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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.

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Abortion Was Illegal. This Secret Group Defied the Law.

In the years before Roe v. Wade, an underground group provided thousands of women with abortions.

“My goal is to be a great Justice for all Americans.” With a new conservative majority on the Supreme Court, abortion is once again at the forefront of American politics. “Life yes, abortion no.” “My own daughters face more restrictions in most states than I faced over 30 years ago.” Drawing attention to a little known chapter of American history: an underground organization that operated outside the law. “Our code name was Jane.” In the 1960s, abortion was largely illegal in the United States. “Hundreds of thousands of pregnant women, unmindful of what may happen to them, secretly and fearfully seek abortions. For them, there is a wide gulf between what the law commands and what they feel they must do.” That was the situation for Sunny Chapman, who was 19 years old when she realized she was pregnant. “I didn’t want to have a baby at all. So I started looking for a way to not be pregnant. The options were: get married; leave the country for an abortion, which the rich girls did; go to an unwed mothers home and put your baby up for adoption, which is what working class girls like myself did; or have what we called ‘back-alley’ abortions, which was a terrifying idea.” “There were stories of women using coat hangers, taking lye. Stories of women jumping off of buildings to try and damage themselves.” Dangers like these motivated a group of women in Chicago to form the Abortion Counseling Service a feminist group, whose mission was to arrange illegal but safe abortions. They became known as Jane. “Nobody in the group was named Jane. So, it was an everywoman name. But we wanted to have a name because, that way, when we called somebody back, we could leave a message for them that Jane called without giving anything away.” “Most of the women in Jane were housewives. They were college students. And they were running an illegal abortion underground service and they were risking being arrested and prosecuted and going to prison for several years or more.” “Did I know it was illegal and did I consider that? Yes, I did, and I thought that this was an act of civil disobedience.” “We put up signs in phone booths, in student centers, in any number of places.” “Well, it’s kind of interesting when you’re running a clandestine service that you have to have, make sure your that the people who want to use it can find. So, we actually had an ad in the alternate paper.” “The ad said something like, ‘Pregnant? Need Help? Call Jane,’ and then there was a phone number. I called Jane. Then someone called me back. They gave me an appointment to meet with a woman who lived in my neighborhood.” “The person would go to her counselor’s house and have everything explained, not just what an abortion was but exactly what they would experience that day. That was really important to us, because we knew that people got scared from the unknown.” “Our practice was that we had one apartment that we called ‘the Front’– we were not very creative with names – which was a front. And it was the address we gave out.” “And then the driver would drive just the women who were having abortions to ‘the Place.’ And that was where the abortion took place.” It was all part of a system designed to keep their operation, and the identity of the abortion provider, a secret. “I was blindfolded and helped onto the bed. He didn’t want to do my procedure because I was a little further along than he liked. I was in the second trimester by this time, and he didn’t want to do it. The counselors talked him into doing it. They held my hand and we got through it.” One provider did most of the procedures. And then they learned more about him. “It was revealed to the group that our doctor was not, in fact, a doctor. People flipped out. Women in the group, some of them, I heard, were crying and saying, ‘We’re no better than the back-alleys. We’ve got to stop doing this.’ Lots of people left the group at that point. They just couldn’t cope with that.” But the women who remained made a decision. “And one woman said, ‘Well, if he can do it and he’s not a doctor, then we can do it too.’ None of us had any medical experience. None. Not one person in this group.” “And so he said he would train the women on how to provide the abortions.” As things were changing for the Janes, they were changing in the rest of the country, as well. “Set bill has passed third reading.” “Hawaii’s State Senate passed the most permissive abortion law in this country.” “Medical history is being made this week in New York State.” “When New York legalized abortion in 1970, women with money, middle-class women started going to New York. They could drive or fly there and get legal, safe abortions by physicians.” “Thousands of women went to New York from Illinois. And Jane started to have many more low-income women, many, many, many more African-American women whom they were serving.” “Because we had a poorer clientele, it was very important that for it to be accessible, it had to be cheap. Once we were doing it ourselves, we charged $100. We figured it cost us about $50 and we took anything, including nothing.” By 1972, the women say they were performing as many as a hundred abortions a week, when one day, there was a knock on the door. “I opened the door. I saw two of the tallest men I had ever seen in my life. I simply turned around, walked back down the hall and announced, ‘These are the police. You do not have to tell them anything.’” “So, we locked the door of the room we were in, which wasn’t really going to stop them for very long. And I think we took all the instruments and everything and threw them out the window. This was a high rise, luckily nobody was beneath. And we were all, kind of, sitting quietly on the bed when the police kicked in the door.” All seven of us were charged with counts of abortion and conspiracy to commit abortion. Each count was worth 10 years. I think that was the moment in my life that I realized that actions have consequences.” As they awaited trial, a landmark Supreme Court decision, Roe v. Wade, made abortion legal across the country. “The Supreme Court today ruled that abortion is completely a private matter to be decided by mother and doctor in the first three months of pregnancy.” “When I heard Roe v. Wade was decided by the Supreme Court, I knew that eventually this case would go away.” “State’s attorneys made a deal with our lawyer that if we didn’t ask for our medical instruments back, they wouldn’t charge us with practicing medicine without a license. And that was it. Done. It was over.”

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In the years before Roe v. Wade, an underground group provided thousands of women with abortions.CreditCredit...Chicago Police Department

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.


“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.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 15 of the New York edition with the headline: The Women, All Named Jane, Behind a Covert Abortion Network. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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