Stories of A. Directed by Charles Belmont and Marielle Issartel. Icarus, 2024 (1973). 89 minutes.

Abortion and Women’s Rights 1970. Directed by Catha Maslow, Jane Pincus, Mary Summers, and Karen Weinstein. Women Make Movies, 2023 (1970). 28 minutes.

In July 2022 I arrived at award-winning filmmaker Dorothy Fadiman’s home with a film crew as I prepared to interview her husband, Jim, about his psychedelic research. Secretly, I was trying not to let my inner fan girl show when Dorothy answered the door. But, unfortunately, she had no time for me. As she explained, “Roe v. Wade is under threat, and there’s no time to waste.” That afternoon she was busy trying to get out from underneath copyright laws by chopping up her 1992 documentary When Abortion Was Illegal to post pieces of it to YouTube to help spread the word. Dorothy had years earlier narrowly survived an illegal abortion and turned her own harrowing story into a documentary to rally support for women’s healthcare rights. With access to abortions under threat in the 2020s, Dorothy, now in her 80s, was motivated to tell her story once again, showing viewers the gritty reality of a world without access to legal abortions. As upset as I was at not getting to spend more time with her, the encounter overwhelmed my experience that day, and I was immediately reminded of activists who have put their bodies and talents on the line in the name of feminism.

The fearful prospect of an unwanted pregnancy is a feeling that many of us have experienced. I was fortunate to benefit from the past accomplishments of women like Dorothy and the filmmakers I’ll discuss below, who translated their difficult circumstances and fears into action, raising their voices to demand better access to women’s healthcare, including support for maternal and infant care as well as support for decisions to terminate a pregnancy. I am a mother, I have endured a miscarriage, and I have terminated a pregnancy. I have had the privilege of working through each of these experiences largely with support for my choices. As a historian of eugenics and sterilization policies and as I look around at the challenges faced by many today, I realize how lucky I am to have had this privilege, and I also know how fragile it is.

Boston-based filmmakers Catha Maslow, Jane Pincus, Mary Summers, and Karen Weinstein center Abortion and Women’s Rights 1970 on questions of choice and privilege that remain at the heart of women’s reproductive health activism. The choice to have children as well as the choice to have safe, legal abortions without judgment was already on full display in this 1970s film. It introduced viewers to intimate stories of women whose reproductive options were constrained by patriarchal laws and medical power dynamics, as well as by racial and economic barriers preventing genuine autonomy over family planning.

The film opens with emotionally charged accounts of individual women describing how it felt to be pregnant and the fear that accompanied their bodily changes as they searched for then-illegal abortions. It is clear that the lack of information surrounding the procedure and its potential side effects created additional concerns. Would it render one sterile forever? Did having an abortion mean never being a mother?

The latter part of this short film adds layers to the issues by taking viewers to Puerto Rico, where women had been subjects of sterilization campaigns and birth control experiments. There, reproductive health activism was shaped by patriarchal, racist, and classist assumptions about poverty and fertility. For example, women who were part of the medical experiments faced a false choice: if they “chose” to stop taking the birth control pill, they might risk losing welfare payments. Others struggled to access financial and emotional assistance to support them in keeping the children they already had.

Abortion and Women’s Rights 1970 reminds us that these are all feminist issues. The right to choose to have children, to choose how many, and to choose when, are all part of feminist movements that emerged in the early 1970s focused on centering self-determination and increasing access to health information about women’s bodies. We would be wise to heed the actions of these feminist filmmakers today as we remember that, regardless of our own proximity to pregnancy or feelings about motherhood, access to reproductive choices is not about politics but about genuine health and care.

Stories of A remains in the same decade as Abortion and Women’s Rights 1970 but shifts our focus to France, providing intimate insights into the complex personal and political struggles of Parisienne women negotiating their place as mothers, laborers, wives, and daughters as they confront patriarchal and capitalist pressures to constrain their femininity. Over the course of ninety minutes, filmmakers take viewers into Paris in the spring of 1973, a time when turbulent political debates about providing abortions in hospitals occurred alongside conversations about access to accurate information about contraceptives. An early arresting scene depicts a married couple seeking an abortion from a sympathetic physician who carefully and thoroughly explains the procedure, including showing them the instruments he uses. Viewers then witness the abortion itself and a relieved couple thanking the doctor.

In this powerful artistic representation of women and family planning, traces of intersectional thinking complicate the narrative, as protagonists raise issues of disability, class, race, and ethnicity. Although these themes are not the focus of the film, they help to present a messy narrative, one that attempts to emphasize the diversity of women’s needs, bodies, and desires, all of which underpin a message of choice and autonomy above all else.

Visual cues such as the ubiquitous scenes of people smoking cigarettes allude to the setting in Paris. However, in some ways, Stories of A could have taken place in many urban locations in the Western world, as women demanded their liberty and autonomy against an oppressive medical and capitalist gaze that traps them in a social role that relies on their subjugation. Medical doctors on both sides of the debate are profiled, with two younger male physicians addressing a crowd of women on the need for hospital-based care to prevent the growing tide of unwanted pregnancies and risks associated with underground or home abortions. The film closes with scenes of women and men marching together to protest the inadequate legal provisions for family planning in France.

Taken together, these two touchstone films depicting an earlier era in the ever-contested area of abortion and family planning rights offer poignant reminders of the fragile nature of choice when it comes to reproductive health. Despite the black-and-white images and throwback fashions, many of the concerns raised in these films continue to animate conversations today when it comes to the intrinsic contradictions in an anti-abortion discourse that fails to recognize fundamental reproductive rights, medical information, and economic choices that concern women’s bodies.

Erika Dyck is a professor and a Canada Research Chair in the History of Health & Social Justice at the University of Saskatchewan. She is the author or co-author of several books on the history of reproductive health. Erika is the co-editor of two McGill-Queen’s University Press book series on the history of medicine and of Intoxicating Histories. She is currently the President of the Alcohol and Drugs History Society.