One day during her pregnancy, activist and “Jane Collective” founder Heather Booth got the scare of a lifetime.
As told by The Janes, a documentary from directors Tia Lessin and Emma Pildes that makes its debut Wednesday on HBO, the Jane Collective was a fearless act of defiance born out of the Women’s Liberation Movement in Chicago. Jane operated from 1968 to 1973 as an underground abortion network in the Second City, connecting women with safe health care at a time when Roe v. Wade had not yet sanctified safe, legal abortions as a federally protected right.
The Booth anecdote didn’t make the final cut, Lessin told The Daily Beast during a recent interview, but it crystallizes the message they wanted their film to drive home.
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The story goes like this: Booth had stepped away from her duties temporarily due to her pregnancy. One day when she was at home, she received a frightening message—her worst-case scenario. “It was the emergency code that indicated that there was trouble,” Lessin said.
Booth began tearing through files. She tore things up. She dumped the evidence of her group’s work in trash cans on her way to their safe house. That alarm could have meant that the group had been busted. It could have meant a woman had been harmed. When Booth finally got to the safe house, Lessin said, she was panting and in complete distress.
“They opened the door, and it was her baby shower.”
Contrary to what some might assume about The Janes’ work, it was not solely the provenance of single, childless women. Many of the activists had husbands and families and did their work, at one point or another, while pregnant themselves. One of the Janes’ leaders, the charismatic Jody Parsons, had her kids and their friends sorting medical supplies. The activists’ goal was not, as some anti-abortion advocates might suggest, to encourage all women to terminate their pregnancies or destroy the American nuclear family as we know it.
“There were a lot of people making all sorts of different decisions at all sorts of different phases of their childbearing lives—about adopting, about not having children, about fostering children,” Lessin said. “All those stories were part of these women’s lives at the time that they were helping women make their own personal choices.”
Lessin and Pildes began work on The Janes after Donald Trump’s election win. The relevance of their work has been painfully blatant from the start, as conservatives began packing the courts nationwide. With the Supreme Court preparing to dismantle Roe v. Wade, multiple states are pre-emptively working to outlaw abortion within their borders. Left and right, the signals are clear that while The Janes emerged victorious when Roe passed in 1973, the work they began is far from over.
Outlawing abortion doesn’t prevent abortions from happening. As The Janes notes, wealthy and well-connected women were able to circumvent the law—and even those without safe options would go to excruciating, often deadly lengths to end their pregnancies when backed into a corner.
The justice system and medical establishment’s refusal to grant women autonomy over their bodies pre-Roe led to disastrous consequences, including “septic abortion wards” created specifically to treat women who’d received illicit procedures from profiteering butchers and quacks. The Janes, Pildes notes, only came to exist because none of the institutions that should have stood up ever did. Some of those involved were as young as 19.
“This is not something that should have been put on their shoulders,” the director said. “There’s nothing uncomplicated about the government and the health-care system failing 50 percent of the population and teenagers—literal teenagers—having to take that on.”
As Pildes put it, the Janes opted to use their privilege to help other people—but there was nothing simple about their work.
The documentary describes various points during which the women became overwhelmed by the gravity of their mission. When abortions became legal in New York, their clientele surged with women from low-income backgrounds, many of them women of color, who could not afford to travel.
In the doc, multiple Janes ruminate on the stark differences between who the Janes were and who the Janes came to serve. More divisive, however, was when the group found out their abortionist, “Mike,” who had safely operated on countless women, was not a real doctor but had simply learned the trade from someone who was.
Pildes praised the Janes interviewed in the doc for their candor about the possible limitations of their work—heroic as it undoubtedly was.
“They were willing to go there, and we were incredibly grateful for that,” Pildes said. “It was important to Tia and I to really have that be part of the story. This can’t be simple; it’s not. And it’s important to talk about how not simple it is.”
Some of the women were not put off by the revelation that their abortionist was not a real doctor. What better way could there be for women to reclaim power from a male-dominated medical establishment that could often be restrictive and condescending toward its female patients? Others were too daunted by the prospect of performing abortions without medical licenses and bowed out.
The Janes only worked with “Mike” in the first place, the doc notes, because Chicago police had arrested their previous go-to licensed physician, Dr. Howard.
Members of the Janes, August 1972.
HBOBetween 1968 and 1973, an endnote on the doc reads, the Janes were able to perform an estimated 11,000 safe, affordable, and yes, illegal, abortions. While today’s news cycle churns out plenty of reasons for despair, Pildes said this project has bolstered her belief in the human spirit—and in people’s willingness to help one another.
“Hope is a powerful thing,” Pildes said, “and out of it is born more willingness to organize and take action.”
Still, Lessin said, she’s terrified and angry—“Maybe livid is a better word.” As someone whose child-bearing years have been defined by the right to plan her own future, she added, “I can’t imagine my life without having that choice.”
Our current fight over abortion rights, Lessin said, is about more than health care—although that’s also paramount. “It’s about our freedoms—our autonomy as human beings to decide our fates.”
“I think about the many generations of women growing up taking abortion rights for granted,” Lessin said. “They’re in for a shock.”
