Post-WWI Denmark is presented as a bleak landscape of shabby tenements, leaky attics and smoky factories connected by ashy cobblestone streets. Serving as our point of entry is young factory worker Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne). With her husband missing and presumed dead in the frontlines, Karoline is destitute. If that weren’t bad enough, an affair with her employer leaves her pregnant and jobless too. Out of options, she decides to abort the baby herself with a needle in a public bathhouse – until intercepted by a stranger. This is where we first meet Overbye (Trine Dyrholm), a candy store owner who offers to help Karoline by finding parents with the means to take care of her child. It is when Karoline is employed by Overbye as a wet nurse that she discovers a dark secret.

Early on, Karoline is curious as to why Overbye is helping her. Overbye replies: “Who else would?” Later, when questioned about her motives by the judge, Overbye is quick to reason she “only did what was necessary.” The pragmatism is alarming. But it exposes an incontestable truth: the societal pressure to carry unwanted pregnancies to term can harm lives in untold ways. Overbye’s response evokes a similar one from Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili), the ob-gyn from Déa Kulumbegashvili’s April who has been performing off-the-record abortions in the Georgian countryside. That if she won’t, someone else will. And that someone may not have her resources, knowhow and skills.

The Girl with the Needle and April belong to a growing trend of films about the horrors faced by women in a society that denies them reproductive rights and bodily autonomy. Access to safe and legal abortion is a healthcare issue. It should be an inalienable human right, not a privilege. For stripping women of the right puts their very lives in danger. But as a new era of political conservatism dawns with a fiery intensity, calls for restrictions on abortion have grown louder. Although so many of the abortion dramas are set in the past, renewed threats to a woman’s freedom of choice have made these personal stories forbiddingly present-tense.

Abortion wasn’t decriminalised in France until 1975. To 23-year-old Annie Ernaux, securing one hush-hush in a back-alley was an act of self-preservation. It allowed her to continue her education, pursue her dream and become the Nobel Prize-winning author she is today. The 2000 memoir Happening recounted the whole ordeal. In its 2021 film adaptation, writer-director Audrey Diwan keeps the camera close to Anne (Anamaria Vartolomei), practically looking over her shoulder as she turns to friends, family and doctors for help, only to be refused. The choice to frame her lonely quest for an abortion in 1.37:1 aspect ratio boxes us in with her, making us feel her agony, her desperation, her resolve all at once. Prohibitory conditions create an isolating atmosphere of fear. Worried her life will slip away, Anne resorts to ending her pregnancy with knitting needles. When that fails, a friend of a friend connects her to a back-alley abortionist. Anne sells all her personal belongings to fund the procedure. During the graphic sequence, the camera doesn’t stay on Anne’s face. Instead, it captures her quivering and squirming body and records her strained breaths, rendering her excruciating pain palpable. (There is a similar harrowing sequence in April where Nina performs an abortion on a deaf-mute girl being abused by a member of her own family. The camera keeps the focus on the girl’s torso writhing in mounting discomfort, while her mother holds her hand.) It takes two procedures for Anne to miscarry. After she expels the foetus in her dorm bathroom, a friend severs the umbilical cord in an expression of solidarity.

In fact, some abortion films double as resounding testaments to solidarity. More often than not, with the male co-author of the unwanted pregnancy out of the picture, the female protagonists are left with no choice but to rely on themselves. But a helping hand is always welcome. It can be a friend or family. In Lingui, les liens sacrés (2021), Mahamat Saleh Haroun takes us to his native Chad to tell a poignant story about the ties that bind a mother and her 15-year-old pregnant daughter in the face of the ruling patriarchy’s fearsome obstacles to women’s rights. Otilia (Anamaria Marinca), from Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007), is the kind of quick problem-solving friend you would want by your side, especially in Ceaușescu’s totalitarian Romania. Over the course of 24 breathless hours, Otilia scurries to find cash, a hotel room and an underground abortionist for her pregnant friend Gabita (Laura Vasiliu). The abortion quest unfolds like a nerve-racking survival thriller. Mungiu presents an urgent look at an iron-fisted world that regulates women’s lives and bodies – and how oppression informs the way women communicate, negotiate and move around in the world. The black-market abortionist Mr. Bebe (Vlad Ivanov) is representative of the Ceaușescu regime itself: a cold-blooded, invasive, manipulative entity itching to exploit the vulnerable. He is a man who knows how to back people into a corner and coerce them into compliance.

Depending on which state you reside in the US, abortion laws can get more or less restrictive. In Eliza Hittman’s Never Rarely Sometimes Always, 17-year-old Autumn (Sidney Flanigan) learns she cannot get an abortion without parental consent in her rural Pennsylvania hometown. So, she decides to travel to New York with her cousin Skylar (Talia Ryder). When the two-day abortion procedure leaves them short of cash for the return ticket home, Skylar seeks out Jasper (Théodore Pellerin), a young man who took a liking to her on the interstate bus ride. Jasper’s help won’t come without a price though. Skylar negotiates by submitting to making out. As the two engage in a transactional kiss, Autumn reaches around from the other side of the pillar to clasp her cousin’s finger – a telling moment of solidarity in a quietly powerful film.

There are places where abortion is legal but not easily accessible. Even where it is accessible, it may still be stigmatised as amoral, unnatural, even murderous. Stigma around abortion manifests as reproductive coercion, be it the pressure to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term or the pressure to choose adoption over abortion. The policing of women’s bodies can be insidious. While navigating the circuitous obstacle course of a health-care system, Autumn visits a local clinic in her hometown. There, the smiling staff lie about how far along she is, show her anti-abortion propaganda and give her an adoption pamphlet instead.

If most films centre the story around the abortion seeker’s perspective, April directs our focus to the abortionist. Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili) is an OB-GYN by day. At night, she drives through backwater villages to provide unsanctioned abortions to pregnant women with little to no access to contraception and education. The film opens with an overhead shot of Nina operating on a woman who suffers a stillbirth on the surgical bed. The resulting accusation of negligence leaves Nina facing an internal investigation. Once-whispered rumours now threaten to expose her overnight enterprise. The moral crisis of Sukhitashvili’s conflicted abortionist animates a film about the routines, the isolation, the horror that is part and parcel of an essential trade made illicit. Nina has internalised the guilt and self-hatred of being an abortionist in an oppressive world so much so that it has changed the way she views intimacy. There is a surgical detachment in her attitude towards sex same as towards work. But she won’t let all the scrutiny stop her from continuing to help women in need.

While the tone ranges from gothic horror (The Girl with the Needle), unflinching social realism (Happening) and psychological character study (April), the power undergirding the films stems from the gravity of push-and-pull laws infringing upon women’s rights to bodily autonomy and privacy. And the desire to humanise abortion beyond political talking points. Each film is told with sensitivity and an honesty that is refreshing, in tune with what young women face in the world. Each serves a grave indictment of a society eager to persecute, curb and violate womanhood. Both domestically and internationally, moral extremism in politics continues to shape regressive laws and policies. The conservative shift has led to an alarming deterioration in access to women’s healthcare. What the emerging trend of abortion films reaffirm is that for women to achieve political, social and economic equality with men, the right to control their reproductive destiny is a must.

Prahlad Srihari is a film and pop culture writer. He lives in Bangalore.