Abortion: Stories Women Tell

A deeply personal film about the crisis in reproductive rights that manages to be even-handed, insightful and deeply moving.

This doc is a tearjerker, but it's also enraging.

If there is a through line that unites all the women in Abortion: Stories Women Tell, it’s that they take the potential responsibilities of parenthood very seriously. And no matter how tough and self-reliant they are, this decision is always an impossible one, and one that the outside world's unbending attitudes do not make any easier.

Stories Women Tell does succeed at what it primarily means to do, which is to take abortion out of the realm of the theoretical and make it more personal.

Tracy Droz Tragos's documentary examines its titular subject with a compassionate eye for regional detail.

What Ms. Tragos succeeds in illustrating is that if you take away the signs and listen to the stories, there is little difference between women on opposite sides of the debate — at least in the region she covers.

Tracy Droz Tragos works to get beyond us-versus-them simplicity in Abortion: Stories Women Tell, focusing on personal narrative over politics in a humanistic look at an issue that promises to remain divisive for the foreseeable future.