All that most of us knew about abortion was that it was rare, and that every once in a while, a woman had an illegal abortion and she died from it. When women started talking to each other, they realized that lots and lots of women wanted abortions. Lots of them got them. In many cases, they weren't very pleasant experiences.
He became very close with one of the central people in the group, and she pushed him to allow other women to come and sit during the abortions. She told me that it was his idea that she actually pick up the instruments. At first, she just said, “No, I'm not doing this.” The idea of actually using instruments inside a woman's body was outrageous.But in this instance, according to her, he talked her into it. When you break through the wall, it's like going through the looking glass. It's like landing in Oz. Suddenly it's in color and not black and white. It takes a lot of guts to do that. But it's exhilarating once you do it, once you break through that barrier that says, You cannot do this. I came when the practitioner was leaving and the women were taking over. I first found Jane when one of my dear friends from the university discovered she was pregnant from a failed IUD and found her way to Jane. After her abortion, she came to my apartment and she was so excited by the experience. I mean, she just had an illegal abortion, she'd been blindfolded—and she was almost literally bouncing off the walls of my apartment in excitement from this incredible experience she had just been through.When you break through the wall, it's like going through the looking glass. It's like landing in Oz. Suddenly it's in color and not black and white.
Her information was taken by the call-back person. It would be her name, her age, her address, her phone number, her last period, how many previous pregnancies, how many kids, how many miscarriages, any medical problems.We would say, “We charge $100. If you can't afford that, what can you afford?” So those cards went to our main administrative person who we called Big Jane—again, creative names—and Big Jane did the scheduling, figuring out who was going to be scheduled on what workday.I first found Jane when one of my dear friends from the university discovered she was pregnant from a failed IUD and found her way to Jane. After her abortion, she came to my apartment and she was so excited by the experience.
We would say, “So when you're scheduled, I'm going to call you and tell you what day it is, and I'm going to give you an address and this is a place we call the Front, where people just gather. And then in groups of four or five, you're going to be taken to another apartment where the abortions will be done. [The members of the group called this location “the Place.”] This is who you'll see there. This is what you will experience and what will happen afterwards. You'll be taken back to the Front. You'll be given post-abortion medications. We encourage you to bring someone with you. You'll go home and we’ll keep in touch with you for the next 10 days to two weeks to make sure everything's OK. Here's the kind of problems you could have. Here’s what we do about these kinds of problems.”We knew, for ourselves, the not knowing was the thing that made you most nervous. We wanted women to be as comfortable as they could be.
The fully trained person would be sitting with the woman and holding her hand and talking with her about whatever she wanted to talk about. At some point, the two women would switch positions—the assistant would then sit with the woman and hold her hand, and the other person would then do the abortion.I would say to women, “You could do anything but scream, because we're in an apartment.”
You’ve got to remember that in those days, there were no shelves of books in bookstores on women's health. There was nothing. And women knew very little about how their bodies worked.
Things could have gone incredibly wrong at any point, and they didn't. But the more you do, the more you start feeling it's just a matter of time. Even in the best of circumstances, when you're doing surgery, things go wrong. We were committing multiple felonies every day. We're talking serious jail time here—not to mention practicing medicine without a license. But that was minor compared to felony abortion charges. In Chicago, typically, when a woman came in with a problem from an illegal abortion, the police were called in right away, and she was usually told that she was going to die, whether she was or not. And so they wanted some deathbed confession. Give up the names. But the majority of the women in the group—not all, but a majority of us—were white, middle-class young women in our 20s. I think we were in denial a lot. We didn't think anything bad would happen to us. So it was kind of shocking when it did, when we actually got busted.A woman came to us with her sister-in-law. Her sister-in-law didn't like what she heard, so she went to a local precinct. And the homicide cops followed the driver from the Front to the Place. They knocked on the door, and somebody opened. They wanted to know where the man was and where the money was.By the end, maybe 60 to 70 percent of the women we saw were poor women of color from the south side and the west side of Chicago.
They quickly figured out who was in the group and who wasn't, because the women in the group wouldn't give up their names. And then they went to the Front and took everyone— boyfriends, husbands, mothers, friends, children—down to the precinct. It was like a zoo. And the seven members of Jane were arrested and put in Cook County jail. They got bailed out and arraigned.[The bust occurred in May 1972. The arrested members of Jane hired a female attorney, who gave them some interesting information.]“There's a case that's making its way through the Supreme Court right now. We think it's going to go your way, and if it does, you're not going to serve any jail time.” Of course, that was Roe v. Wade, and that's exactly what happened.In that period, four of the seven women who were arrested decided to come back to the group. I think those four women didn't want the Chicago cops telling them what they could and couldn't do. We thought the cops were just going to keep busting us. But there was a point at which the attorney told them that if a certain lieutenant had not been on vacation, the bust would have never happened. So then we figured there wasn't a grand plan to get us. And pretty much went back to business as usual.We were committing multiple felonies every day. We're talking serious jail time here—not to mention practicing medicine without a license. But that was minor compared to felony abortion charges.
Until this current iteration of the Supreme Court, I used to say they'll never overturn Roe, but they'll accept every crazy, crucial limitation that any state presents to them. But given who's on the court right now, I think these people have enough hubris that they may very well likely just overturn Roe. The fact that they let this Texas law, which is so clearly in violation of Roe, stand, tells you where they are. So is it going to make it worse? Yes. Are women going to suffer? Yes. Are women probably going to die? Yes.It's important to realize the desperation that women felt, to go through an underground network of women who didn't look like them, whose backgrounds were so different from theirs. Think of that: How desperate you must be. Your life is at stake. Those of us who were in Jane did everything we could to make women feel comfortable. But the difference in those later days between us and so many of the women we counseled—not all of them, but so many of the women we counseled—was so vast. When I think about it now, all I can think of is how desperate they must have been. They'd heard, “You can trust these women.” But still, they had in their minds the crumpled bodies in the alleys, the news stories of women who had been butchered.I don't think that can be underestimated, to tell you what lengths women will go to, to do what they feel they must. For other people judging them and saying, “Oh, well, this isn't so bad, you can do blah blah blah”—it shows such cruelty and lack of compassion that it's kind of horrifying to me. Women are not going back. I don't know what form the resistance is going to take. But the resistance will be there.I worried about Roe’s survival—maybe not from the very beginning, but certainly once the Hyde Amendment got passed.