Missouri, currently home to just one abortion facility statewide, has some of the country’s most stringent laws restricting abortion access, yet it’s often overlooked by the national media. So says filmmaker and Missouri native Tracy Droz Tragos, who chose her home state (though she no longer lives there) as the setting for her new HBO documentary, Abortion: Stories Women Tell, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in the spring and hits theaters this Friday.

The film is as it sounds: a collection of stories from a number of women who live in Missouri, and a few who live in the neighboring state of Illinois, where some Missourian abortion seekers must travel for treatment. Among them are women who work at abortion facilities and those who crusade against them; women who are struggling with the decision to abort, with the aftermath of having done so, and with the experience of parenting babies they were forced to bear because of laws that made abortion a practical non-option.

There’s Amie, a waitress and single mom who finds herself accidentally pregnant with a third child, an unthinkable burden given her shoestring lifestyle; Debra, a white-haired older woman who had an abortion at 19 and now volunteers as an escort at a clinic, ushering patients in from the parking lot amid the din of fire-and-brimstone-spouting protestors; Monique, who remembers the male nurse who held her hand as she aborted a fetus conceived with an abusive husband; Alexis, a pregnant 17-year-old carrying to term a daughter who “wasn’t supposed to be here until I was like 30, ’cause I was gonna be done with medical school”; and pro-lifers like Susan, a Lisa Kudrow look-alike who books keynote speaking gigs at anti-abortion rallies but also reveals that she has terminated three pregnancies of her own.

Their stories are moving, sometimes crushing, no matter where you stand on the matter of a woman’s right to choose. “I think the most important thing for me is that this film touches people on a personal level,” Droz Tragos told me when we discussed her documentary by phone. “The conversation out there right now is very divisive, angry, a lot of name-calling and banning to hell. The most important thing is to reclaim the conversation just a little bit and give voice to women. That,” she added, “would be a big success.”