The Cider House Rules is based on John Irving’s novel of the same name.  The action takes place mostly in 1943 - 45, in rural Maine.  Dr Larch is the director of an orphanage, where preganat women come to be delivered of their babies, or to have an abortion.  Larch gives them the choice, and if they want to leave their babies there, the orphanage takes charge of them.  Abortion had been illegal for almost a century at this point.

Homer Wells, the protagonist of the film, is a young orphan who has not been able to find an family to adopt him.  Eventually Dr Larch realizes that Homer will grow up in the orphanage, and he in effect becomes his mentor and his instructor in obstetrics and abortions.  Homer becomes highly skilled in this field, and a close bond develops between the older and the younger man.

Homer, however, feels in his innermost being that he does not want to perform any abortions, even though he is glad they are available to women who otherwise would become the victims of back-street hacks.  He simply feels that killing a fetus is morally wrong.  But when he leaves the orphanage and falls in love, his moral position is tested in a complex way.

We may study this film, if the class wants to deal with the ethical issue of abortion.  As an aside, I would like to recommend the book highly, and Irving’s memoir, My Movie Business, which describes the long process by which the book became a movie, and the many changes (and simplifications) Irving had to impose on his story to turn it into a film.