As Roe v. Wade fell, teenage girls formed a mock government in ‘Girls State’

NEW YORK (AP) — In the summer of 2022, days before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, some 500 high school girls gathered in Missouri for a weeklong mock government camp in which they elected their own governor and seated an all-female Supreme Court that would rule on their own bodies.

Not everyone came from the same part of the political spectrum or felt the same way about abortion. But, for a handful of days, theirs were the voices that counted. It was during that week that documentary filmmakers Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine chose to film the follow-up to their award-winning 2020 film “Boys State.”

“It felt like we had gone from this sort of — not quite utopia — but this imagined, wonderful world where we had control of our bodies and we were involved in these conversations,” says Nisha Murali, one of the handful of young women followed in the film. “And then it just got ripped away from us.”

“Girls State,” which debuts Friday on Apple TV+, is, like 2020’s “Boys State,” an election-year documentary where national political discourse is experienced and reflected through coming-of-age teenagers.

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