2012’s Meant To Be tells the story of …. well, it tells a few stories.

Tori (Erin Sossamon) is a teenage girl who has a bright future but only if she can survive her less-than-wonderful present.  She has an abusive boyfriend.  Her parents seem to be absent.  She’s a photographer and her high school counselor (Michael Gross) has helped her to find a scholarship but Tori has recently discovered that she’s pregnant!

Linda Dickson (Erika Eleniak) is a social worker, who lives in a nice house and who has a wonderful husband (Dean Cain) but who also seems to be struggling with an overwhelming depression.  Maybe it’s because her 18 year-old daughter has recently left home for college.  She obsesses on finding newspaper stories about 20 year-olds doing wonderful things.  She cuts them out of the paper and puts them in a shoebox.  (I do the same thing with well-written obituaries.)  When a call comes in about a loud argument at Tori’s house, Linda is the one who investigates.  When she realizes that Tori is pregnant, Linda becomes a part of Tori’s life, giving her advice.  Linda is determined to convince Tori to not get an abortion, even if it means that Tori will lose her scholarship.

And finally, there’s Nathan (Bradley Dorsey), a twenty year-old aspiring writer who doesn’t know what he should write about.  In a voice-over, he says that he’s learned that writing about only what you know can be a trap so he’s decided to write about what he doesn’t know.  (By that logic, my next short story should be about trigonometry.)  Nathan grew up in the foster system.  He doesn’t know who his mother was.  He’s not even fully sure where he was born.  But he’s still going to search for her so he can discover not only where he came from but also why he was abandoned.

Nathan finds himself staying at a mysterious hotel, one where all of the other guests also appear to be people who never knew their mother.  Even though Nathan puts a do-not disturb sign on his door, the motel maid (Della Reese) still regularly enters his room and encourages him to get out of bed and continue his search.  With the help of two other guests, Shelly (Kristen Renton) and Becky (Colleen Foy), Nathan is able to track down his mother and her address….

Can you guess who she is?

Of course, you can!  Now, in all fairness to the movie, it doesn’t present the fact that Linda is Nathan’s mother as some sort of surprise twist.  From the moment that Nathan figures out that his mother was named Linda and then Becky comes across an old glamour shot of Erika Eleniak in a high school yearbook, it’s pretty clear that Linda Dickson gave up Nathan and she’s never stopped thinking about him and that’s why she’s so obsessed with Tori.  That’s not the twist.

But there is a twist and here it is….

Are you ready?

Nathan and all the residents at the hotel and most of the passengers on the flights that Nathan takes in  and out of town are …. ABORTION GHOSTS!  That’s right.  Linda had an abortion.  Nathan was the son she was meant to have but didn’t.

Is it heavy-handed?  Yes.  Is it effective?  Well, the answer to that question probably depends on how you feel about abortion.  That’s one thing about all of these abortion movies.  It’s hard for me to imagine that any of these films — whether it’s the church-produced Pro-Life films or the studio-produced Pro-Choice films — have ever changed anyone’s mind about abortion.  As such, movies about abortion largely exist to preach to the choir.  Abortion movies, regardless of which side they come down on, are largely movie that people watch so that they can nod and think to themselves, “My side really is the only correct one.”

As for the film itself, it’s rather slow and the voice-over tends to get rather portentous.  Dean Cain was probably on the set for one day.  Colleen Foy gave the best performance while Erika Eleniak was a bit bland in the lead role.  On the plus side, it looked like a real movie, which is more than one can say for a lot of faith-based films.  Again, how you react to the film will largely depend on whether or not you agree with its message.