the story of jane the legendary underground abortion service

In December, the FDA permanently allowed abortion pills to be delivered by mail, which it had previously restricted.

You still might be able to catch the new feature film Call Jane, directed by Phyllis Nagy, in theaters.

Watch Tia Lessin and Emma Pildes’s 2022 documentary about the group, The Janes.

In The Story of Jane, activist Laura Kaplan tells the story of the legendary service, of which she herself was a member. They simply believed that women should take reproductive care into their own hands, as they had done for centuries prior to the advent of bans on abortion. None of the Jane volunteers-all of them women-were doctors. But soon enough, its members started assisting with the procedures, and by the end of 1971, were themselves providing as many as 90 abortions a week in addition to basic gynecological care. Jane began in 1969 as a counseling service that connected people with doctors willing to terminate their pregnancies. The Abortion Counseling Service of Women’s Liberation, codenamed “Jane,” performed an estimated 11,000 low-cost abortions in Chicago in the years immediately preceding the 1973 Roe v. Eventually, determined to reclaim women’s reproductive power in any way they were able, many members of Jane learned to perform abortions themselves.Īn extraordinary history by one of Jane’s members, The Story of Jane is an urgent account of the organization’s development, the conflicts within the group, and the impact its work had on both the women it helped and the members themselves.Martha Scott, Jeanne Galatzer-Levy, Abby Pariser, Sheila Smith and Madeline Schwenk were five of the seven Jane members arrested in 1972 (via HBO) As Jane grew, so did the group’s capacity to protect its clients. Organized in 1969 and active until the opening of the first legal abortion clinics in 1973, Jane initially counseled women and referred them to abortion providers who set prices and conditions. The Story of Jane recounts the evolution of the Abortion Counseling Service, code name Jane, the underground group of heroic women that provided low-cost abortion services in Chicago in the years before the procedure was legalized.

Also the subject of the acclaimed HBO documentary The Janes.

A compelling testament to a woman’s most essential freedom-control over her own body-and to the power of women helping women. The powerful story of the women who founded and ran the legendary Chicago reproductive rights organization Abortion Counseling Service, otherwise known as Jane, written by one of its members.

The story of jane the legendary underground abortion service