Author: 徐彩庭
Sunshine, a Filipino high school student, is the most promising star in the gym. She is beautiful, graceful, and everyone who meets her loves her, especially because she is a prospective recruit for the Philippines’ rhythmic gymnastics Olympic team. Still young, a small incident threatens to derail her plans - she is pregnant. If the coach finds out, she undoubtedly will be disqualified. In order to save her future, she is determined to have an abortion.
Abortion is not legal in the Phillipines, so Sunshine is unable to turn to others for help. Instead, she relies on herself and goes to the secretive black market where she wanders around drug dealers, shady hotels, and the streets after dark. Along the way, a mysterious little girl follows her, and another unmarried pregnant girl in an even more dire situation looks forward to Sunshine’s help. Caught between fiction versus reality, bodily self-determination, and social constructs,”Sunshine" illustrates the difficulties women face in these situations, providing audiences a glimpse into the complicated landscape of Filipino abortion policy and opening dialogue between women and children on abortion.
The Philippines is Asia’s only Catholic country, making abortion taboo in accordance with Catholic doctrine. Women who have had abortions could be imprisoned from two to six years, and medical staff assisting in abortion risk having their medical licenses revoked. Worse still, sexual assault, incest, and life-threatening pregnancies for the mother may not be valid exceptions. CNN reports that strict Filipino abortion laws drive over one million mothers to illegal channels for help annually, meaning buying drugs off the internet or consulting secret clinics. Ultimately, thousands of women lose their lives every year.
In the movie, Sunshine is a microcosm of these over one million women. Using unknown drugs, she inflicts a self-induced abortion and bleeds profusely, taking a walk through hell. On this walk, she meets a twelve year old girl, Maria Grace, who is in an even more difficult situation: she was sexually assaulted by her uncle and became pregnant. Born into a poor family, Maria did not even have enough money to buy illegal drugs, so she could only beg for help from people on the street. While Maria finally got the abortion drugs, due to heavy bleeding, her life was holding on by just a thread. She also met a doctor who is scared to break the law and reluctant to save her, demonstrating the difficulties of walking this soul-snapping street.
Many movies featuring similar topics spend a lot of screentime describing the bodily pain and life risks of women who get illegal abortions. For example, Audrey Dewan’s French film, “Happening” creates a poignant picture of illegal abortion surgery being a painful experience. Suffering in “Sunshine” is also an important topic: the scenes of Sunshine and Maria Grace begging for help while covered in blood and struggling on the verge of death are shocking. The movie painfully denounces the legal structures that force women to go into dangerous situations.
However, besides suffering, “Sunshine” also preserves room for warmth, incorporating a perspective rarely seen in similar works- the voices of children. Abortion is often defined as choosing between women' s self-determination and the embryo’s life, making it hard to include children when the narrative advocates for women’s rights. In “Sunshine,” children are everywhere with one mysterious girl becoming the main character throughout the film: - on the street, Sunshine meets this nameless little girl of unknown origins, but the girl knows all about Sunshine. The girl’s behavior is somewhat similar to Sunshine’s, and she always appears next to Sunshine at the most unexpected times. Who is this little girl? The movie gives the audience plenty of room for imagination.
Sometimes this mysterious girl obediently follows Sunshine, while other times she cruelly condemns Sunshine’s abortion. However, when Sunshine is in a hemorrhagic coma, it is this girl who hugs her and prays for her to live. In one of the movie’s most moving scenes, Sunshine goes to the gymnasium in the dead of night, waving her ribbon and dancing alone to the music, immersing herself in the melody and rhythm. When the music stops, Sunshine sees the little girl watching, mesmerized, and asks with tears in her eyes: “Can you understand?” The little girl hugs her and responds with: “I understand." This response may indicate the little girl understands Sunshine’s love of rhythmic gymnastics, or that she understands Sunshine is making this decision out of love.
The movie shows us that children can breathe life into their parents and bless adults. When we believe that children have the ability to understand and love, we will understand that Sunshine is not a murderer, and children are not helpless victims, even if Sunshine ultimately decides to prioritize her own life over the child. At the end of the movie, Sunshine enters the competition arena, and in that moment, she is ready to dance to her heart’s content, demonstrating the shared love, choice, and achievement of her and the little girl.
As director Antoinette Jadaone has said, rhythmic gymnastics is currently the only all female Olympic division, just like how pregnancy and birth are uniquely female experiences, carrying pain and difficulties that only women experience. “Sunshine” invites the Filipino society to pay attention to this kind of life experience, letting the audience hear a gentle voice in the midst of pain: as we empower women, is it possible to reimagine children to be more than mere victims of abortion? The language of abortion is more than suffering, guilt, and personal achievement; it’s also about providing more space for love and understanding.
Reference：
Heather Chen. "Philippines Abortion‑Ban Debate Highlights Tensions over Women’s Rights in Wake of Roe v. Wade." CNN, 18 July 2022. edition.cnn.com/2022/07/18/asia/philippines‑abortion‑ban‑debate‑women‑rights‑roe‑wade‑intl‑hnk‑dst.
Hussain, Rubina, and Lawrence B. Finer. “Unintended Pregnancy and Unsafe Abortion in the Philippines: Context and Consequences.” In Brief, no. 3, Apr. 2013, Guttmacher Institute, New York