In the 1996 documentary J ane: An Abortion Service, some former Jane members appeared on camera wearing sunglasses to conceal their identities. The Story of Jane: The Legendary Underground Feminist Abortion Service, a 1995 history authored by former Jane member Laura Kaplan, referred to each Jane member by a pseudonym. The earlier of these were marked by lingering concerns about harassment and prosecution. HBO’s new documentary The Janes joins a small canon of Jane histories and tributes. Jane members did it without any institutional backing, they did it without any credentials, and they did it without anyone’s permission. Jane did this all under the noses of both the mob, which wanted to monopolize the abortion market, and the cops, who wanted to eliminate it. No one ever died from a Jane abortion thousands were able to live freer, fuller, and more dignified lives. The story of ordinary women, defying the law to take control of their own lives, shows both the desperation and danger of the pre- Roe reality, and the possibilities for solidarity and subversion in a post- Roe landscape.ĭuring its existence, Jane facilitated more than 11,000 safe, illegal abortions. Jane is part cautionary tale, part inspirational narrative. The group’s story periodically reemerges in the feminist consciousness, gripping younger women’s imaginations. Jane, an illegal, women-run abortion service that operated in Chicago from 1968 to 1973, has become a minor legend in the intervening decades. Mug shots for members of The Janes, 1972. Eventually, Jody joined Chicago’s underground feminist abortion provider: Jane. No doctor would ever stand in her way again. Her experience of being denied an abortion-the abjection and terror of it-had seeded a new understanding. The young cancer patient, Jody Howard, had never considered abortion in a political context until she needed one and couldn’t get it. Similar stories are now playing out in red states across the country, but this scene took place in Chicago in 1968. They kept saying no until finally she convinced two psychiatrists that she would kill herself if she wasn’t given an abortion. Her life would be endangered by the pregnancy it wasn’t endangered yet.
The young woman asked her hospital for an abortion her doctors backed her up. “And congratulations, you’re eight weeks pregnant.” “The sterilization procedure was a success,” he said. When the anesthetic lifted, the first voice she heard was the surgeon’s. She had harangued a doctor for months, until he finally agreed to schedule a tubal ligation. After getting a diagnosis of Hodgkin’s disease, a lymphatic cancer, during her second pregnancy, the young woman had realized that giving birth again would likely kill her. THE PATIENT was a twenty-six-year-old mother of two, and she had just been sterilized.
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