Before the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, women who sought to end a pregnancy in the United States did so outside the law, often at great physical risk. This Oscar-nominated oral history collects first-person accounts from women who underwent illegal abortions, from doctors and lay practitioners who performed them in secret, and from family members who watched the aftermath. Interview subjects describe back-alley procedures, self-induced attempts, and the makeshift networks women built to find someone willing to help them, along with the injuries, infections, and deaths that followed when things went wrong. The film traces how criminalization did not stop abortion but pushed it into unregulated and dangerous circumstances, and it places these personal stories against the broader legal history that led to Roe v. Wade. Told largely through candid, unscripted testimony rather than narration, the film functions as a record of a period many viewers have only heard about in the abstract.