from the shock, they exchanged histories and realized they weren’t mother and daughter. But Fessler spent the rest of the night talking to the woman and writing down her story. ‘I knew I would make an art piece from it,’ she said, ‘Something that touched me personally, but having bigger social ramifications.’ Fessler began exploring her own adoption for the first time. She grew up in Maumee, Ohio, and discovered that the stream near the town was one of three streams that fed the river near where her birth mother had lived. She was then able to track down her biological mother. ‘To actually meet the person grounds you in a reality,’ said Fessler. ‘The process is important because it gets rid of the secrecy, imagination and the lies surrounding adoption.’ Fessler turned her experience into a short film called ‘Along the Pale Blue River.’ Five years ago, Fessler began working on her current documentary, but she was forced to postpone it because she didn’t have enough time to work on it and teach. In 2003, Fessler received Harvard University’s Radcliffe Fellowship, a grant that allowed her to take a break from teaching, and resumed work on her book, ‘The Girls Who Went Away.’ She is currently on sabbatical and working on her untitled film.