PEOPLE MAGAZINE: Why Jennifer Lawrence Is Endorsing Kamala Harris and Producing 2 Women's Rights Docs - 'Women Are Dying' (Exclusive)

By Jack Smart

Jennifer Lawrence is backing Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential race. The main reason, she tells PEOPLE, is simple: “Abortion is literally on the ballot.” 

“I'm voting for Kamala Harris because I think she's an amazing candidate and I know that she will do whatever she can to protect reproductive rights,” says the Oscar-winning actress, 34, urging others to do the same. “That's the most important thing, is to not let somebody into the White House who is going to ban abortion.”

Ahead of the national election, the self-described feminist is executive producing two to-be-released documentary films that exemplify those political values: Bread and Roses, which follows three women living under Taliban rule in Afghanistan, and Zurawski v Texas, about abortion care supporters who in 2023 sued the state of Texas. 

“As online trolls like to point out every time I get involved in politics, I didn't go to school, I dropped out of middle school, so I don't have a classic education,” says Lawrence with characteristic candor. “So storytelling is where I get most of my education.”

Producing and promoting films through her production company Excellent Cadaver is her way of educating others through storytelling, she adds. “That's the beautiful, amazing thing about film and documentaries. Hearing facts or listening to the news, hearing certain things happen, it's very easy to forget until you actually see human existence and you see what's going on. I think that's when minds can be changed.”

Bread and Roses, from Afghan filmmaker Sahra Mani, also counts Pakistani Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai among its executive producers. “I read Malala's book years ago, so actually meeting her is a huge honor,” says Lawrence. “And she's unsurprisingly brilliant."

The Afghan women living under the Taliban’s restrictive decrees depicted in the documentary — a government employee confined to her home, an activist taking refuge in Pakistan and a dentist organizing demonstrations — taught the No Hard Feelings star “what heroism really is,” she tells PEOPLE. 

Working with Mani throughout the complicated process of getting equipment to the doc’s subjects, she adds, it was inspiring to “seeing these women find community in each other and finding what makes them able to go about their day and to band together and to fight, but then still finding time for levity and love.”

The women depicted in Zurawski v Texas, “who have gone through what no human being should ever, ever endure,” Lawrence says, similarly represent the human side of political oppression: “They put it on display so that it doesn't happen to other women. They're not thinking about their suffering. They're using their suffering to help other people, and it's heroic.”

The case of Zurawski v. Texas, which the state’s Supreme Court ruled against this May, began when Amanda Zurawski nearly lost her life as doctors were legally banned from removing her unviable fetus in 2022. 

“Women are dying,” states Lawrence. The film, which also includes Hillaryand Chelsea Clinton as executive producers, can “enlighten people's idea of what abortion is and why certain people need abortions — and why it's so important to keep lawmakers out of families and out of people's doctors' offices… These laws are made by random white men and they're not made by healthcare providers.”

While Lawrence and fellow Excellent Cadaver producer Justine Ciarrocchi did not originally intend to enter the documentary space, she says, it’s fitting that both Bread and Roses and Zurawski v Texas are coming to Americans in 2024 as they face Harris and Donald Trump on the ballot. “With both of these movies, I'm moved by how they persevere and how they move on,” says Lawrence of the women on screen.

Lawrence hopes both films inspire audiences to contact their leaders, donate, volunteer — and most of all, she says, exercise their civic duty. “Take action by voting,” she says. “The most important thing that we can do right now is just vote.”