If that biblical "Lake of Fire" truly awaits the damned in hell, the road there will have been paved by the good intentions of zealots on both sides of the abortion issue.

Tony Kaye's extraordinary documentary -- all 152 agonizing minutes of it -- is no polemic "for" or "against," no Michael Moore mockumentary, but rather a powerful, evenhanded chronicle of the moral and political debate, with dynamic historical footage of the violent tumult of America's abortion-rights battle over the past 30 years.

It features the likes of linguist-cultural historian Noam Chomsky, lawyer Alan Dershowitz, anti-abortion politician Pat Buchanan, Christian fundamentalist Randall Terry (founder of Operation Rescue) and anti-abortion fanatics Michael Griffin, Paul Hill and John Salvi, who murdered doctors "in the name of the mother of God."

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'Lake of Fire'

• Rating: R in nature for subject matter and extremely graphic abortion images.

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Rare is the dispassionate thinker whose sympathies can't be pigeonholed. Chomsky, with his nuanced view of conflicting sets of values, is one of them. So is Nat Hentoff, a liberal atheist who opposes abortion from the rational rather than religious view, that when a sperm and an egg unite, the process of forming a human being should not be interrupted.

Most fascinating is the presence of Norma McCorvey, the anonymous "Jane Roe" of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. She was a pro-choice icon until the charge of responsibility for "35 million baby deaths" led to her conversion into a passionate anti-abortion missionary.

The film's last anguished half-hour consists of a heartbreaking case study of 28-year-old Stacey (who looks 40), from the time she enters an abortion clinic through the procedure itself. It gives the lie to extremists on both sides who think abortion is a purely legal matter or who believe that any woman undergoes it casually.

The lethal combination, Kaye demonstrates, is a reconfigured alignment of religion and politics that has joined Catholics and fundamentalist Protestants, turning the anti-abortion struggle into a jihad akin to that of radical Islam, the wilder fringe members justifying themselves as guerrilla warriors and martyrs in a holy cause: "Abortionists are murderers, murderers should be executed," says one of the doctor-killers.

Director Kaye started out making splashy commercials in the '80s for big-name clients like Nike and Volkswagen, then had a much-publicized falling out with New Line Studio and star Edward Norton over "American History X" (1998), a drama about brothers seduced into a white supremacy movement. He spent 17 years making "Lake of Fire." He has the courage to show us unborn babies in pieces -- shameful manipulation or Holocaust-like truth? Even the staunchest pro-choice advocates will be disturbed by the sight of tiny limbs and eyes in a surgical tray. The other side's equivalent: Kaye also provides graphic images of coat-hanger efforts to abort and the fact that, before the 1973 Supreme Court decision, the single leading cause of death among young American women was neither cancer nor anything else but illegal abortions.

The film's best insight comes from Dershowitz's parable of the rabbi who is asked to settle a marital dispute. After listening to the husband's view, the rabbi declares, "You're right." He then hears the wife and says, "You're right." A student objects, saying, "Rabbi, they both can't be right." The rabbi nods and says, "You're right."

The maddening thing about "Lake of Fire" is that it makes BOTH the cases for and against abortion so effectively. When does a fetus become a human being? Doctors and bioethicists don't know. All we know is that the American tradition of problem-solving dialogue has been supplanted by intransigent true believers, stridently drowning out any and all voices of moderation.

Abortion is absolute "murder."

Abortion is an amoral birth-control "right."

It is neither. It is something in between that must be determined by human beings on Earth, not by disputed religious texts. This superb, emotionally grueling film frames the black-and-white positions (and fittingly films them in black-and-white) while revealing that it's really about agonizing shades of gray.