Long after Tracy Droz Tragos’s documentary Plan C is over, you are left with lingering images of some passionate, determined, courageous and driven women that the film is centred on. There’s Francine Coeytaux, a social scientist and women’s health advocate specialising in reproductive health programmes. She, along with her partner, Elisa Wells, co-founded the groundbreaking Plan C initiative in the USA to spread information among women about online access to safe and effective abortion pills. The documentary also has many more self-proclaimed “anarchists” trying to bring about a positive change for women. “It feels like a revolution”, is how they see it.
Plan C is about this network of ordinary American women, midwives, doctors, feminists and activists fighting for the reproductive rights and choices of women and the rightful access to abortion pills, that are severely restricted in the US but used widely across the world. As one of them describes it, they are “running a drug cartel in order to help people’’.
Plan C, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, was filmed over four years, from 2018 to 2022 and is as driven about its subject as the women featured in it. It moves urgently, is propulsive, powerful and assertive.
It grounds the issue in recent US history and politics—Donald Trump and the rise of Republican conservatism, especially in the judiciary, all leading to the overturning in 2022 of Roe v Wade—the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision of protecting women’s right to have an abortion. It closes with the frightening scenario of abortion bans coming in effect in an increasing number of states in America. But far from going quiet because of the unhelpful law, the women in the film are sure to turn their dissent even louder than before. As Francine says: “You have to stand up to the bully, not run and hide from them.”
What stands out starkly is the sad state of reproductive rights and justice across one of the world’s superpowers. Despite a rooted feminist movement and gender discourse, it’s the government that gets the right to decide on women’s choices when it comes to their own bodies. Beyond the draconian laws is the surveillance by fellow citizens, even physicians turning cops. As the filmmaker puts it—intensely personal health care decisions, that should ideally involve the patient and the physician, are turned public. There are curbs on freedom of expression, bans on social media. Yet these women go on about their job safely, often stealthily, mobilising other women in the face of fear and censorship.
The film shows the human side of its protagonists, the dangers they are up against and the risks they are taking each day. “I feel called to do it. Like you pick up a crying child. You just do it,” says one. Not just themselves, but they are exposing their kids and families to threats as well. Francine is an uncommon dissident and upholder of the civil disobedience movement.
An abortion rights activist who is also a loving parent of 30-year-old twins. There’s the threat of the gun, bombing or criminal prosecution, a marker of the rampant lawlessness in the supposedly civilised West. Francine’s husband, David Glanzman, admits worrying about her yet being supportive. The most moving moment is when he talks about the tombstone he wants on his grave: “He was married to Francine Coeytaux.”
At a time when the pill is medically safe but legally fraught in the US, the film respects the right to privacy of women who so desire, protects the identities, obscuring places, several faces are kept hidden and many testimonies are aural, often through phone calls.
It’s tough not to keep making comparisons with the situation in India where the pill may not be an issue, but female foeticide is a curse, where women are decimated even before they are born for being women, where a lot of women might not even have access to doctors, clinics and due medical procedures, leave alone the right to their own bodies and choices regarding them.
In that respect, the film looks ahead at the alternatives that have come to play during the pandemic—telemedicine and self-management at home. When the going gets tough, the tough get going. There’s ingenuity in a valid, legal subversion of the law through mail-based abortion pills. As Wells puts it in the film, if Pfizer is out there and delivering Viagra directly to homes, why is there the element of stigma and shame around abortion pills? Especially when they are safe, effective, and approved by the Food and Drug Administration and the World Health Organisation.
Cinema Without Borders
In this weekly column, the writer introduces you to powerful cinema from across the world
Film: Plan C
