It started small: In 1969, UT Austin student Judy Smith began inviting people to her house to speak about the challenges facing women. She had no way of knowing the group was planting seeds that would lead to the landmark Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion.
Director Karen Stirgwolt's short documentary, Lone Star Three, tells the story of the late Smith and two other UT undergraduate students, Victoria Foe and Barbara Hines, who ultimately formed an underground network to help women access abortions.
The Women's Fund at the Austin Community Foundation will screen the 2025 film at the Millenium in East Austin on Tuesday.
"We didn't have an agenda," Hines said in the documentary of the group's early days. "It was just 10 to 15 women talking about things, topics that women had never talked about before."
Over time, the group began to identify birth control access as a key factor that could give women more agency. They launched a campus birth control information center at UT, operating out of a makeshift, closet-like space that they hammered together themselves inside the offices of The Rag, an underground student newspaper.
At the time, it was difficult to get a prescription for birth control if you were unmarried. Smith, Foe and Hines helped refer women to trusted physicians.
But the group quickly began to encounter women who were pregnant "and desperate not to be," Foe said. They heard about cases of dangerous, self-managed abortions. Foe and Smith traveled to Mexico and established a relationship with a doctor who agreed to discreetly treat clients referred by the group. Occasionally, members of the group even gave women rides to the clinic.
The students knew they might be taking on some legal risk; abortion was illegal in Texas. So they sought the advice of one of the only female lawyers they knew of in Austin at the time — Sarah Weddington. Learning about the group's experiences inspired Weddington to take the case of Norma McCorvey, also known by the pseudonym "Jane Roe."
"It was their efforts that really got me involved with the issue and really did directly lead to Roe v. Wade," Weddington says in the film.
Wendy Richardson, the writer and co-producer of Lone Star Three, came to the story after wondering at how Weddington — a young, female lawyer from Texas — had become the lawyer to argue before the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade. When she discovered Weddington's connection to the UT students, she knew she wanted to make a film about them.
"This is a truly Austin story," Richardson told KUT. "Everyone I asked, no one knew about them. No one knew how Roe originated or the fact that it was in Austin. It just seemed like we uncovered kind of this treasure of women's history."
The project took on additional significance for Richardson after Roe was overturned in 2022. It did for Hines, too.
"I hope [viewers] take away that young people are capable of many things and are very fearless, and that social change is a long-term struggle," said Hines, who went on to become an immigration rights attorney. "I'm hoping that the younger generation will continue to keep this really important issue alive."
Hines and Richardson will be part of a panel discussion after the film screening on Tuesday. The event runs from 6:30-8:30 p.m.
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