When Heather Booth helped a friend’s sister get in touch with a doctor in 1965 to gain access to an illegal abortion, almost without realizing it, she set the stage for what would come next. Jane Collective or easier Janes, an underground collective based in Chicago, Illinois dedicated to advocating and defending women at a time when abortion was not only illegal in most of the United States, but was considered murder. Officially known as the Women’s Liberation Abortion Advisory Service, it was affiliated with the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union and worked from 1969 to 1973 to ensure access to safe medical services for women from all walks of life. Weeks after the long-awaited Supreme Court ruling that will rule on the future of Roe v. Wade, which recognized the right to terminate a pregnancy since 1973, 70s movement history Jane becomes documentary.
At first, the Jane Collective worked by word of mouth: it all started with the spontaneous initiative of some white girls, well educated and from good families — including the aforementioned Heather Booth and collective founder Judith Arcana — who began to take an interest in the cases of young women, often of color and economically modest, who need access to abortion. Many of these volunteers, numbering 100 in a matter of months, came from the anti-war and civil rights movements.some were schoolgirls, some were teachers or housewives, some were mothers, some had illegal abortions and did not want other women to be subjected to such practices.
It is estimated that at the time, Cook County Hospital, one of the largest medical facilities in the city of Chicago, treated about 5,000 patients each year who attempted abortions at home. An unfathomable number of them became infertile or permanently marked, while it is estimated that at least one patient died every month.. Realizing this dramatic situation, the team took action to ensure access to safe practices for specialist doctors: volunteers answered the phones – the code word was Jane – to advise patients, refer them to the clinic and look after the children. The cost of the illegal procedure proposed by Jane was about $500, today about $3200-3900. But it never happened that the collective refused to help a person who could not pay for it, and there are no known cases of death of women as a result of Jane’s participation.
The network primarily catered to poor and black women. – who still face significant barriers to accessing abortion care after New York City legalized the practice in 1970. volunteers and author on Jane’s story, in a documentary. Add to that how difficult it was to provide abortion care to patients with life experiences so different from their own. The legislation was very strict even with those who promoted these initiatives, but under the protection of wealthy women, the police often did not dare to intervene, and so for four years the collective acted placidly. “I was not only a nursing mother, I was a college graduate, a white woman married to a lawyer,” she explains in the documentary Arcana, who, along with her companions, provided hospitality to patients’ children until they returned home from the clinic. .
Arkana and six other women were reportedly arrested in May 1972 and charged in connection with performing abortions, each sentenced to up to 110 years in prison. “We were criminals,” the activist explains to filmmakers Thie Lessin and Emma Pildes in Janefilmed a documentary from HBO and will be released on June 8. It was only through the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that the charges were dropped and the activists released.. At this point, the law finally changed in favor of women, and the collective no longer had a reason to exist, so it was dissolved. From those difficult years, these testimonies of female courage and solidarity remained, deeply imprinting the lives of thousands of women. While many fear that the Supreme Court’s decision could set the country back half a century on women’s rights, it’s good to ask what we’d be willing to do if we were in the same position we were then, remembering the words of the activist who in the documentary says: “Sometimes it is necessary to resist illegitimate authority, and sometimes there are unjust laws that need to be challenged.”
Source: Elle