The Jane Collective
-Chrissie
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In the years before Roe v. Wade, abortion rights were decided at the state level. This had also been true of the right to use birth control (Griswold v. Connecticut, 1965) decision and even the right to marry outside of one’s race (Loving v. Virginia, 1967). Because there was no federal guarantee, women had different rights in different states. This meant there was a class and wealth divide to those rights as well: a woman who lived in a state in which abortion was illegal and who had the means to travel to one where it was legal could get the healthcare she needed in a safe medical setting; a woman who did not have the means could not. Underground abortions became the norm in many parts of the United States, some done more safely than others.
One of the best known, and safest, of these underground providers in the decade prior to Roe was the Jane Collective. The organization developed out of the personal experience of one of its founders, Heather Booth, who helped her friend’s sister to find a doctor willing to perform an abortion. She found one via a group called the Medical Committee for Human Rights, and through this service was able to bring her friend’s sister back from the brink of suicide. Booth gained a reputation for being able to direct women to safe abortions, which began her work with the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union to create the Abortion Counseling Services of the CWLU, better known simply as “Jane.”
In an effort to provide healthcare to as many people as possible, they broadcast their services with posters and newspaper ads saying, “Pregnant? Don’t want to be? Call Jane” with a phone number that led to an answering machine. The pregnant person then left their contact information and then got a call back to schedule a meeting at one of the front apartments used by Jane. From there, they would be taken to one of the few doctors who worked with the Collective for the abortion. After a few years, they discovered that one of the doctors was not actually a doctor at all. Despite his lack of credentials, none of his patients had serious complications, prompting some of the members of Jane to learn how to perform the procedure themselves. There was a particular irony to this when local doctors who refused to administer abortions began referring their patients to Jane. The group performed approximately 11,000 abortions over the seven years they existed, with no deaths associated with their work. An OB/GYN who provided follow-up care compared the safety of the abortions performed by Jane to those done by doctors in legal clinics in other states. Most of the Janes were white middle-class women, as were most of their clients at the beginning. After abortion was legalized in New York state, their clientele shifted to be primarily poor women of color, underlining the economically disproportionate effect of abortion bans.
Despite the fact that abortion was illegal in Illinois, they were rarely bothered by police, likely due to the fact that “unlike other illegal abortionists, Jane did not leave bleeding bodies in motels for the police to deal with.”[1] Eventually though, the police received a specific request to investigate. On 3 May 1972, one of their locations was raided and seven Janes were arrested and charged with eleven counts each of providing abortion and with a generalized charge of conspiracy to commit abortion. There was confusion when the police first arrived, because they were expecting to arrest one or two male doctors, not a group of women. The Janes hired attorney Jo Anne Wolfson for their defense. Wolfson’s strategy was to delay the trial as long as possible because of the upcoming expected SCOTUS ruling in Roe v. Wade. The strategy worked: when the Roe ruling was announced, the charges against the women were dropped. With abortion legalized, the Jane Collective disbanded because they were no longer needed. Their courage and compassion are well-remembered and serve as an example for all who work for equality across sex, gender, and race.
[1]PB Bart, “Seizing the Means of Reproduction,” Qualitative Sociology, Vol. 10, Issue 4. 1987