New York, 2022. Jes­sa Gid­ney is try­ing to have it all – a high-pow­ered legal career, a mean­ing­ful mar­riage, and hope­ful­ly, one day, a child. But when her pro­fes­sion­al ambi­tions come up short and Jes­sa finds her­self at a turn­ing point, she leans into her fam­i­ly’s his­to­ry of activism by tak­ing on pro bono work at a near­by deten­tion cen­ter. There she meets Iso­bel Perez – a young moth­er fight­ing to stay with her daugh­ter – but as she gets to know Iso­bel, an unset­tling rev­e­la­tion about Iso­bel’s health leads Jes­sa to uncov­er a hor­ri­fy­ing pat­tern of med­ical mal­prac­tice with­in the deten­tion facil­i­ty. One that shock­ing­ly has ties to her own family.

Vir­ginia, 1927. Car­rie Buck is an ordi­nary young woman in the cen­ter of an extra­or­di­nary legal bat­tle at the fore­front of the Amer­i­can eugen­ics con­ver­sa­tion. From a poor fam­i­ly, she was only six years old when she first became a ward of the state. Une­d­u­cat­ed and with­out any sup­port, she spends her youth dream­ing about a dif­fer­ent future – one sep­a­rate from her exploita­tive fos­ter fam­i­ly – unknow­ing of the rip­ples her small, coun­try life will have on an entire nation.

As Jes­sa works to assem­ble a case against the prison and the crimes she believes are being com­mit­ted there, she dis­cov­ers the land­mark Supreme Court case involv­ing Car­rie Buck with shock­ing­ly sim­i­lar impli­ca­tions to the one before her now. Her con­nec­tion to the case, how­ev­er, is deep­er and much more per­son­al than she ever knew – send­ing her down new paths that will leave her for­ev­er changed and deter­mined to fight for these women, no mat­ter the cost.