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Retro Report
Code Name Jane: The Women Behind a Covert Abortion Network
In the years before abortion became legal, a clandestine group helped women with unwanted pregnancies get around the law.
The no-frills advertisement, printed at times in student and alternative newspapers, went straight to the point: “Pregnant? Don’t want to be? Call Jane.” A telephone number followed.
This was nearly half a century ago, when abortion was illegal almost everywhere in the country and alternative newspapers were in their heyday. There was no Jane, though, not literally anyway. Yet at the same time, Jane was anybody.
“It was an Everywoman name,” used for everyone who once formed an underground network that provided clandestine abortion services, Laura Kaplan said. Ms. Kaplan was part of it and wrote about the experience in a 1995 book, “The Story of Jane.” That group, referred to by some as the Jane Collective, operated in Chicago and carried out thousands of abortions from 1969 to 1973. Many of the procedures were performed by medical nonprofessionals. They may have been the housewife next door, the college student down the block, the local schoolteacher.
Retro Report, a series of video documentaries that re-examine major news stories of long ago, devotes this installment to the Janes and their mission.
In his pronouncements and Supreme Court appointments, President Trump appears intent on overturning, or at least hobbling, Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that legalized abortion in the United States. As it is, dozens of states have imposed enough restrictions to make it hard for many women, especially those of scant means, to find professional help to end a pregnancy. About 90 percent of American counties do not have a single abortion clinic, effectively putting the procedure beyond easy reach for countless women.
Perhaps not surprisingly, many with unwanted pregnancies resort to do-it-yourself measures. This does not mean a wholesale return to the bad old days of desperate women swallowing lye or turpentine, or using knitting needles or wire hangers. The norm now is a self-administered abortion pill — actually a combination of two medications, misoprostol and mifepristone. They are generally considered safe and, when taken together, almost always effective in a pregnancy’s first trimester.
Nonetheless, most states require by statute that a doctor be involved; several women have been jailed for running afoul of the law. It is enough to have spawned movements to assist pregnant women wishing to act on their own, not unlike the secretive Janes of old. In keeping with its mission of looking back to then look ahead, Retro Report recalls the life and times of that Chicago network, known formally as the Abortion Counseling Service of Women’s Liberation.
A founder was Heather Booth, who as a University of Chicago student in the 1960s had helped a friend’s sister find a doctor who would do an abortion. The author Kate Manning, writing in The New York Times last year, said Ms. Booth described that woman and her own actions this way: “I was told she was nearly suicidal. I viewed it not as breaking the law but as acting on the Golden Rule. Someone was in anguish, and I tried to help her.”
The network came into being in 1969, with clients like Sunny Chapman, who at age 19 had become pregnant. It was a difficult pregnancy, with considerable bleeding, Ms. Chapman recalled for Retro Report. Like many women, she first turned to what was commonly referred to back then as a back-alley abortionist. “I had a conversation with the man on the phone, and just talking to him made me feel completely unsafe,” she said, adding, “He sounded like a gangster.” Hospital emergency room doctors treated her with hostility, she said.
And so she called the network, whose founders proclaimed, “We are for every woman having exactly as many children as she wants, when she wants, if she wants.”
The Janes’ tactics were worthy of a spy novel. A woman seeking to end her pregnancy left a message on an answering machine. A “Callback Jane” phoned her, collected information and passed it to a “Big Jane.” Patients would be taken first to one address, “the front,” for counseling. They were then led, sometimes blindfolded, to another spot, “the place,” where a doctor did the abortion.
That is, if he indeed was a doctor. It turned out that at least one abortionist, while skilled enough, was not a physician, just someone looking for a ready buck. A few of the Janes, Ms. Kaplan said, figured that if he could do it, so could they. And they did, for a lot less. The man’s going rate in the early ’70s went as high as $1,000, equivalent to about $6,500 today. The Janes dropped the price to $100, accepting less if the woman had little money.
In 1972, the Chicago police raided an apartment used by the Janes, and arrested seven of them. In the police van, the women ripped off the sections of index cards bearing their patients’ names and addresses, and swallowed them.
Everything changed, though, on Jan. 22, 1973, when the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Roe v. Wade. Charges against the Janes were dropped. Soon enough, the network disbanded. With abortion now legal nationwide, there seemed no point to it anymore.
But the political, cultural and religious wars over abortion have not ended. Roe v. Wade’s provisions have been steadily chipped away by state laws that ban the procedure after a specified number of weeks, or impose mandatory waiting periods, or effectively forbid online purchases of misoprostol and mifepristone. Most states require that a licensed doctor prescribe the drugs. Many insist that a clinician be physically present when the medications are taken, a mandate that can create hardship for, say, rural women living far from abortion providers.
Despite such barriers, do-it-yourself efforts endure. In 2015 alone, Google had more than 700,000 searches for self-induced abortions, many of them for ways to “buy abortion pills online.”
In the thicket of legal and political issues, the consequences for real lives are sometimes obscured, much as the identities of Roe and Wade often are. Roe was Norma McCorvey, five months pregnant in 1970 when two Dallas lawyers picked her to be the plaintiff in a challenge to Texas’ anti-abortion statutes. The defendant was Dallas County’s long-serving district attorney, Henry Wade. Ms. McCorvey, who died last year at 69, had that baby, a girl she then gave up for adoption. Later, she went through several religious transformations and became an ardent opponent of abortion rights.
It seems safe to say that most Americans are unfamiliar with all that, let alone with the generic Roe’s first name in the case. It was Jane.
How The Times Covered the Story
“A historic resolution of a fiercely controversial issue” was how Warren Weaver Jr. of The Times described the Supreme Court’s 7-2 vote in 1973 that lifted restrictions on first-trimester abortions. The front-page article noted that the decision was at odds with the views of the president, Richard M. Nixon, but that three of his four Supreme Court appointees had voted with the majority. The fourth, William H. Rehnquist, and Byron R. White dissented. Obituaries for the defendant, Dallas County’s district attorney, Henry Wade, and the plaintiff, Norma McCorvey (known in court documents as Jane Roe), chronicle their involvement in the case.
The video with this article is part of a documentary series presented by The New York Times. The video project was started with a grant from Christopher Buck. Retro Report, led by Kyra Darnton, is a nonprofit video news organization examining the history and context behind today’s news. To watch more, subscribe to the Retro Report newsletter, and follow Retro Report on YouTube and Twitter.
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