A Mother and Daughter on Abortion
1987 · 12m · Canada
Directed by Gail Singer
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, tender
A mother and her adult daughter candidly compare their experiences seeking abortions in different decades, before and after Canada's 1969 law change, and how each was caught in the system's rules.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A straightforward talking-heads doc about abortion policy feels like exactly the kind of worthy-but-safe PBS fixture that makes Felix's skin crawl—though Singer's refusal to score the intimacy or manipulate the emotional stakes is almost subversive in its restraint.
Singer's 1987 essay film sits deliberately in the essay-documentary tradition, letting two voices build an archive of lived experience across legal rupture; the formal restraint—no archival footage, no dramatic reconstruction—trusts the form itself to be the argument, which is precisely how this lineage works best.
The singular choice here is letting silence and overlap carry the weight: the daughter's voice sometimes runs under the mother's, a technical decision that refuses clean separation and instead creates the acoustic texture of generational reckoning happening in real time.