This Documentary About the Fight for Abortion Information and Access Is One of the Must-Sees of 2023
The fight for contraception, abortion rights, and bodily autonomy has always been hard-fought and tense, but in the last few years, it's become a life or death battle for many. And many private citizens have taken it upon themselves to fight back. Enter Francine Coeytaux and Plan C, a grassroots organization arming people in all 50 states with information about abortion medication by mail.
Plan C, a new documentary about the work being done by Coeytaux and her organization, premiered last week at the Sundance Film Festival. Directed by Tracy Droz Tragos, Plan C chronicles the organization’s work from 2018-2022, a timespan marked by constant upheaval, from COVID and the changing Supreme Court, to the abortion bounty law passed in Texas, and the final strike-down of Roe v. Wade last summer.
What Plan C really drives home is just how often the goalposts change for frontline workers trying to provide abortion care to those in need. Reproductive rights are not only in constant flux at the national level due to the 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court, but individual states are changing their laws all the time, with red states seemingly in a perpetual death race with one another to see who can innovate the most appalling regulations.
For an organization like Plan C—which tracks and disseminates information about all 50 states—the sheer logistical nightmare they face on a near-daily basis is immense. It's fighting a war on 50 different fronts simultaneously, against an enemy constantly changing the rules of engagement. But Plan C is improbably holding its ground. That perseverance comes through in the film, which, despite the heavy subject matter, is ultimately an uplifting and inspiring story about how people can (and do) make a difference.
Tragos is no stranger to the Sundance Film Festival or to the fight for abortion rights. Her first film Rich Hill, about the hopes and challenges of three young boys growing up in a poor rural Missouri town, won the documentary Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2014. And her second film, Abortion: Stories Women Tell, was nominated for an Emmy and is currently streaming on HBO.
Cosmopolitan talked to Tracy about the challenges of making a film about a constantly evolving issue, how this originated, how the overturning of Roe v. Wade impacted the project, and staying sane while making movies about difficult subjects.
Let's start at the beginning: How did this project first manifest?
I wanted to see how folks were preparing for Roe being overturned after [Brett] Kavanaugh was appointed. So I started to do the research and… I don’t want to dwell on all the rejection, but there was so much, and films about abortion are potentially polarizing and they’re hard for entities to fund. Based on my research. I was like, ‘This woman Francine is amazing, and my mind is blown.’ Everything else comes through Amazon right to your door, why not abortion care?
Had you heard of Plan C before that?
No, I hadn’t heard of it! I mean, I knew what abortion medication is. I’ve had four pregnancies in my life—two miscarriages and two children. And for one of the miscarriages, I took the abortion pill, which is often given in miscarriage management. And that’s part of the ridiculousness of this, that doctors can’t even prescribe it for miscarriage management, or they’re afraid of doing it. It’s a real travesty.
I had even gone home and taken the medication myself, but still this idea of telemedicine and online provisioning—I didn’t know anything about it.
What do you remember about the first time you met Francine in 2018?
I sent her a message on LinkedIn, and she got back to me right away. She lives 20 minutes from my house in L.A., and we met for coffee. I had a little bit of street cred because I’d made a previous film about abortion, but I don’t think she knew much about me until we met.
What I remember was her passion, her anger, and how everything she was saying made such sense. She talked about how this medication has been approved for 20 years, it’s safer than Tylenol, and it should be over the counter, but it’s so highly regulated and it’s all political, and most people don’t even know that it exists and that it’s a thing separate from emergency contraception. She’s larger than life, and I was awed by her, impressed by her, and I just wanted to keep talking with her and follow her in her work.
So once Francine was on board, the papers have been signed, and the funding was secured, what did day one look like on a project like this?
Ha! What do you mean ‘funding is secured?’ Is that a joke?
[laughs] I didn’t think so! But okay, let’s talk about that. How did you fund the film?
I rattled the cup through my fiscal sponsor for donations by individuals… and by going into debt. So that’s how I funded it. But there are films that feel bigger than you. And you say, ‘That’s the last time I’ll put my own money in, and I’ll wait until it’s fully funded,’ but that hasn’t been my experience as a filmmaker. It’s often having to green-light myself, and make personal calculations of how much debt I can go into. So that's what this was.
Do you remember what day one of shooting was like?
I met Francine at a meeting with her colleagues. They were sitting around her kitchen table and they had a sheet of paper on the window and they were writing out plans. Part of what she and the organization struggled with is just getting the word out there when they’re being censored and people don’t even want to use the word ‘abortion.’ And Francine had this crazy idea of getting American providers to mail within their states. And everybody was like, ‘No, no, Francine, that's crazy.’ But then COVID hit, and it didn’t seem so crazy.
You were in production on the film when several major moments happened in the abortion fight, from Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, to the nominations of Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, to the leaked SCOTUS decision. Do you have any memories of those days in terms of working on the film?
And there’s also what was happening in Texas with SB 8, the six-week abortion ban with private citizen enforcement, which really put a chill factor in everyone’s heart. But yes, right after the leaked decision, I went to Oklahoma to film in a clinic that was perfectly able to provide care, and the staff was there but the waiting room was dark, there were no patients, and things were being boxed up.
And once Roe did fall, I was with one of the doctors answering the Miscarriage and Abortion Hotline, and there was just this desperation. People who had appointments that got canceled, and people so desperate for care but with so few options.
How close did you think the film was to being done before the SCOTUS draft leak last spring?
There’s always a question of, ‘When do you put the camera down?’ Certainly I’d wondered about that, because as an independent filmmaker cobbling it together, some days are better than other days.
But there was already a sense of urgency for getting the word out about this organization. That really took off once COVID hit, and it hasn’t stopped. So the fact that the leaked decision happened… they were all moving in that direction anyway. The writing was on the wall.
With a film like this, where the subject is an ongoing fight with no end in sight, how do you decide when you’ve gone as far as you can go with the project?
Well, certainly once Roe fell, the narrative seemed to persist that the only option was for people to travel out of their states and to take days off work and go where abortion was legal. And that option still needs to exist, but I wasn’t hearing—and the folks who do this work weren’t hearing—that there’s another option. The option is that the pills come to you, and you don’t have to take the time off, and you can do this in the privacy of your own home, safely and discreetly. So there was that feeling of, ‘We’ve gotta get this out there.’
Did you have another ending in mind at the start of the project?
There was a meeting that was supposed to happen in January of 2022 with people from all areas of the network coming together, but it got canceled due to COVID. And that was heartbreaking because I thought that might be the ending. But then so much more happened, and the meeting happened in August in response to Roe getting overturned. So it’s hard, but sometimes these things then make sense in a way that you don’t anticipate when you start off, and once I had that big meeting, that was the ending, and we raced to finish the film.
What was the biggest challenge in editing the film?
One of the most important things was the chronology, and where we were in relation to Roe falling. Once Roe fell it became important for us to let the audience know that, 'Yes, we were here for that, and we’ll include that, but then we’ll also take you all the way back to when we started before COVID.'
Does anything stand out as the most difficult cut you had to make?
There are many many people in this movement, and I don’t like having to not include all of them. There are so many aspects to this, like abortion care not even being allowed to be taught in red states, but it was just a bridge too far. The ripple effects of this are so vast, and we haven’t even begun to understand how this is going to affect everything. Like whether Washington University in St. Louis can continue to have an accredited medical school if they can’t teach certain aspects of medicine!
We have not felt the full impact of this, and that’s why I’m so honored to follow people who are just not waiting for lawmakers to understand how devastating this is. And that’s the good news story in all of this—people who are stepping up to address the public health emergency now.
People often feel let down by politicians, but in states where abortion was literally on the ballot, the results were almost universally good. Is that what you see in the future of the movement?
I certainly hope lawmakers will see this film. Massachusetts is the only state that I’m aware of that has a Shield Law, which means they won’t extradite or cooperate with a subpoena for providers in that state prescribing over state lines. But that’s a longer process, and that’s great, but we can’t wait until the next election. We as citizens need to fill those gaps, and that’s what the brave people in my film are doing right now.
The abortion fight obviously isn’t going anywhere. Do you see yourself continuing to make films about this issue?
I do want to make films about other things, and I’m developing a narrative film about someone I met during the making of Plan C, which I took to the Sundance Screenwriting Lab in 2021. It’s actually more of a mother/kid story than anything else. I’ve ended up mushing my political activism and my personal life as a parent into that story. It’s not really about abortion, but I’m following someone that is a part of that network. And I’m making a follow-up to Rich Hill.
Your work has featured heavier subjects. What do you do to take care of yourself while you’re making a film?
That is a good question. [laughs] I love my dogs, and I constantly fantasize about moving somewhere where there’s lots of land and lots of dogs. But when I’m at home I walk my dogs every day. That’s very important to me, to walk my dogs and just take that hour out of things.
And frankly this film, for as hard as it was, I’m following some very heroic, very positive people. So it sucks that they’re having to do this, but they’re a bunch of rabble-rousers, and they’re kind of fun to be around. Francine has been a wonderful pick-me-up, and she’s lifted me up and encouraged me when I’ve thought, ‘Oh this is gonna be too hard.’ She believes in this film getting out there, and I’m grateful to have her championing me on.
'Plan C' doesn’t have a release date yet, but you can check in with the organization’s website for information on future screenings.
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