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    Britney Spears Writes of Having Abortion While Dating Justin Timberlake

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    The pop star included the detail in her upcoming memoir “The Woman in Me”; Timberlake did not immediately respond.Britney Spears wrote in her much-awaited memoir that she had an abortion during her relationship with Justin Timberlake, according to excerpts released Tuesday by People Magazine.“Justin definitely wasn’t happy about the pregnancy,” the excerpt reads, according to People. “He said we weren’t ready to have a baby in our lives, that we were way too young.”Representatives for Timberlake did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Spears and Timberlake dated for a few years starting when she was 17 and he was 18, generating a tabloid frenzy as they made their ascents as two of the defining pop stars of the late 1990s and early 2000s.Their relationship became subject to public scrutiny again in 2021, after a New York Times documentary, “Framing Britney Spears,” included a re-examination of the world’s reaction to their breakup, which was framed in the media as being Spears’s fault — partly because a music video by Timberlake implied that Spears had cheated on him. Without going into detail, Timberlake apologized to Spears in an Instagram post, saying that he had “failed” her.The memoir, called “The Woman in Me” and slated for release next week, is Spears’ first in-depth account of her life and career and is being published in the aftermath of her release from a legal conservatorship that governed her life for more than 13 years.The collection of excerpts released so far recall the heady days leading up to her getting a record deal at 15, her inner monologue as she held a live snake in the famous moment at the 2001 Video Music Awards, and her loss of passion for performing while under the strictures of the conservatorship, which was instituted amid a series of public struggles in 2007 and 2008.“I would do little bits of creative stuff here and there, but my heart wasn’t in it anymore,” the excerpt read. “As far as my passion for singing and dancing, it was almost a joke at that point.”The end of the conservatorship nearly two years ago was preceded by waves of outrage from fans who called themselves the #FreeBritney movement and held rallies in Los Angeles for the end of the legal arrangement, which was largely overseen by her father, James P. Spears.Since it ended, Spears, 41, has gotten married, separated from her husband and released two singles; she has shared bits of her rage about the conservatorship in Instagram posts, but her memoir will include the most significant — and organized — insights yet into her thoughts on the ways in which the minutiae of her life were under others’ control even as she worked as an international pop star.In the excerpts released so far, Spears rewinds back to her days as a preteen in “The Mickey Mouse Club” — recalling a truth-or-dare kiss with Timberlake, a fellow cast member — and to coming close to being cast as the lead opposite Ryan Gosling in “The Notebook,” a role that ultimately went to Rachel McAdams.She recalls her childhood growing up with parents that she would later blame for exerting too much control over her life, telling a story about how her mother, Lynne Spears, would let her drink cocktails as an eighth grader. And she discusses the constant pressures surrounding her body, writing how, during the conservatorship years, her father “repeatedly” told her that she “looked fat and that I was going to have to do something about it.”“I’d been looked up and down, had people telling me what they thought of my body, since I was a teenager,” one excerpt said. “Shaving my head and acting out were my ways of pushing back. But under the conservatorship I was made to understand that those days were now over. I had to grow my hair out and get back into shape. I had to go to bed early and take whatever medication they told me to take.”Spears had privately pushed for years to end the conservatorship, but she left no doubts about her position in 2021, when she told a judge in Los Angeles that the arrangement was “abusive,” saying that she was forced to work when she didn’t want to and prevented from removing her birth control device when she wanted to have more children. Her father has long maintained that the conservatorship had always been intended to protect his daughter from exploitation.The memoir pushes back fiercely on the idea of that the conservatorship was for her own good: She writes, according to an excerpt, that the arrangement made her into a kind of “child-robot,” a shadow of her former self, asserting that male artists had mismanaged their money and dealt with substance abuse problems without being treated as she had.“There was no way to behave like an adult, since they wouldn’t treat me like an adult, so I would regress and act like a little girl,” one of the excerpts said, “but then my adult self would step back in — only my world didn’t allow me to be an adult.” More

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      ‘Plan C’ Review: Abortion by Mail

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      In this documentary by Tracy Droz Tragos, each of the film’s subjects considers how far past the line of legal comfort they can afford to cross.The director Tracy Droz Tragos anchors her abortion documentary “Plan C” on a grass-roots organization by the same name. At the center of the organization is Francine Coeytaux, a public health activist in the United States, previously known for her campaign to get contraceptive pills sold over the counter at pharmacies.Under the leadership of Coeytaux and Elisa Wells, the group, which was founded in 2015, focuses on providing information to patients about medical suppliers and providers who can prescribe at-home abortion pills — medication which can safely end a pregnancy up to 12 weeks.The footage of Plan C’s activities covers four years, beginning in 2019 and extending after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. Some scenes of abortion providers at work are shot vérité style, while in others Coeytaux and her associates speak directly to the camera about their efforts to assist people seeking abortions.Plan C’s methods are mobile, often including telehealth or prescriptions delivered by mail, and the group’s actions come with both legal and physical risks.There are over a dozen doctors, abortion rights advocates and patients interviewed in this film, and most don’t reveal their full names for safety reasons, fearing violence from anti-abortion activists or prosecution in states such as Texas, where residents can receive rewards for reporting abortion providers. Some don’t reveal their faces, and Tragos blurs their images or conceals identifying features.At times, all of the secrecy and legal caution can make it hard to understand the complex logistics of getting a legal abortion in the United States. But the risks involved are bracingly apparent, and the documentary benefits from its attempts to capture Plan C’s high-stakes operation in progress.As people navigate this new reality, each of the film’s subjects considers how far past the line of legal comfort they can afford to cross.Plan CNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Battleground’ Review: A Look at the Anti-Abortion Movement

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      Months after Roe v. Wade was overturned, this documentary provides, if nothing else, a glimpse into the minds of the mobilized minority leading the anti-abortion charge.Cynthia Lowen’s straightforward documentary “Battleground” follows three prominent anti-abortion campaigners in the few years leading up to 2022, when the Supreme Court ruled to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision protecting a woman’s right to an abortion.The documentary is a cookie-cutter presentation intent on showing viewers how leaders of the anti-abortion movement have managed to advance their goals and consolidate power by mobilizing an evangelical minority.Appearing as talking heads, abortion rights voices — namely current and former representatives of Planned Parenthood — are featured as well, but those women primarily retread familiar talking points: banning abortion threatens a woman’s bodily autonomy, her health and her economic future. These segments do, however, provide some minimal context that cuts through the rhetoric of the anti-abortion activists who are at the center of the film.Lowen spotlights the strategies employed by those anti-abortion groups, who are composed not just of evangelical Christians, but also young people and people who profess to be neither religious nor conservative. The teenagers’ cheery dedication comes off as cultlike, with Lowen doing her best to keep the camera’s gaze strictly observant.Of the three anti-abortion leaders Lowen trails, Terrisa Bukovinac, the founder of Pro-Life San Francisco, is perhaps the most baffling. A self-proclaimed feminist and atheist who claims that women who support anti-abortion legislation can be promiscuous, too, she is the face of a modern anti-abortion campaign that understands that optics are everything. For her, the movement would benefit from distancing itself from its moralistic image, appearing instead more like an approachable lifestyle brand.A recorded conversation between evangelical leaders and President Donald Trump is played in bits and pieces throughout the film. It suggests a kind of devil’s pact between those religious honchos and the former president’s administration, one depicted as more concerned with amassing the support of single-issue voters and willing to assume their ideological position as a result. It’s a haunting reality, and “Battleground” provides a glimpse into the minds of a minority leading the anti-abortion charge — if nothing else.BattlegroundNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters. More

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      in Television

      Using Comedy to Push for Abortion Rights

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      Lizz Winstead, the “Daily Show” co-creator, has marshaled her contacts in the standup world to help supporters turn protest into action.“Things are awesome — never better!” joked Lizz Winstead, the comedian, producer and abortion rights activist. “Sleeping well; no diarrhea. Things are awesome.”Things are decidedly not awesome, but comic misdirection might as well be oxygen for Winstead, who has banked her career on satirizing politics and media and calling out hypocrisy, as the co-creator of “The Daily Show” and a host and director on the now-defunct left-wing radio network Air America. For most of the last decade or so, though, she has been singularly, steadfastly focused on one issue, abortion. Her preferred method for delivering her message is the variety show: a little schtick, a little song, a little taboo talk.“Don’t be ashamed of having an abortion,” the comedian Joyelle Nicole Johnson said onstage at “Bro v. Wade,” a benefit show in Brooklyn that Winstead organized recently with her group Abortion Access Front. “Maybe be ashamed of how you got pregnant. I got pregnant the classy way: On the floor. On an Amtrak train. In the handicapped restroom, babeeey!”Joking about abortion is nothing new; George Carlin went there, among many others. But Winstead’s goal is sharper: with righteous fervor and a Rolodex of comic all-stars, she leads a nonprofit that uses unexpected tools — like humor and men — to advocate for abortion as health care and as a fundamental human right.She told her own abortion story on a Comedy Central special in 1992, and in the decades since, has been warning, on stages across the country and in social media campaigns, that reproductive rights were in jeopardy. Long before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last month, Abortion Access Front was preparing. Now, it is mobilizing as never before: On Sunday it will host “Operation Save Abortion,” a livestreamed daylong training session, with more than 60 partners and 25 panelists from local and national care, funding and policy organizations, and secure ways for viewers to plan direct, on-the-ground action. It will be capped off by a set from Johnson, a board member and ride-or-die touring performer, who lately has become accustomed to delivering punch lines to an audience that has spent the day weeping.Joyelle Nicole Johnson, left, with Winstead, is a board member and ride-or-die touring performer for Abortion Access Front. Nina Westervelt for The New York Times“Politicians aren’t going to save us,” Winstead, 60, said. Laughter won’t either. But with her network of grassroots advocates, abortion providers and entertainers, she hopes to change the narrative around abortion, eliminate the shame and give newly fired-up supporters the tools to get involved. “If people have to march one more time, and rage and feel helpless and hopeless, they win,” she said of her anti-abortion opponents. “We need to give people who are, like, ‘What can we do?’ an answer,” she added.That includes the people responsible for 50 percent of a pregnancy — men. On the eve of Father’s Day last month, Abortion Access Front produced a “Dads for Choice” video starring W. Kamau Bell, the comedian, CNN host and commentator, and inviting men to consider who bears the monetary costs of contraception: “Nobody ever got pregnant from a vibrator!”“The more complicated the issues are, the more humor can break things down to their basic points, and clarify things,” Bell said. Especially for topics that have traditionally been deemed uncomfortable, “humor can invite people in.”Why might comedy be an especially effective tool now? “Well, the other stuff hasn’t worked,” said David Cross, who was part of the all-male “Bro v. Wade” lineup. “Look where we find ourselves.”Abortion Access Front performances feature sketch comedy; music; standups like Sarah Silverman, Michelle Buteau, Jenny Yang, Aida Rodriguez and Negin Farsad and notables like the writer Dan Savage and filmmaker Mark Duplass; and on the road, conversations with local abortion providers, to highlight their needs. Even pro-abortion-rights crowds are often edified and galvanized, according to audience surveys collected by a researcher from the University of California, Los Angeles.“To give you the joy and then the information and then give you something to do, that trifecta of an evening is magic,” Winstead said. Beginning in 2016, the showcases toured annually across dozens of cities, including in states hostile to abortion.David Cross performing at “Bro v. Wade.”Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesOne of the group’s messages is that everybody can find a way to contribute; abortion rights supporters need not march in every street protest or continually reach into their overstretched wallets. “If you have 10 minutes a month to give, I can give you something to do that’s meaningful,” Winstead said. “And I don’t want you to feel bad that that’s all you can give. Life is too messed up right now.”At one clinic, in Huntsville, Ala., Abortion Access Front and its volunteers planted hedges out front, to help block anti-abortion protesters. In Detroit, at the request of another clinic, they threw a block party as a gesture of welcome and gratitude to the community.“For a lot of these folks, in the only clinic in their state, they feel really isolated,” said Amy Elizabeth Alterman, an abortion scholar, ethnographer and public health researcher at U.C.L.A. Out of safety concerns or for social reasons, “many abortion providers don’t tell friends and family what they do.”Winstead’s organization, which has a full-time staff of 10 and many volunteers, served as a much-needed balm. “When a band of feminists explodes out of a van, wearing pro-abortion swag and saying, ‘Thank you for what you do. What can we do and how can we celebrate you?’ it’s often very emotional,” Alterman said. “Sometimes providers cry.”Winstead and the group are not trying to reach across the aisle to change anti-abortion evangelists’ minds. Since she became outspoken on the issue, she has personally experienced a backlash. “My parents, when they were alive, got calls constantly saying, your daughter’s a baby murderer,” she said. They were Catholic — “it really scared them.” Her shows were boycotted; old employers were called in efforts at intimidation. She “paid a lot of money,” she said, to erase her personal data from the internet.Now, “there’s no place I can get fired from — come at me, I don’t care,” she said. Fomenting any cultural shift requires real dedication, said Dean Obeidallah, the comic and radio host, who was on the “Bro v. Wade” bill and performed at Winstead’s first abortion-rights benefit a decade ago. “I can tell you from years of doing comedy, and trying to dispel stereotypes about Arab Americans, it’s never a light-bulb moment,” he said. “For people on your side already, you have to make them feel like they’re in the right place. For people who aren’t on the right side, or even have hate, it’s chipping away.”“To give you the joy and then the information and then give you something to do, that trifecta of an evening is magic,” Winstead said of her group’s performances.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesFor those in the Minnesota-born Winstead’s orbit, it’s not surprising that she rose from a politically minded standup to an activist leader. “She’s just one of those — you meet them throughout life — boundless energy, high-strung, talk very quickly, gesticulate wildly, kind of people,” said Cross, a friend for more than 30 years.Johnson, the comic who has been with the organization since it started, said, “I think she’s a non-somniac, like Obama’s a non-somniac, to be able to do all the things she does. Her brain is constantly worrying — since 2016, her hair has turned white.”Even for Abortion Access Front, whose allies long knew that reproductive care and women’s rights were under attack, the weeks since Roe v. Wade was overturned have been, as Winstead said, gut-churningly surreal and destabilizing. “I’ve always felt unsafe in this country,” said Johnson, who is Black, “but now it’s almost a slapstick level of unsafe. It’s chaos.”Winstead said, “This is almost our last shot, because we’re burned out — and that’s by design.”But this moment has also sharpened activists’ focus, and expanded their tent. Since Roe was overturned, “I talk about it every chance — you’re going to hear abortion, abortion, abortion out of Joyelle’s mouth,” Johnson said. “I do it for the women in the audience who are not as liberated as me, those women who cannot tell their closest family members. I hope it liberates some people.” Viva Ruiz, a performer and activist whose group, Thank God For Abortion, is involved in the training session Sunday, said, “Everybody needs to use their way — the more variance there is, the more tactics there are, the more successful we can be.” She added, “The thing is, to just not stop. To keep showing up.”Together, Winstead agreed, “we are more motivated to fight and stay in the fight. And be relentless.” More

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      in Theater

      When an Abortion Story Is Told as a Caper, Thriller or Farce

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      As Roe falls, new works including a documentary, a feature film and a comedy show disrupt the taboos and clichés around abortion.In 1969, when abortion was illegal in Illinois, an underground operation arose in Chicago. Officially called the Abortion Counseling Service of Women’s Liberation, it became known as the Jane network, because women seeking abortions were told to call a number and “ask for Jane.” As I watched “The Janes,” an HBO documentary about the service, I was struck by the buoyancy of the story. Though the women behind Jane were working under stress to provide secretive abortions to desperate and terrified women, a kicky sensibility pervades the film. There are weed jokes and anti-surveillance shenanigans and a soundtrack fit for a mod spy movie. As the Janes evade the church, the Mafia and the police to facilitate around 11,000 clandestine abortions, they emerge from anonymity as the stars of a new genre: the abortion caper.“The Janes” ends with Roe v. Wade being handed down in 1973. Within weeks of the documentary’s release, the Supreme Court had overturned Roe, which makes the film feel even more essential — not just as a road map for modern civil disobedience but as a testament to the kind of complex, unruly abortion storytelling that also now feels at risk. Over the past few weeks, as I waited for the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision to drop, I sought out such stories compulsively, as if the ruling might seize them too. In addition to “The Janes,” I watched the French film “Happening,” about a student seeking an illegal abortion in France in 1963, and “Oh God, a Show About Abortion,” the comedian Alison Leiby’s one-woman show about terminating a pregnancy at Planned Parenthood at age 35.In “Oh God, a Show About Abortion,” the comedian Alison Leiby talks about terminating a pregnancy at Planned Parenthood at age 35.Desiree Rios for The New York TimesThe effort to control abortion has also had the effect of suppressing the stories we tell about it. Women seeking abortions are silenced by abortion bans, anonymized in court and moralized about onscreen. It is striking how often abortion has been obscured in films, presented as a quickly discarded option (as in “Juno”) or averted with a spontaneous miscarriage (“Citizen Ruth”) or deployed to facilitate another character’s arc (“Dirty Dancing”) or completely euphemized (“Knocked Up,” where it is referred to only as “rhymes with smashmorshion.”)When abortion stories are not stifled by shame, they might be celebrated as a brave act of speaking out — a tradition that has created its own clichés, as accounts of abortion are smoothed into politically palatable forms, in which the patient is fashioned as suitably desperate and her story is disclosed only reluctantly. Women have been made to barter their stories for their rights. In the documentary, a Jane member recalls women calling the service and listing their reasons for needing an abortion, but she would assure them this was unnecessary: “We would really try to make clear to them — they didn’t need to justify themselves.”What does an abortion story look like freed from justification? Abortion is a common procedure (one in four American women will have one, according to the Guttmacher Institute) that has been so flattened into an “issue” that it can feel revelatory to just recast abortion as an experience, one that can unlock unexpected insights into women’s private lives. If “The Janes” makes abortion into a caper, “Happening” turns it into a hero’s journey and “Oh God” renders it as a farce. Together, these works suggest that abortions are worth talking about because women’s lives are interesting in their own right.The French film “Happening” follows a university student’s search for an illegal abortion in the early 1960s.IFC Films, via Associated Press“Happening” follows Anne, a student of literature who becomes pregnant and seeks an illegal abortion while studying for final exams. As Anne is sabotaged by her doctors, shunned by her peers and preyed on by men, she watches her life’s potential narrow with each passing week. And as she pursues increasingly dangerous methods to end the pregnancy, she risks death to fight for her future as a writer. “I’d like a child one day, but not instead of a life,” she tells one useless doctor.The plot of “Happening” is driven not by Anne’s harrowing victimization but by her flinty resolve. When a doctor offers her sympathy instead of assistance, she refuses to leave his office. “So help me,” she demands. Like a great action hero, she endures physical trials while outwitting her adversaries. She works to compel her community to recognize her humanity through abortion’s veil of criminality and taboo.Anne finally makes her way to an underground abortionist, but the procedure doesn’t work, so she undergoes another, riskier operation that could kill her or else send her to the hospital, which could be her last stop before prison. She ends up convulsing over a dorm toilet, but the scene plays less like body-horror than a feat of strength. When one of her bullies comes upon her in the stall, Anne cannily implicates her in the event, instructing her to fetch a pair of scissors and sever the bloody tissue trailing from her body. The very existence of “Happening” confirms her triumph: It is based on a 2000 memoir by the writer Annie Ernaux.No such horrors await Alison Leiby in “Oh God, a Show About Abortion,” whose self-described “simple and frictionless” abortion is worth examining mostly because it is a funny story. The 70-minute monologue begins with a startling joke — “My mom texted me, ‘Kill it tonight!’ and I’m like, I already did, that’s why the show exists!” — that feels crafted to immediately disarm the abortion taboo. Then the show rollicks through the experience itself, from the moment Leiby pees awkwardly into a glass tumbler in a Courtyard by Marriott to the first-trimester procedure she secures in a Planned Parenthood facility located across the street from a glaringly luxe maternity store. (“Who owns that?” she jokes. “Mike Pence?”)Within weeks of the release of “The Janes,” the film feels even more essential to our critic, as a testament to the kind of complex, unruly abortion storytelling that also now feels at risk.HBOEven before Roe’s reversal, Leiby recognized that she was lucky, and that most women seeking abortion “do not stroll into Planned Parenthood with a Lululemon outfit and then take an Uber home.” Near the end of the piece, when her mother tells her that she was forced to go to the Mafia for an illegal abortion in the 1960s, Leiby hesitates to share her own experience. “I didn’t want to come off as bragging, like, A doctor did mine,” she jokes.Leiby does not belabor her own privilege, and her story gains power from that choice. Her abortion decision is still met with plenty of patriarchal condescension and ambient shame. But she resists the pressure to feel sad about ending her pregnancy, and she refuses to apologize for her right to do it safely and legally. “I thought I’d spend the next few days or months staring out the window like I’m in a depression medication commercial,” she says. Instead, she walks out of the clinic feeling “a little underwhelmed.”I attended Leiby’s show this month in New York while visibly pregnant. Though my expanding body now inspires rote congratulations from strangers, my own feelings about my pregnancy have been tumultuous, and it was invigorating to step into an environment where the condition was not immediately culturally affirmed.Much of Leiby’s story concerns her choice not to raise children — there is an interlude about perineal tearing — and though her abortion is far easier to secure than Annie Ernaux’s, the stakes have not been lowered. Leiby wants to pursue her career and to avoid the “painful and exhausting and scary” aspects of parenting, but she also just wants to be recognized as a full adult human on her own terms, not as a problem that only a baby can fix.“The Janes,” too, is a story about women claiming their potential, though the members of the Jane network fulfill theirs not by receiving abortions but by providing them. When they discover that their abortionist, “Mike,” is not a doctor but just a guy who learned how to perform a dilation and curettage (a procedure known as a D and C), they refuse to shutter the service. Instead, they begin to perform abortions themselves, largely for free, no Mikes necessary. They learn to assume responsibility, not just for their own lives but for the lives of others. In turn, they are driven to “share that sense of personal power with women,” as one member puts it. “We wanted every woman who contacted us to be the hero of her own story.”Representative Cori Bush, a Democrat from Missouri, spoke publicly last fall for the first time about being raped at church camp when she was 17 and having an abortion at 18.Jason Andrew for The New York TimesThese abortion stories represent just a slice of the experience (for one thing, they largely feature white women), and they have arrived at a time when abortion storytelling is at risk of being winnowed even further. Even if a patient does not disclose her abortion, digital surveillance threatens to tell the tale for her, through Google searches, menstruation app data and location tracking. (Such tools have already been used in criminal prosecutions).Stories that do emerge will often be shaped to withstand political pressure. Last fall, when Representative Cori Bush, a Democrat from Missouri, spoke publicly for the first time about being raped at church camp when she was 17 and having an abortion at 18, she did it in support of legislation codifying Roe. “It felt like something was pressing down on me,” she said about the demands on her testimony, adding: “Whatever I say, it has to produce.”The decision in Dobbs tells its own story about women considering abortion. The court’s imagined modern pregnant woman can achieve total self-actualization while carrying her pregnancy to term, with the help of anti-discrimination laws, state-mandated parental leave and health insurance. “Now you have the opportunity to be whatever you want to be,” Lynn Fitch, the Mississippi attorney general, said in an interview about the case. “You have the option in life to really achieve your dream and goals, and you can have those beautiful children as well.”This woman can have it all, except she cannot have an abortion, and she can’t have a story, either. She is a straw man — useful only after she has been stripped of her subjectivity and drained of all substance. More

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      ‘The Janes’ Review: Taking Matters Into Their Own Hands

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      This HBO documentary spotlights the women activists who banded together to form Jane, a clandestine group providing safe abortions in the years before Roe v. Wade.“The Janes” is a straightforward, talking-heads documentary from HBO that provides a brief history of the Jane Collective, a clandestine abortion group working out of Chicago in the late 1960s and early ’70s.Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that protected a women’s right to an abortion, had not yet been handed down, meaning the procedure was illegal in most states, forcing women with unwanted pregnancies to turn to exploitative abortion providers (like the Mafia) or resort to dangerous methods to self-induce an abortion.This situation — and the can-do spirit of the times, cultivated by the civil rights and women’s liberation movements — sparked the members of Jane into action.The documentary, directed by Tia Lessin and Emma Pildes, relies primarily on testimonies from the Jane Collective’s women volunteers, tracing their efforts from the beginning — when the group was merely a referral service — to their final days contending with law enforcement.Ultimately, the Jane Collective provided close to 11,000 abortions by the time Roe v. Wade came into effect, at which point the group ceased its activities. (Though the renewed push for restrictive abortion laws today, and reports of the present Supreme Court’s ruling on a case that could overturn Roe, casts a sense of bleak uncertainty over the film’s otherwise triumphant conclusion.)Cookie-cutter though it is, “The Janes” does have something going for it: its interview subjects, the former Janes, who all speak about their beliefs and shared past with striking clarity. They remind us that their work — their commitment to ensuring the safety and well-being of other women — was not really all that radical, but a measured, intelligent response to the inadequacies of a system that refused to fend for its own.The JanesNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. Watch on HBO platforms. More

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      in Theater

      Shows About Abortion Surface a Stark Divide

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      Decidedly anti-sensationalistic, Alison Leiby’s shrewd and funny personal monologue plays downtown. Uptown, a staged reading focuses on a gruesome case.A few nights after the leak of the Supreme Court draft opinion that would overturn the right to abortion protected by Roe v. Wade, the comedian Alison Leiby walked onto the stage of the Cherry Lane Theater, in Manhattan’s West Village, to greet the audience before her monologue.“How are we doing?” she asked, taking the temperature of a friendly crowd that had more men in it than you might expect. Then, easily: “The show is exactly the same as it was before we lost all of our rights.”Low-key sardonic, politically charged humor it would be, apparently. We might have guessed as much from the title of the insightfully funny piece she was about to perform: “Oh God, a Show About Abortion.”It is probably true, in terms of Leiby’s script and Lila Neugebauer’s direction, that the monologue — constructed around an account of the abortion that Leiby had three years ago, at 35 — has not changed. But the atmosphere surrounding abortion rights has; it’s more charged, more urgent, more anxious. And the audience always brings the outside world into the room.So here is the first thing you need to know about Leiby’s abortion story: In a smart and entertaining show, full of observations about the sometimes painful messiness of female bodies — menstruation, childbirth, lactation — and the social pressure to put on a happy face about all of it, her trip to Planned Parenthood is the least dramatic, most calmly straightforward part.“Does this feel anticlimactic to you?” she asks, when she’s done retelling it.She knows it must, because back when it happened, she’d expected something more lurid, too.“I think that I thought I’d have some kind of Scarlet A that tells everyone I had an abortion,” she says, “which would have been devastating because it’s private, and also red clashes with my complexion.”A laugh line, sure, but that bit about the fear of the Scarlet A? It lands.“Oh Gosnell: A Show About the Truth” is a staged reading based on court records that features the cast members, from left, Roxanne Bonifield, Kaché Attyana, Benjamin Standford and Andrea Edgerson.Russ RowlandA couple of miles uptown, at the Chain Studio Theater on West 36th Street, is a show that announced its New York run as “Oh Gosnell: The Truth About Abortion” — a tabloid title with stalkerish overtones, especially given that its own news release mentions Leiby’s show.A publicist for “Oh Gosnell” said that the creation of the play was inspired by Leiby’s comic monologue. “They laugh about it — we tell the truth about it,” says the website of the play now going by the name “Oh Gosnell: A Show About the Truth.”It’s written by Phelim McAleer, who is credited on IMDB as being a producer of the yet-to-be-released film “My Son Hunter,” starring Laurence Fox as Hunter Biden, and as a writer and a producer of “Obamagate,” starring Dean Cain, which The New York Post described as a play that had its premiere on YouTube. His other plays include “Ferguson,” about the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown.Laughter and truth are not mutually exclusive, of course, even if McAleer, a right-wing provocateur whose program bio calls him “a veteran investigative journalist,” implies otherwise.As for conveying any general truth about abortion, rather than specific truths about the gruesome case of Kermit Gosnell — a Philadelphia physician convicted in 2013 of first-degree murder for killing three babies after botched late-term abortions — it doesn’t. Neither is it constructed to persuade.The script for the play, simply titled “Gosnell,” says that it was “compiled, verbatim, from grand jury and criminal trial transcripts” in the Gosnell case. In a spare, somewhat murky staged reading directed by David Atkinson, it has a cast of seven that includes a compelling young actor named Kaché Attyana, who I hope will soon get better work.“The first thing I want you to be assured of, ladies and gentlemen,” a prosecutor (Roxanne Bonifield) says, close to the top of the show, “is that this is not a case about abortion.”For emphasis, she repeats that assertion. Maybe McAleer, the co-author of a book about the Gosnell case, and a producer and co-screenwriter of the 2018 movie “Gosnell: The Trial of America’s Biggest Serial Killer,” didn’t hear her?Then again, in a program note, McAleer writes of the Gosnell trial: “Perhaps the desire to suppress information was why no national media covered the story. There is a reluctance to shine a spotlight on abortion in the U.S. Few people are prepared to go behind the doors and tell the truth of what is really happening there.”Heidi Schreck in her play “What the Constitution Means to Me,” which opened on Broadway in 2019.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe problem with saying that no national media covered the story — well, his own show contradicts that right off the bat, when images of news clippings about the case include one from The New York Times. (Projections are by Meghan Chou.)As for going behind those doors, women do that every day, seeking abortion care. Leiby did it. I’ve done it. My mom did it, too, pre-Roe v. Wade, to save her life from an ectopic pregnancy before my brothers and I were born.Telling the truth about abortion, though — speaking of those experiences, that is, in a culture where abortion remains heavily stigmatized — well, that is rare.Which is maybe why Leiby expected to feel something more sensational than relief after her own abortion.“I thought I’d spend the next few days or months staring out the window like I’m in a depression medication commercial,” she says. “I thought I would carry sadness and emptiness with me everywhere I went.”Kidding, a little bit? Probably. But the notion of abortion as an automatic trauma is pretty deeply rooted in the culture, and it’s not often interrogated onstage. Which leaves the mystery intact.And, conversely, gives the shows that do discuss it an added potency — like Ruby Rae Spiegel’s “Dry Land,” which harnesses the ticking-time-bomb feeling of an unwanted pregnancy, and Lightning Rod Special’s “The Appointment,” which juxtaposes wild musical satire with the crisp quiet of an abortion clinic. And, of course, Heidi Schreck’s “What the Constitution Means to Me,” which put an abortion story on Broadway.In the Signature Theater revival of Suzan-Lori Parks’s play, Christine Lahti (right, with Joaquina Kalukango) portrayed an abortion provider. Richard Termine for The New York TimesWhen Leiby mentioned the Scarlet A, I thought of Suzan-Lori Parks’s take on “The Scarlet Letter” — the one of her Red Letter Plays whose title we can’t print here — with its heroine, Hester Smith, who is described in the list of characters as “the Abortionist.” Kia Corthron’s “Come Down Burning,” which also has a heroine who performs abortions, makes a clear connection between the option to safely end a pregnancy and women’s ability to control their own lives.Then there is Ciara Ni Chuirc’s “Made by God,” which had its premiere this winter at Irish Repertory Theater: a drama about a shame-filled Irish teenager who died alone with her newborn in the 1980s, and about the seismic shift in public opinion that led Ireland to legalize abortion in 2019. The play’s principal anti-abortion character is an American interloper.Leiby — who reports, incredulously, that she whispered the phrase “an abortion” to Planned Parenthood when she called to make an appointment for one — means her monologue to start people talking about theirs.Beyond that, though, her show makes a broader point: about the need for women to be able to decide what they want and don’t want, and shape their existences accordingly.“I’m a woman who did something she needed to do,” she says, “to protect the life she built for herself.”It’s not funny, but it’s true.Oh God, a Show About AbortionThrough June 4 at the Cherry Lane Theater, Manhattan; cherrylanetheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes.Oh Gosnell: A Show About the TruthThrough May 15 at the Chain Studio Theater, Manhattan; ohgosnell.com. Running time: 1 hour. More

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      Performing a Comedy About Abortion, Watching the Supreme Court

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      Alison Leiby had just performed her show “Oh God, a Show About Abortion” when she learned of the leaked draft opinion showing that the court could be on the verge of overturning Roe v. Wade.After finishing a preview performance of her hourlong stand-up show about reproductive rights, “Oh God, a Show About Abortion,” the comedian Alison Leiby was finishing dinner Monday night when she checked her phone.She had dozens of messages, all about the breaking news that a leaked draft of a Supreme Court opinion showed that the court appeared to be poised to overturn Roe v. Wade, eliminating the constitutional right to abortion in the United States.“It was just an absolute confrontation with reality, that this is not theoretical anymore,” Leiby, a self-described abortion rights activist perhaps best known for work co-producing “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” said in an interview.As Leiby began to process what this potential decision would mean for the country, she also realized that she needed to quickly start thinking about how it might reshape her show, a 70-minute stand-up set about her own unwanted pregnancy and how it was resolved with a Saturday afternoon trip to Planned Parenthood. So at Tuesday evening’s preview at the Cherry Lane Theater in New York, she addressed the news at the top of the show.“I’m not going to ignore the literal elephant in the room,” Leiby said on Tuesday, thanking the person behind the lone guffaw in the audience for getting her wordplay.From Opinion: A Challenge to Roe v. WadeCommentary by Times Opinion writers and columnists on the Supreme Court’s upcoming decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.Ross Douthat: The leak of a draft Supreme Court decision that would overturn Roe v. Wade is not a surprise, but the strategy behind it is something of a mystery.Roxane Gay: Whoever leaked the draft wanted people to understand the fate awaiting America. So people can prepare. So they can rage.Emily Bazelon: By suggesting in the draft that the progress women have made is a reason to throw out Roe, Justice Samuel Alito has turned feminism against itself.Bret Stephens: Roe v. Wade was an ill-judged decision when it was handed down. But overturning it would do more to replicate its damage than to reverse it.Sway: In the latest episode of her podcast, Kara Swisher talks to an abortion rights advocate about the draft opinion and the future of abortion rights in America..“I’m not changing anything in response to the news, but I understand that your feelings toward it might be different,” Leiby said. “If something is funny, not funny, cathartic — feel that. That is valid. I’m not up here dancing for applause. We’re in this together.”Zoe Verzani, right, spoke to Leiby after the performance at the Cherry Lane Theater.Desiree Rios for The New York TimesThe news that the court could be on the verge of overturning Roe, which would lead to immediate abortion bans in some states and prompt others to move to issue bans and restrictions, comes as theaters and cinemas around New York City and the nation are presenting works about abortion.In Atlanta, performances of “Roe,” a play by Lisa Loomer focused on the plaintiff in the landmark case and the lawyer who argued it in front of the Supreme Court, begin Friday. The same day, the Metrograph Theater in New York will begin a series devoted to films that touch on or explore abortion, including Josef von Sternberg’s 1931 drama “An American Tragedy” and the 1987 romantic comedy “Dirty Dancing.” And this summer, a small nonprofit theater in Chicago will premiere “Roe v US,” a play billed as giving “voice to the women who made the choice.”The same night Leiby’s show opens in the West Village, a play that looks at abortion through a very different lens is scheduled to be held at a theater in Midtown: “Oh Gosnell,” about Kermit Gosnell, a doctor who was convicted of murder in 2013 following botched late-term abortions. The case became a rallying cry for the anti-abortion movement. Phelim McAleer, an Irish-born filmmaker and producer, said that he had seen Leiby’s show billed as an “abortion comedy” and decided to counter it by producing a play about Gosnell that draws its text from a grand jury report and trial transcripts, saying he wanted to give audiences an “alternative viewpoint.”The show has faced difficulties: The theater it originally planned to use backed out, and two of its seven actors walked out shortly before previews were set to begin.Intent on making sure the play goes ahead at its new venue, McAleer — who has made documentaries questioning the opposition to fracking, and said he was working on a film about Hunter Biden — said that he was still processing the Supreme Court news. “It definitely means the Gosnell story is more relevant than ever and plays about abortion are more relevant than ever,” he said.Leiby and McAleer’s two shows could hardly be more dissimilar. One is a comedy about an uneventful abortion procedure that makes a case for broad abortion access and the other is a graphic play about an infamous abortion provider whose clinic was described by prosecutors as a “house of horrors.” But Leiby and McAleer share one similar goal: to talk about, and to get audiences to listen to, a work about abortion.This week there will be a staged reading of “Oh Gosnell,” a play about Kermit Gosnell, a doctor who was convicted of murder in 2013 following botched late-term abortions.Russ Rowland“Oh God, a Show About Abortion,” — which is being presented by the comedian Ilana Glazer and directed by Lila Neugebauer — is scheduled to run through June 4. After seeing an earlier iteration of Leiby’s show, Jason Zinoman wrote in The New York Times that, “Without a trace of didacticism, she finds humor in the messy, confusing, sometimes banal experience of an unwanted pregnancy and an abortion.”The show tells her story: of a 35-year-old comedy writer who learns she is pregnant in a hotel bathroom in St. Louis. She is so confident in her disinterest in having children that in the act, she compares her eggs to those by Fabergé (“feminine but decorative”). At Leiby’s first mention of Planned Parenthood, a group of young, female public health students who were in the audience burst into cheers.One member of the group, Zoe Verzani, 24, who wore a hot-pink Planned Parenthood T-shirt to the show this week, said that she thought Leiby handled the material just right.Understand the State of Roe v. WadeCard 1 of 4What is Roe v. Wade? More

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      From Chad, a Filmmaker and a Star Committed to Telling Stories of Home

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      In “Lingui, the Sacred Bonds,” the director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun works again with Achouackh Abakar Souleymane, this time on a wrenching drama about abortion.As Chad’s most lauded auteur, the director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun remains committed to portraying his sub-Saharan African homeland onscreen. Early in his career he focused on the fallout from the nation’s multiple civil wars, which forced him to migrate to France in the 1980s. But in the aftermath of the conflict that concluded in 2010, he has shifted his attention to other social ills.With his newest drama, “Lingui, the Sacred Bonds,” which debuted at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival and reached American theaters on Friday, he takes on the topic of abortion through the plight of a Muslim woman, Amina (Achouackh Abakar Souleymane), who is helping her teenage daughter, Maria (Rihane Khalil Alio), terminate her pregnancy after a sexual assault. The film has received rave reviews, with The Times’s Manohla Dargis making it a Critic’s Pick.While abortion is in theory legal in Chad under strict circumstances, the stigma (often associated with religious beliefs) and restrictions around it push some to resort to clandestine clinics or, worse, to carry to term and then kill the newborn.In a joint interview, Haroun, speaking from Paris, and Abakar Souleymane, in N’Djamena, Chad, shared more on the relevance of their second film collaboration. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.Why did you decide to make this film at this moment in Chad?MAHAMAT-SALEH HAROUN I read an article about a newborn child discovered in the garbage, and all these situations of unwanted pregnancies. But I was first really traumatized by the same subject when I was a child. I was 7 or 8, and we found a baby in the garbage. Several decades later when I read this article, I said, “That’s not normal. I have to do something.” I started investigating, asking nurses, and I discovered that it was a huge problem women are facing every day, because the fact is that in Chad, in our local languages, the word “rape” doesn’t exist. We know that rape exists, a lot of women are victims of it, but there is no word to express it. It’s always as if it’s the women’s fault, like they are guilty because they are pregnant. Sometimes they deny the pregnancy or sometimes, when they discover it’s too late to even think of an abortion, they keep it secret until they have the kid and then they kill it because they don’t have any solutions. I had to tell that story from a Chadian point of view in a human way that resonates with the same problems in the United States, in Argentina, in El Salvador, and in other countries in Africa.ACHOUACKH ABAKAR SOULEYMANE It’s horrible because if you’re not married and you are pregnant, you cannot talk about it. Sometimes these young women are just on their own. If you’re raped, you don’t talk about it, you just deal with it. As a woman, as a single mom, I was happy to be that person that can show it to the whole country and tell women that if this happened in your life, it’s happening to a lot of other women, and you can do something about it.Achouackh Abakar Souleymane in a scene from the film.MUBIDid you or the film face any pushback from government officials or religious groups?HAROUN When we were in Cannes, people said a lot of things against the film on social media, but they hadn’t seen it. But then when we showed the film in Chad, no one said anything because it’s just the reality. We even have some support from the government. I remember the Ministry of Culture was very happy and we had also a state minister at the screening. He called my assistant the day after and said he wanted to organize his own screening for the whole government because he thought that the film should be shown to all those people who don’t know a lot about this subject. I refused because you never know with politics; sometimes you are manipulated. But it was really well received and even for Achouackh, who being in Chad you might think she could be a victim of hate, she has only received congratulations.ABAKAR SOULEYMANE People would come up to me and say, “You are so brave for being able to do that.” That was shocking.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More