With After Tiller (2013 Sundance Film Festival), director Martha Shane was focused on giving a voice to the doctors performing these procedures and afraid to speak out. Through interviews and intimate footage, audiences are given a unique point of view from the perspective of four different doctors.      

“I recognize what I do. And, at times, I struggle. At times, I don’t. But I always come back to the woman and what she’s going through.” 

This line from Dr. Shelly Sterling is from a powerful scene from the documentary that follows doctors willing to perform third-trimester abortions after the assassination of their colleague, Dr. George Tiller, in Wichita, Kansas. 

“My co-director and I were watching the news coverage at the time and there are a lot of interesting details we learned through that: that he was a father of four and he’d been murdered in church,” says Shane. “At first we thought maybe we should make a film about Dr. Tiller. And then we started asking, ‘Who was still doing this work after this doctor was murdered?’”

Shane initially only knew about two doctors willing to speak. She later on found out that there had been two more who worked closely with Dr. Tiller in Wichita who were going to continue this work. “And so those became the four core stories that we told. We were really motivated by this idea of giving them a voice — these doctors who really had not wanted to go public for reasons of safety. It was all about giving them a voice,” Shane explains.  

Something that’s often viewed as a challenge is how we discuss a topic as heavy as reproductive rights with an audience member who might be pro-choice or with a new generation of audience members who might not be in the know, as Pildes described.    

“Embracing the complexity [of the subject] is the way to go,” says Shane. “It just seems to me that trusting that viewers and individuals and voters can handle these films is more effective than trying to paint it as a very simplistic issue.”