On Making Art — and What’s Personally at Stake — in Post-Roe America
Photo illustration by Slate.
I recently wrote a piece for Salon about NO CHOICE, an upcoming independent film I’m proud to be part of. Set in a post-Roe America, the story has become even more urgent in light of the Trump administration’s recent move to rescind emergency abortion protections under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA).
The film’s writer, producer, and director, Nate Hilgartner, and I met in grad school at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He was, in fact, the first person from our program I met in person—both of us clutching wine bottles on a sweaty August night, waiting on the stoop of Julia Case-Levine’s apartment in Brooklyn. It was a mixer for students in the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program, past, present, and, now, us.
Nate and I hit it off immediately. We were the most theatrical voices in class, and for good reason: he’d just moved to New York from L.A. after years as a screenwriter, and I was a former actor (or, more accurately, an actor on pause). We were the ones professors asked to read our work aloud first—which, to us, meant loudly and dramatically.
So when Nate mentioned during our final semester that he wanted to make a film in response to the fall of Roe v. Wade, I understood the impulse. It wasn’t just a creative outlet—it felt like a necessary act of protest. Over beers in a Nolita bar, he pitched me what would become NO CHOICE, a story about a young woman caught in a part of the country sliding into a real-life Handmaid’s Tale. I was sold.
We talked about the optics from the start. Why should a man tell this story? Why Nate? But once he started sharing drafts, those questions disappeared. What mattered was that it was heartbreaking. I believed the world that he’d placed all of us in. This was a story that felt like horror because it was.
Almost overnight, fiction became reality.
This is personal for me. At a time when women’s rights are being rolled back, transforming that chaos into art has felt like a form of resistance. When I turned 35 last fall, I made a promise to myself that I would take the steps to freeze my eggs before my next birthday.
We must stop treating this like it’s some crazy uncomfortable overshare. So many of us—yes, even those in stable, loving relationships—aren’t ready to have children right now. And that’s okay.
I have career ambitions I refuse to sacrifice to made-up timelines. I refuse to put pressure on a man or our relationship because I’m worried the clock is ticking. That kind of pressure can distort something good, or, worse, make you stay in something that isn’t.
It takes some of us longer to forge the path to parenthood — and that’s okay. For me, that has been a choice. Since I was twenty-six, people have felt the need to tell me, “There’s still time.” But they never asked, never knew that I never wanted to even consider motherhood until my mid-thirties. Our timelines are our own.
So, more than ever, I feel a personal stake in expanding access to reproductive healthcare—not just abortion, but also IVF and egg freezing. Rights to what we do with our bodies and when should be extended to all women.
I also had the joy of casting the film with Nate and Steve Hilgartner. We saw extraordinary talent, and somehow managed to land exactly the right actors for every role. We got lucky. For more, click below.