ABSTRACT
Rapid thudding music swells as dramatic images flash on the screen – women on hospital beds, instruments, medicines, doctor, clinic, nightclub, masked men with guns raiding a building, demonstrations, drugs, a knife, boats, police abseiling from helicopters – the show begins. The female host explains that a viewer has written a letter to the Tam la, ha khwamjing programme about a ‘suspicious’ clinic in Wiphawadi-Rangsit – it has darkened windows and most patients are young women who emerge from the clinic looking pale and sickly. The crew goes in with a secret camera in a handbag – we see blurred images of the inside of the clinic, patients being asked questions, a woman discusses the price of an abortion with the receptionist in muffled sound. The clinic is full of women patients, a few accompanied by men. The evidence is presented to the local police who set up a raid. Dramatic music reaches a crescendo as a pregnant undercover policewoman goes into the clinic to pretend to want an abortion. Again we see blurred images as she pays for the abortion. She sends a signal to the police as she is being prepared for the abortion. Plain-clothes policemen swarm over the clinic, upstairs and downstairs, making sure that the doctor and helpers don’t escape from the back. We see two girls, aged 16 and 18, recovering following abortions. Questions are fired at them as their hair is pushed back from their pale faces. The camera moves through the clinic, we see an operating room, including instruments that are ‘dirty with blood’. A senior uniformed policeman strolls through surveying the clinic and pointing at equipment. We are told that the doctor graduated from Mahidol University (Thailand’s most prestigious medical school) and used to work for a famous Family Planning Clinic. He initially denied doing abortions but the girls confessed that they had just had an abortion. The host asks the camera . . .‘Why don’t young girls heed warnings about sex and contraception. It is probably because they have heard from word of mouth that it is possible to have an abortion – some have had many abortions, without feeling any kind of fear at all’.
