'Plan C' Review: A Must-See For All | SXSW
Compelling, urgent stories from the medication-abortion underground.
Plan C. Courtesy of Plan C.
Plan C, acclaimed documentarian Tracy Droz Tragos' latest film, opens with a disclaimer. White text seeps onto a black screen, as if emerging through a fog. "Voices, faces, names, and locations of some participants in this film," it reads, "are obscured to protect them from the risk of prosecution and violence." That warning is ominous. Prosecution. Violence. Welcome to the United States of America in 2023, where a minority faction has seized enough power to chill conversation about and access to medication that is safe and effective and, as the film shows, desperately needed across this country.
Plan C is a gripping film about Plan C, both the non-profit group that bears that name and abortion via mifepristone and misoprostol, the combination of medications that is known, too, as Plan C. Tragos trains her lens on the people, not the politics, and aims to share stories, moving past vitriol and rhetoric to see what things look like behind the headlines and on the ground. How broadly worded laws impact lives. These are quiet stories, desperate stories, and empowering stories, especially where the film sits with the activists who have dedicated their lives to reproductive justice, where they speak of a world in which babies of all colors are wanted, loved, and supported, and where all people have the right to control their bodies, not have legislative bodies control them.
Handheld footage juxtaposed with tight shots and disguised voices gives the viewer a visceral sense of the guerilla nature of the struggle. It feels, at times, like clips smuggled out of a warzone through an underground network of freedom fighters, rebels for a cause. The film takes its viewers into the most intimate spaces of people's lives—their homes, their families, their ultrasounds—and it gives us a sense of the why: why women end a pregnancy. It's a reality that pithy political rhetoric glosses over or ignores entirely. There are no lawyers here. No cases, no litigants. Just people whose voices can go unheard unless someone thinks to look for them and to ask them to tell their stories. Which is exactly what Tragos and her team have done.
And that's the theme of Plan C: To train the lens on where we are and how we got here, without fear or favor, by listening to the women—and it's really just women, at least in this film—who are committed to getting the word out about medication abortion and by showing how far women who need it will go to get it. They drive hundreds of miles. They cross state lines. They scrape cash together. They walk alone across empty parking lots to approach a clandestine van that is distributing abortion medication. The activists are bold and emboldening. They hire an ad van, a huge, three-sided billboard on wheels, to let people know, in the brightest of lights, that Plan C exists. This small group of women are doing everything they can to ensure that Plan C remains available to women if and when they need it. These women are so committed to that choice, that option, that they put themselves and their families at risk as they hopscotch through the thicket of ever-changing laws that try and try and try to control women, brought to us by the very same people who flipped the "my body, my choice" script on its head when it came to wearing masks during COVID. Rules for thee, it seems.
Every politician, physician, attorney, judge, and—yes—citizen would be well-advised to watch this deeply important film, to see why women need to self-manage abortion and why controlling access to the medicines that make up Plan C is imposing government into the most profound areas of people's lives. Those who will make it their business to see this film already know how close we are to the brink of that dystopian future that literary giants like Margaret Atwood, George Orwell, and Ray Bradbury warned us about. It's those who think they don't need to see it who most desperately do.
Tragos shows us how we are barreling ever faster to authoritarianism, a reality that is both the antithesis of and mutually exclusive with freedom and the small band of women who are shuttling pills through the U.S. mail and surreptitiously placing stickers with Plan C's website address on the toilet paper holders in stalls of bathrooms at universities in the reddest of the red states is doing more than their part to stop it. Information. Access. Power. Because, as one brilliant professor who appears in the film says, you can’t defend your human rights if you don’t know what they are in the first place.
Plan C is necessary and vital, holding a lens up to this society and taking a snapshot of the moment, of what the end of Roe has wrought for countless women across the county. The landscape is bleak, but Tragos shows us that there is also so much hope—hope that those who believe in the ideals of freedom and who realize that no good comes of authoritarianism will stand up before we hit rock bottom. Some people who never thought that they would want and need an abortion are starting to see the problem of big government in people's lives, brought to you, ironically, by the party of small government. Like people who never thought they’d need or want an abortion but whose fetus was given such a dire diagnosis that that course reads as the most humane way forward. Now they want a choice, and they don't have it. That's all the pro-choice movement ever wanted: To have agency over one's own life and future. Tragos' film isn't looking to convert, but it may have the unintended effect of doing just that because you can't help but empathize with the people who are desperate to choose their own future.
Plan C ends as it began, with white text dissolving onto a black background. It's an effective bookend, but this time, there is no disclaimer or warning. Rather, there is a message of hope. Abortion has always been an inevitability, and it is going nowhere—except, perhaps, underground. If that's its future, then there will be women—and, one hopes, legions of men, who play a very real role in every pregnancy but whose bodies remain beyond the fray—who support that cause. In the tradition of the most impactful journalists, Tragos shines a very bright light on this reality. And with her work, perhaps the time that abortion is driven underground will be short because to restrict women's access to and agency over their own bodies is no way to run an ostensibly free society. Pregnant women become a second class where their lives and their decisions are no longer their own. Tragos offers a look behind that curtain and allows the viewer to simply see and decide their role in a battle that, to date, shows no sign of abating. See it. You’ll be glad that you did, and you may just be inspired to get off the sidelines, in one way or another. Because authoritarianism never stops where you think it will. First, they came for medication abortion. Next, they may come for you.
