THE BOSTON GLOBE: How many abortion documentaries can one director make? As many as it takes.

By Natalia Winkelman

In 2016, the documentary filmmaker Maisie Crow released “Jackson,” an intimate look at the only abortion clinic remaining in the state of Mississippi. She had been working on the film for four years, building a persuasive picture of how the state’s restricted access to reproductive health care affected the lives of local women.

While making that film, “it did not feel like Roe was fragile,” Crow said. “It felt like states were trying to find a way to limit access to abortion and get away with it.”

Following the election, Crow watched then-President Trump fill seat after seat on the Supreme Court. The outlook for Roe v. Wade did not look good.

“It was clear that Roe was going to be overturned,” she said. “It was just a matter of when.”

Crow’s latest documentary, “Zurawski v Texas,” co-directed with Abbie Perrault, finds her returning to the topic of reproductive health care. It documents a new reality in Texas, where abortions are banned with the exception of cases where a pregnant person is at risk of serious harm. But experts say that the terms of this exception have never been made clear, and physicians who perform the procedure could face prison time.

The film will screen at this year’s 10th annual GlobeDocs Film Festival, which runs Oct. 22-27. “Zurawski v Texas” will play on Sunday, Oct. 27 as the festival’s closing-night film. Among the film’s executive producers are Jennifer Lawrence, Hillary Clinton, and Chelsea Clinton.

The film tracks a groundbreaking lawsuit filed by the Center for Reproductive Rights against the state of Texas on behalf of an array of women who were denied abortions despite experiencing serious pregnancy complications.

Crow developed a relationship with the center while she was working on “Jackson,” which screened at GlobeDocs during its second edition, in 2016. Led by attorney Molly Duane, the suit struck Crow as a compelling way for her to return to the issue of abortion access.

“I knew that if this case needed to be filed, we were in triage mode,” Crow said.

The lead plaintiff is Amanda Zurawski, a woman from Austin, Texas, who was 18 weeks pregnant when she went into premature labor. Doctors at an Austin hospital deemed her not yet sick enough to receive an abortion, and Zurawski nearly died of sepsis before receiving the care she needed.

“Amanda’s willingness to be the first to put her name and face on one of these lawsuits spoke volumes to us,” Perrault, Crow’s co-director, wrote in an email. “It became clear so quickly that she was fighting on behalf of all women in Texas.”

Following her medical crisis, Zurawski was devastated to learn that she had suffered scarring and damage to her reproductive organs.

“I needed an abortion to protect my life, and to protect the lives of my future babies that I hope and dream I can still have one day,” Zurawski said in her testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2023. “The preventable harm inflicted on me has already, medically, made it harder than it already was for me to get pregnant again.”

By centering on women with planned pregnancies who had abortions for medical reasons, the Zurawski case offers a perspective on reproductive health care that, before the end of Roe, was rarely in the public eye — let alone part of the abortion debate.

“I think that for far too long, we’ve just been using the word ‘abortion’ to mean one specific type of abortion,” Crow said.

“If women in emergent medical conditions are being denied care,” she added, “then I think it becomes pretty clear to viewers that women who maybe need an abortion for financial reasons — or any other of the whole spectrum of reasons that people access abortion care — are not going to get them” either.

For “Jackson,” Crow embedded with her subjects for years in order to follow “how these laws changed and how the anti-abortion movement gained traction,” she said. “Zurawski” moved much more quickly. The film took only a year to make from start to finish, as the case unfolded in real time.

“This film is such a true collaboration with the participants,” Crow said. “We were in lockstep each step of the way, and there was really this idea of continued consent in terms of the trauma that they were willing to share.”

Between making “Jackson” and “Zurawski,” Crow witnessed an upending of abortion policies across the country. Her personal life also shifted.

“I’m a mother, that’s the biggest way that I’ve changed” between the productions, she said. “I was very pro-choice when I made ‘Jackson,’ but nothing solidified my feelings around the need for abortion access more than going through childbirth myself. Childbirth is scary. It’s traumatic — or it was for me at least.

And the decision to do that should be up to the woman who’s going to have to go through it.”

Crow isn’t sure whether she’ll continue to focus on reproductive health care in her work. It all depends on what the future holds.

“If you would have asked me in 2016, pre-election, if I thought I was going to be making another film on abortion, I would have said no,” she said. “But obviously, here we are.”