The Janes. Directed by Tia Lessin and Emma Pildes. New York: HBO, 2022. 102 minutes.

12th and Delaware. Directed by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady. New York: HBO, 2010. 80 minutes.

Plan C. Directed by Tracy Droz Tragos. Los Angeles: GOODDOCS, 2023. 60 and 94 minutes.

Reproductive Justice on the Screen and in the Classroom

As we finalize this film review, we are raging, along with students and faculty across many college campuses, against the war in Gaza. While the US-backed Israeli occupation of Palestine and degradation of Palestinians is nothing new—it has been ongoing for three-quarters of a century—the degree to which the devastation appears in news feeds and the scale of activist resistance around the globe make this moment unlike anything we’ve seen in our lifetimes. Central to coverage of the Palestinian struggle are harrowing images: fathers hold the limp bodies of their babies, and mothers, whose starving bodies have stopped producing milk, hold their malnourished and crying children. These images and related stories make clear that genocide and occupation are matters of reproductive justice.

They also make it hard to know how exactly to talk about something like the current state of abortion rights, access, and justice in the United States. At the same time, it isn’t terribly difficult to recognize linkages between Palestinian women giving birth at public checkpoints when they cannot get to a hospital due to Israeli restriction of Palestinian mobility, which has long been a tactic of the occupation (Griffin 2023), and pregnant women in US hospitals who are facing death because doctors are not permitted to provide emergency abortions in the hospitals these women can get to.

The latter situation has led the US Supreme Court to consider, for the first time, the stark health implications of a state abortion ban—which was enabled, not incidentally, after this very same court overturned Roe v. Wade just two years ago. The case Moyle v. United States ended up on the Court’s desk after Idaho politicians challenged the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA)—a federal law requiring doctors to treat all patients who arrive at an emergency room.1 Idaho’s state law prevents abortions in all cases, except when the patient is facing death. As a result, Idaho’s ER doctors needed to withhold crucial medical care until they were certain that a patient was close enough to death to warrant the procedure—something that creates serious health risks and can leave patients with unnecessary long-term health complications, including, ironically, infertility. Critics of Idaho’s law said that it was in conflict with EMTALA, and because EMTALA is a federal law, it would supersede Idaho’s ban. In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court sided with critics of Idaho’s abortion ban, allowing emergency room health care workers to provide abortions as a stabilizing medical treatment. This is a victory. But Justice Alito’s dissent, in which he argues for reconsidering EMTALA so that it frames the pregnant woman and the fetus as equals, makes clear how precarious legal precedent can be.

Considering the myriad reproductive health issues and injustices taking place at this moment in time, as well as the many terrific films about these injustices, where to start a review of films about reproductive justice? In what follows, we focus on films that are helpful for thinking about abortion justice in the United States, building on reproductive justice scholars’ and advocates’ positions that reproductive justice is not reducible to abortion rights and also that reproductive justice is impossible without abortion access (Ross and Solinger 2017; Thomsen 2015). Our reflections here are organized along the lines, as squiggly as they are, of past, present, and future, although considering these films from the present moment makes clear that any such temporal designations are fictions. Put more directly, what we frame here as past and as future are apparent in our present, just as our present gives us new tools with which to rethink the past and to aim for a different future.

The Janes

Let’s begin by traveling back to 1960s and 1970s Chicago, which is precisely what The Janes invites us to do. This documentary, directed by Tia Lessin and Emma Pildes and produced by HBO in January 2022, is one of a few recent films about the Jane Collective. The activist group’s mission was to provide safe and low-cost abortions for women with unwanted pregnancies when it was largely illegal to obtain an abortion in the United States. The group began as a referral network, but once members found out that one of the so-called doctors to whom they had been sending patients was not actually a doctor, they decided to learn how to perform abortions themselves. Ultimately, during their four-year existence, the housewives and college students who made up the Jane Collective helped between 11,000 and 13,000 women obtain illegal abortions, and with no fatalities. The Janes tells this story by drawing from interviews with former Janes, the name that all group members assumed, as well as with some of the women they helped. Many of the Janes shared anecdotes about their own traumatizing abortion stories and their desires to ensure that other women’s abortion experiences would be different than their own. Some also shared their personal experiences performing abortions. Throughout, the film speaks to the social and political context of this work, highlighting the influence of feminist and civil rights movements as well as the risks collective members assumed, evidenced, for instance, in their using code names, hosting secret meetings, and rotating vehicles. In 1972, police arrested seven Jane members after raiding the apartment where they operated. However, before the case went to trial, the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision legalized abortion and all charges were dropped.2

Various versions of the story of the Jane Collective have begun to circulate in recent years. Two fictional dramas about the group, Call Jane (2022) and Ask for Jane (2018), for instance, unfold around the story of a single woman who, after receiving an illegal abortion, became inspired to join Jane. The Janes, however, offers something different: a portrait of feminist abortion justice activism as necessarily collective.

Possible texts to teach alongside The Janes:

• Laura Kaplan, The Story of Jane (1995)
• Kelly Suzanne O’ Donnell, “Reproducing Jane: Abortion Stories and Women’s Political Histories” in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (2017)
• Doreen St. Felix, “‘The Janes’ and the Power of Pro-Abortion Imagery” in The New Yorker (2022)
• “Teaching the Jane Collective,” a website created by Carly Thomsen and her students who performed Paula Kamen’s play Jane: Abortion and the Underground and that includes resources useful for teaching about the Jane Collective

12th & Delaware

Now, let’s move to the present, when the anti-abortion movement is investing more time and resources into the crisis pregnancy center (CPC) industry than all other parts of their movement combined. CPCs are anti-abortion nonprofits that critics say masquerade as abortion clinics to dissuade women from seeking abortions. Their deceptive strategies are well-documented (see the recommended texts below). They intentionally open near abortion clinics and give themselves names meant to confuse patients who believe they have found a legitimate medical clinic. This is the case with the CPC featured in the 2010 documentary 12th & Delaware, directed by Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing, which focuses on an abortion clinic and a CPC across the street from one another in Fort Pierce, Florida, at the intersection of 12th and Delaware.

CPCs’ uses of deceptive tactics go much further than their names and locations. The film features a training for CPC volunteers, for instance, in which the leader explains how to respond vaguely to questions from callers who believe they have reached an abortion clinic. The goal is simply to get these callers into the CPC so that volunteers can perform what they call “pregnancy counseling” to attempt to convince women not to obtain an abortion. The claims they make while doing so—including that abortion can cause breast cancer, infertility, and depression—have been proven false repeatedly. 12th & Delaware provides a rare look at how these experiences at CPCs impact the women who end up there.

The film also shows why clients may not realize that a CPC is not an abortion clinic, even after ending up inside. CPCs work to make themselves look like legitimate medical facilities. For instance, CPCs increasingly offer ultrasounds—without making it clear to those receiving the ultrasound that the staff performing it are not medical professionals. In 12th & Delaware, we see how CPC volunteers use sonograms to manipulate patients’ emotions. Critics say that CPCs use this technology to suggest to patients that they are less far along in the pregnancy than they really are (Thomsen 2020). The intended outcome is that the patient believes they have more time to make a decision about an abortion than they really do. In a post-Dobbs world—which was almost unimaginable when 12th & Delaware was released—the potential consequences of this tactic are increasingly severe.

12th & Delaware gestures toward the broader social and political context out of which the CPC industry emerges. We see CPC volunteers torment abortion clinic workers and patients regularly, the effects of over-regulating abortion clinics and under-regulating CPCs, and how CPCs are supported and enabled by conservative Christianity. Today, when CPCs outnumber abortion clinics 3:1 across the United States, the messages of 12th & Delaware are even more crucial than they were when the film first came out in 2010. When teaching this film, it is crucial to assign academic scholarship about CPCs so that students have greater tools with which to dismantle the claims of CPC volunteers, something that the film does not do. On the one hand, these claims evidence the degree to which CPCs rely on deception, lies, and misinformation. On the other hand, this approach works only if viewers already know that these claims have been repeatedly proven inaccurate.

Possible texts to teach alongside 12th & Delaware:

• Alice X. Chen, “Crisis Pregnancy Centers: Impeding the Right to Informed Decision Making” in Cardozo Journal of Law and Gender (2013)
• Amy Bryant, Subasri Narasimhan, Katelyn Bryant-Comstock, and Erika Levi, “Crisis Pregnancy Center Websites: Information, Misinformation, Disinformation”in Contraception (2014)
• Carly Thomsen, Zach Levitt, Christopher Gernon, and Penelope Spencer, “Anti-abortion Ideology on the Move: Mobile Crisis Pregnancy Centers as Unruly, Unmappable, Ungovernable” in Political Geography (2022)
• Carly Thomsen, Zach Levitt, Christopher Gernon, and Penelope Spencer, “Presence and Absence: Crisis Pregnancy Centers and Abortion Facilities in the Contemporary Reproductive Justice Landscape” in Human Geography (2023)
• Carly Thomsen, Carrie Baker, and Zach Levitt, “Pregnant? Need Help? They Have an Agenda” in the New York Times (2022)
• Carly Thomsen, “Crisis Pregnancy Centers and Sonograms” in The Imminent Frame: Secularism, Religion, and the Public Sphere (2020)
  

Plan C

The 2023 documentary film Plan C, named after a grassroots activist organization, makes clear that “the future of abortion is now” (Mark, Foster, and Perritt 2021). That future, Plan C suggests, is comprised of mail-order abortion pills and enabled by a small but mighty group of activists who are willing to ship the pills to those who need them—including in states where abortion is now illegal. Plan C, the organization, operates in six states legally and the remaining states illegally. As the film makes clear, the work its members do is dangerous; many of the volunteers and doctors featured are anonymous, their faces blurred, voices augmented, names limited to a single letter. At the same time, it is remarkably difficult to stop people from buying things online or to regulate their shipping through the mail, as Plan C cofounder Francine Coeytaux notes.

Directed and produced by Tracy Droz Tragos, Plan C covers a remarkable amount of ground, historical, geographic, and ideological. For instance, the film positions the work of Plan C as a matter of reproductive justice, not simply reproductive rights—something that requires us to consider how racism drove the historical development of family planning and continues to impact the reproductive lives of women of color today, which Loretta Ross makes clear, both through her interview in the film and her work elsewhere. She notes, for instance, that when family planning was presented as a way to control the growth of populations of Black and Brown people, Republicans, including Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr., fully supported it. As evidence of this point, Ross notes that the first family planning clinic was strategically located in a Mexican-American community in Texas. At the time, during Richard Nixon’s presidency, these clinics were framed as a way to address growing racial unrest and as good for the country. When family planning was “pitched as a women’s rights issue, where white women were accessing these Title X clinics,” Ross says, Republicans changed their position (44:58). Just as racism drove the history of family planning, it continues to permeate reproductive outcomes today. An activist associated with Plan C noted that “a Black woman in Mississippi is 118 times more likely to die from continuing a pregnancy than an abortion. Whose life are you saving? You don’t really care about life” (47:49). Considering that Black and Brown women are disproportionately likely to seek abortions, and to lack the resources necessary for securing one, the story Plan C tells is necessarily about the impacts of racism.

It also highlights the impacts of two different forces that coincided: the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused abortion clinics to close when abortion was not deemed “essential healthcare,” and the Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which effectively reversed Roe v. Wade and allowed states to outlaw abortion.3 Plan C’s work exploded within this social and political context. The irony here is that by this point in time, ninety countries had already approved abortion medication for use in the first trimester. In the United States, however, the pills—which are safer than many over-the-counter medications, including aspirin—have been overregulated in much the same way as Plan B, or the morning after pill, was in prior years.

That the film highlights growth in the demand for Plan C in the last few years should not suggest that the post-Roe moment is the first time activists have been circulating abortion pills. Activists around the world—including Dr. Rebecca Gomperts who founded the organizations Women on Waves and Women on Web and makes a brief appearance in the film—have for many years been getting abortion medication to people in countries where abortion is illegal and to people who live in places where the procedure is legal but who do not have the resources to obtain it.4 While Plan C also includes interviews with people who have received these pills, the stars of the film are the activists who show up day in and day out—those whom Plan C cofounder Elissa Wells calls “abortion enablers,” not abortion providers. One activist distributor even describes holding a package of pills as feeling revolutionary.

Watching Plan C also feels revolutionary. We see activists struggle against censorship, difficulty mobilizing a critical mass of health-care professionals willing to ship pills across state lines, and very real fears about the consequences of engaging in work that is illegal in some states. Plan C reminds us what bold, courageous, and effective organizing can look like. It is exactly the film we need now, and for the foreseeable future.

Possible texts to teach alongside Plan C:

• Loretta Ross and Rickie Solinger, Reproductive Justice: An Introduction (2017)
• Sydney Calkin, Abortion Pills Go Global (2023)
• Carrie Baker, “One Thing the Failed Attempt to Ban the Abortion Pill Did” in Slate (2024)

1Moyle v. United States, 603 US __ (2024).

2Roe v. Wade, 410 US 113 (1973).

3Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 597 US __ (2022).

4Issue 7.1 in Films for the Feminist Classroom contains a review of the film Vessel (dir. Diana Whitten, 2014), which features the work of Women on Waves, an organization founded by Rebecca Gompers.

Carly Thomsen is associate professor of English and the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Rice University. She is the author of Visibility Interrupted: Rural Queer Life and the Politics of Unbecoming (2021) and the producer of a related documentary film, In Plain Sight. She is also the co-editor of Feminist Studies: An Introductory Reader (2025). Her next book, Queer Reproductive Justice, is forthcoming with University of California Press. Her work on LGBTQ activism, queer rurality, reproductive justice, and feminist pedagogy is published in various journals including Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Political Geography, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, Feminist Studies, Human Geography, Feminist Formations, Journal of Lesbian Studies, and Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture, and Social Justice. Thomsen’s public-facing work includes a reproductive justice mini golf course, leading Public Feminism Fellowships and curating related art exhibitions, co-founding the Center for Public Feminism, and writing for the public, including for the New York Times and Ms. magazine. For more information, please visit: https://www.carlythomsen.com/.

Isabella “El” Fahey is a student at Middlebury College studying gender, sexuality, and feminist studies, political science, and Italian. Her enthusiasm for social change extends beyond the classroom, serving as a member of her student government’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee. As a research assistant under Carly Thomsen, she is actively engaged in research to counter legitimacy claims made by CPCs and combat the spread of medical misinformation regarding reproductive health. She is also a production member of the podcast Feminism, Fascism, and the Future, designed to educate streamers on the antigender movement and how to organize feminist movements.