Athena Film Festival 2016 | Day 1

Festival organizers couldn’t have picked a more appropriate or more timely film to open a festival centered on women and leadership.

The opening night film for the 2016 Athena Film Festival was Dawn Porter’s documentary Trapped, and the festival organizers couldn’t have picked a more appropriate or more timely film to open a festival centered on women and leadership.

The title refers to TRAP (Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers) laws that have been passed in many states, ostensibly to protect women’s health, but which have the real effect of limiting women’s access to abortion by forcing clinics to close, making it difficult for physicians to continue their practices, and placing onerous and needless requirements on women who are seeking an abortion.

Roe v Wade has withstood countless legal challenges, but that hasn’t prevented anti-abortion activists and sympathetic state legislatures from finding ways to limit women’s actual ability to access the care to which they are legally entitled. In some states, the closest facility providing an abortion may be hundreds of miles away, and restrictions like a mandatory waiting period (which is not required for far more dangerous medical procedures) increases the burden on women seeking an abortion, particularly those who are poor.

One problem with the TRAP laws is that they sound reasonable to the general public but are in fact a stealth attack on women’s reproductive rights. There’s no need for a clinic providing abortions to be a fully-equipped ambulatory surgical center, for instance, because abortion is less dangerous than getting a shot of penicillin, and the result is needless expense that has forced some clinics to close. Similarly, there’s no medical reason for a mandatory waiting period, or to require physicians providing abortions to have admitting privileges at a local hospital—such laws clearly have the purpose of limiting women’s access to medical care, which is the opposite of safeguarding anyone’s health.

Porter, who also directed the 2013 documentary Gideon’s Army and the 2014 HBO documentary Spies of Mississippi, has a real gift for presenting important issues in a way that creates a human connection with the audience while also placing the issues in broader social and political context. Instead of voiceover narration, she presents issues through the stories of individuals whom the audience comes to know and care about. So the burden that TRAP laws place on abortion providers is presented in terms of individuals such as: Dr. Willie Parker, a physician who provides reproductive services to women in the South; Dalton Johnson, the owner of the only clinic providing abortions in Northern Alabama; and Gloria Gray, owner and director of the West Alabama Women’s Center in Tuscaloosa. Other prominent voices in Trapped include: Amy Hagstrom Miller, founder and CEO of Whole Women’s Health and the lead plaintiff in a challenge to abortion laws in Texas; Marva Sadler, the director of clinical services at Whole Women’s Health; and Nancy Northrup, the CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights.

Last night’s screening of Trapped was particularly timely because on March 2 the U.S. Supreme Court will hear the case Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt, a challenge to a Texas law (HB2) that imposes unnecessary and onerous restrictions on facilities that provide abortion. HB2, passed in 2013, has resulted in the closure of more than 75 percent of clinics providing abortions in the state. In case you haven’t looked at a map lately, Texas is a big state, and clinic closings mean that someone might literally have to drive for hours to receive a medical service to which she is legally entitled, if she can even get an appointment with one of the few providers still willing to provide abortion services.

Trapped has already picked up a few honors, including winning a Special Jury Prize at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival. It’s bound to pick up more, because it’s a well-crafted film that places an important issue in both the individual human and the broader political and social context. | Sarah Boslaugh