This has a slick, instantly memorable title that brings to mind perhaps a light, romantic comedy but I would never in a million years be able to guess the context in which the phrase is actually used. It is in fact a serious film about pregnancy and abortion and is shot from such a studiously objective point of view that it sometimes feels like a documentary. Nevertheless it makes for a powerful statement about the needless pain to which America subjects its young women in deliberately making it difficult for them to get an abortion when they want to.

Teenager Autumn Callahan suspects that she is pregnant but is unwilling to let her parents know about it. She visits a pregnancy center on her own, takes a test and is told that she is about 10 weeks pregnant. The staff there try to dissuade her from having an abortion when it becomes obvious that she doesn’t want to give birth. After doing research online, she learns that she is unable to legally get an abortion in her home state of Pennsylvania without parental consent and tries inducing a miscarriage on her own without success. When she becomes nauseous, she tells the truth to Skylar, her cousin and colleague at the grocery store where they work part-time. Skylar steals some cash from the store and together they take a bus to New York. At the Planned Parenthood clinic there, she is given another examination and learns that she is 18 weeks along and that the staff at the other pregnancy center probably lied to her. This means that the two will have to stay longer than expected in New York to get the abortion done and they don’t have enough cash to do so.

This is pretty much an activist film that is laser-focused on the issue it champions. On the one hand, I admire how it can be so sparse with the storytelling. For example, we never actually get any scene of a confrontation with whoever the father is but there are more than enough hints that coercion was involved in at least some of her sexual encounters and she now hates him. Similarly we don’t get to explore why Autumn is so adamant about keeping her family in the dark though it’s clear that her father has pretty deplorable views about women. In doing so, it defiantly makes its point: it’s important to be understanding and sympathetic but when it comes down to it, the only thing that matters in a pregnancy is the woman’s own decision about what to do about it. She is the one who gets to decide how much of her story to tell and when to do it, she is the one who decides who gets to know and of course she decides if she wants to get an abortion. Her cousin Skylar here serves as the perfect example of how other people should behave: being 100% supportive and respectful of her boundaries and choices even when things are difficult and when Autumn herself doesn’t have a clear idea of what to do next. It’s an unambiguously clear and powerful statement.

On the other hand, I’m not sure that this level of intense focus makes for great cinema. This feels like such a textbook presentation of how an abortion at Planned Parenthood works step by step and exactly how the people around her should support her that the characters here don’t feel like real, fully developed people. In particular, I find it disconcerting that Autumn finds it preferable to have Skylar get money from a boy that they meet on the road, doing things that she isn’t fully comfortable about, than to let her parents know about the pregnancy. The film then seems to sell this as an example of how to unconditionally and unreservedly support a pregnant girl. Then there’s how it treats every male as someone to be wary of. To be fair, it does get the point across about how from a girl’s perspective, every male who interacts with them seems to want something from her and is a potential predator. But again the single-issue focus is off-putting and inorganic, like this is an informational video rather than a film.

In the end this feels like a film that I want to like and that I do agree is highly effective in getting its message across but is so narrowly focused that I find it difficult to recommend it without reservation. It’s true that you can learn a lot about what it’s like to have an unwanted pregnancy in the US watching this but on an artistic level, it’s hard to believe that this has any staying power.