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Actors say they have not been paid for their work on ‘Roe v. Wade’ film

March 5, 2021 CNA Daily News 1

Denver Newsroom, Mar 5, 2021 / 04:28 pm (CNA).- Several actors who worked on the film “Roe v. Wade” claim they are still waiting to be paid for their work on the movie, despite shooting their scenes over two years ago.

The film’s co-director and co-producer told CNA that the payment issue is resolved on their end, and they are waiting for the actors union to pay the actors using a large deposit the filmmakers placed with the union.

“Roe v. Wade,” a film about the landmark 1973 US Supreme Court decision on abortion, premiered last weekend at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

Susan LaBrecque, a Mississippi-based actor with a small speaking role in the movie, told CNA that she has yet to be paid for her work, despite her scenes being filmed over two days in New Orleans during July 2018.

Members of the actors union, SAG-AFTRA, normally can expect their payment to arrive within 30-45 days of filming, LaBrecque said.

Because the current payments are delayed, there will be late fees applied by the union, she noted. She said she knows of several other actors in the film— all with similarly small roles— who have not gotten their paychecks.

She said to her, it feels wrong that the film premiered before everyone involved was compensated for the work they put into it. 

“It feels wrong to tell [such] a moral story in a way, and have something in the background that’s not morally correct,” LaBrecque told CNA.

Cathy Allyn, co-director and producer of the movie, told CNA that they had placed a $200,000 deposit with SAG to cover any missed payments or other expenses, which is common practice in the film industry.

The missing payments were not caught until the filmmakers completed post-production accounting, at which point it was too late for them to hire a payroll company, Allyn asserted.

Allyn said she signed paperwork “a few weeks ago” to allow SAG to release their deposit to a payroll company, which will pay the actors.

She said the payment issues were likely due to “incomplete paperwork,” that she had apologized to the actors profusely, and that she and her co-producer Nick Loeb have no intention of leaving cast members “hanging.”

She said the filmmakers went through the “appropriate legal avenues” with SAG, and that COVID-19 likely contributed to the delay in the payments.

SAG did not respond by press time Friday to CNA’s request for comment, but released a statement to Los Angeles Magazine on the matter March 3.

“We were finally able to secure a release on the producer’s deposit [from] February 10. We are processing the funds with a payroll company so we can get payments out to performers as quickly as possible,” the statement reads.

“This does not cover all of the claims and we hope that the producer will fulfill its obligations and fully pay all talent,” it concluded.

LaBrecque pushed back on Allyn’s assertion that the actors know what they are owed, stating that she does not have “any idea how much the fees are, or when they will be paid.”

Actors Sherri Eakin and Brent Phillip Henry confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter that they, too, have yet to be compensated. They told THR that they have also not yet been given a payment schedule.

CNA encouraged other actors with the same problem to reach out voluntarily, but did not receive any additional reports by press time.

“Roe v. Wade” is set to be available in April on Amazon Prime and iTunes. Among its executive producers is Dr. Alveda King, Martin Luther King Jr.’s niece.

Loeb, a businessman-turned-filmmaker and actor, co-directed, co-produced, and starred in “Roe v. Wade.” He plays the part of Dr. Bernard Nathanson, a prolific abortion doctor who later converted to Christianity and became pro-life.

In a Feb. 23 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Loeb said despite the film’s subject matter, it is not a “conservative,” “religious,” or even a “pro-life” film.

Loeb said not all the actors in the film are pro-life, but at least one of the actors— whom he declined to name— converted from pro-choice views to pro-life over the course of filmmaking.

“What we tried to do is really just lay out the facts of how Roe v. Wade came to be and how it was decided. People can take one view or another. I’ve had a lot of people who think it’s in the middle,” he commented to The Hollywood Reporter.

Still, Loeb himself is pro-life and the personal journey of Loeb’s character, Nathanson, is one of pro-life conversion.

“Why some folks may think it’s a conservative film or why it aligns with those views is because the protagonist actually converts. He starts off pro-choice and becomes pro-life through his journey. It’s a true story,” Loeb commented.

Nathanson personally performed an estimated 5,000 abortions and oversaw tens of thousands more, including one on his own pregnant girlfriend in the 1960s.

Nathanson was previously a strong proponent of legalized abortion, and has been accused of inflating statistics on illegal abortions in the U.S. In 1969, he helped to found the lobbying organization now known as NARAL Pro-Choice America.

He left the practice of abortion in the early 1970s, and became a Christian and a pro-life activist until his death in 2011.


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Tasmania poised to legalize euthanasia, assisted suicide

March 5, 2021 CNA Daily News 0

Hobart, Australia, Mar 5, 2021 / 03:01 pm (CNA).- The Australian island of Tasmania is expected to become the third Australian state to legalize assisted suicide and euthanasia, after a bill passed the lower house of the state’s parliament Thursday night.

The law would apply to people over 18 with an advanced, incurable, irreversible condition expected to cause death within six months, and patients can opt out of the decision at any time, the Australian Associated Press reported.

In a 16-6 vote March 4, the bill was passed by the House of Assembly. The governing Liberal Party members were given a conscience vote on the bill. All nine members of the opposition Australian Labor Party voted for the bill, as did both members of the Greens, who are crossbenchers.

Tasmanian lawmakers debated the bill, known as “End of Life Choices,” extensively this week. The state’s legislature has in the past rejected bills to legalize assisted suicide, most recently in 2013.

The bill will require approval from the parliament’s upper house before it can become law.

Assisted suicide and euthanasia have been legal in Victoria since June 2019, and in December 2019 Western Australia passed a law allowing the practices, which is expected to take effect in mid-2021.

Australia is currently considering legalizing euthanasia nationwide.

One of the Tasmanian bill’s provisions states that medical practitioners who object to assisted suicide and euthanasia must provide the patient seeking it with the contact information for the state’s Voluntary Assisted Dying Commission. 

Anther provision would allow assisted suicide to be prescribed via telemedicine— a provision hotly debated in Tasmania’s parliament.

The Tasmanian branch of the Australian Medical Association told ABC News last year that they do not support the bill, or assisted suicide in general. “The bill as it stands is really physician-assisted suicide and we don’t support that … we don’t agree that a doctor should ever do any action with a primary purpose of ending a person’s life,” AMA Tasmania President Helen McArdle told the ABC.

Live and Die Well, a Tasmanian group that advocates for palliative care rather than assisted suicide, has argued against the bill on the grounds that it does not provide enough safeguards for the vulnerable.

New South Wales rejected such a bill in 2017, as did the national parliament in 2016.

The Northern Territory legalized assisted suicide in 1995, but the Australian parliament overturned the law two years later.

Catholic bishops in Australia have repeatedly written in support of palliative care as an alternative to assisted suicide and euthaniasia.

The state of Victoria reported more than ten times the anticipated number of deaths from assisted suicide and euthanasia in its first legal year.

Victoria’s Voluntary Assisted Dying Review Board reported 124 deaths by assisted suicide and euthanasia since June 19, 2019, when the legalization of the precedure took effect, The Catholic Weekly reported. There were a total of 231 permits issued for the procedure that year. The state’s premier had publicly predicted only “a dozen” deaths by assisted suicide in the first year.

Last month, an Australian university found that the country has less than half the number of palliative care physicians needed to care for terminally-ill patients.

A study published by Australian Catholic University’s PM Glynn Institute revealed that the country only has 0.9 palliative care doctors per every 100,000 people. According to the ACU, health industry standards state there should be at least two doctors for this population.

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s September 2020 letter Samaritanus bonus reaffirmed the Church’s perennial teaching on the sinfulness of euthanasia and assisted suicide, and recalled the obligation of Catholics to accompany the sick and dying through prayer, physical presence, and the sacraments.

Samaritanus bonus also addressed the pastoral care of Catholics who request euthanasia or assisted suicide, explaining that a priest and others should avoid any active or passive gesture which might signal approval for the action, including remaining until the act is performed.


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Papal Mass in Erbil ‘nothing short of a miracle’, organizer says

March 5, 2021 CNA Daily News 0

Erbil, Iraq, Mar 5, 2021 / 11:19 am (CNA).- When Vida Hanna was told by the Archbishop Bashar Warda of the Chaldean Archeparchy of Erbil that Pope Francis was coming to Iraq, she thought to herself it was just another rumor.

Growing up in the Chaldean Catholic community in Erbil, Hanna, 27, was a little girl when there were rumors that St. John Paul II was planning to come to Iraq for the Jubilee 2000.

“But once I saw the official announcement from the Vatican, I knew this time it was for real,” she told CNA from her office at the Catholic University in Erbil.

Hanna, who graduated in communications at UC San Diego, is the director of public and international relations at the Catholic university, and Archbishop Warda appointed her coordinator of the Mass Pope Francis will celebrate March 7 at Erbil’s Franso Hariri Stadium.

“COVID has devastated the local economy, so organizing an event of this magnitude, even for the local Kurdish autonomous authorities, was financially impossible,” Hanna said. But according to her, the Knights of Columbus stepped in on their own initiative. “With their usual generosity and discretion, they made this dream possible for the whole community,” she added.

“Calling this event historical is almost an understatement for all minorities, especially Christian, after centuries of massacre, persecutions, and forced displacement.”

Once the funds were secured, Hanna convoked volunteers. They got far more than they expected to, because “all the Christian kids know that this is a once in a life opportunity.”

She then put the Catholic university IT managers to work on software that would guarantee high standards of identity recognition.

“This took quite an effort, because, as you can understand, the security standards have to be very high: we need to double check documents, correct name spellings, make sure they match IDs, and so forth,” she told CNA.  

The volunteers were trained at the Catholic university, gathered information from Christians in a 50 mile radius from Erbil, and set up 30 computers at the campus. “The sign-in for the 10,000 available seats lasted two weeks, while simultaneously, a group of volunteers with church and government experts scouted the stadium, established perimeters, security areas, and contingency plans,” Hanna says. 

She told CNA that with all this details taken care of, “the next challenge was transportation.” “Keep in mind, never before in Erbil, 10,000 people have been simultaneously transported to a single place in an orderly fashion. But we are now very confident that everything is in place and will work fine.” 

Hanna is especially happy that the Mass is involving so many young people. Beside the 250 young volunteers, there are another 100 youth in the chorus that will accompany the Mass.

“All of the local young Christians are in awe that this is happening to them and their generation… and it is so much needed! Only the Holy Father can bring the sense of security, the inner peace, the hope for a society that accepts religious diversity,” she said.

During the Mass, local Muslim authorities will attend, and there will be a place reserved for other minorities such as the Yazidis. The celebration will include passages in Aramaic, Kurdish, Arabic, English, and Italian. “I will be doing one of the readings in Aramaic, the language of Jesus… so I am a bit nervous,” Hanna joked.

“But the important thing is that the Mass will be not only the celebration of Jesus’ sacrifice, but also a strong message to our young Christians: you can stay, you don’t need to leave, you can build a future here, in the land where we Christians have been for almost two millennia.”  


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