Cool Rerun Part One: The Jane Collective: Direct Action Abortion Access Works

It's a Cool People Cool Rerun!

Margaret talks with Samantha McVey about the more than a hundred women who provided safe, affordable abortion in pre- Roe v Wade Chicago.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
Hello and welcome to Cool People who Did Cool Stuff.
I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy. This is a rerun episode.
Everyone loves rerun episodes. Why is this the rerun episode? Well,
a couple reasons. One of them is that some stuff
happened this week. You might have been there, you might
have noticed. But the other reason is that I'm on
tour right now and I'm finally headed back home, which

(00:28):
means that I will be back to being able to
record in a more easy way instead of recording intros
in a rest area somewhere in California in the morning.
Is what I'm doing. Anyway, This rerun episode is about
the Jane Collective. You see, imagine a time when abortion

(00:48):
isn't legal in the United States. It's probably easy for
you to imagine if you live in a lot of
states right now, and yet most people are okay with it,
which we all saw at the polls last week. What
a bunch of people did is they got together and
they offered abortion services safely, and developed new technology for
them and did all kinds of amazing things even though

(01:10):
it was a crime. Because sometimes resistance looks like protest,
and sometimes it's just outright crime, which we would never advocate,
but we sure will talk about some of the people
who did it as cool on this podcast. Hi, Margaret
here with Samantha, today's guest, recording a new introduction to
this episode because a lot has happened since we recorded

(01:33):
it only a couple weeks ago. Normally, this is a
history podcast in the way that our subjects tying to
current events is left up to the listener's imagination. But
this is kind of an exceptional moment because when we
recorded this episode, which is about abortion access and direct
action abortion access, specifically the Jain collective. Well, I guess
you all saw that when you saw the title of
the episode when you downloaded it. We kind of joke about,

(01:56):
I think during the course of recording about not joke
what we say, Well, the overturning of Roe v. Wade
is a potential threat, and since then we've obviously all
seen that. There's a leak's document that says, well, it's
not a potential threat, it is an almost certainty that
is happening. The Supreme Court intends to overthrow Roe v.

Speaker 3 (02:16):
Wade.

Speaker 2 (02:17):
Samantha, do you have a better overview than that?

Speaker 4 (02:21):
So here is what we have been able to read,
and what we know that in this lite document, they
have already voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, and they
did it through the Supreme Court case of Dobbs v.
Jackson Women's Health Organization, which is based out of Mississippi,
which also is a trigger state. And if you don't

(02:41):
know what trigger state is, it means they are ready
to go the minute Roe v. Wade is overturned, that
there will be an immediate ban on abortion the second
it happens. So they are called the trigger states. And
there are several we'll mention that in a minute, and
Mississippi is one of those. So in this brief that
we read from Judge Alito, who is the one that

(03:04):
has written this up, it is ninety eight pages long,
with like forty pages of an appendix to talk about
his argument about why Roe v. Wade should be overturned.
And he begins his statement, and I think it's something
that we need to talk about because the language in
itself is going to be repeated throughout. I'm not going
to read it, I swear to god, I'm not. I cried.
I screamed at the computer when I was reading this,

(03:25):
and dissecting it, and I want to vomit as we
are talking about it. But in it he writes, yeah.
He begins the statement with talking about how divisive this
issue is and is a profound moral issue. So he
is allowing this conversation to take into a whole load
of feelings and automatically place what he feels is morality

(03:48):
and his own morality onto this. So that's how it begins.
And then he talks about the fact that the Constitution,
and we hold that rowan Casey, which is the Casey
versus Planned Parenthood, which happened in the nineties that helped
keep up with the bro v Wade, that it must
be overruled. The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and
no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision,

(04:12):
including the one on which the defenders of Roe and
Casey now chiefly rely, the due process clause of the
fourteenth Amendment. So in that clause, just for people, I
have a feeling so many people, the people listening to
this are so smart, they're gonna be like, would you
shut up and move on? But just in case, just
in case, it's that privacy, the right to privacy, which
is not necessarily mentioned, but it is based in this

(04:34):
and they took that language and said, yes, this is
about privacy. So that's very important, as we know, because
it goes to a slew of other unconstitutional constitutional things.
So he talks about that, and that he continues on
that provision has been held to guarantee some rights that
are not mentioned in the Constitution, but many such must

(04:55):
be quote deeply rooted in this nation's history and tradition
in the concept of ordered liberty. So ordered liberty as
well as nation's history is going to be all throughout
this brief. His whole stance is that because it was
never mentioned in the Constitution, that it was never ever

(05:16):
a constitutional thing and should not be allowed as a
constitutional thing, and that it wasn't even mentioned to be
a right until nineteen seventy three. And because of that,
this is not a constitutional issue. And the other part
to this is that ordered liberty. So when we talk
about ordered liberty, this is when he is saying that

(05:36):
he and a certain amount of people have the right
to tell you what your liberties are, and they get
to tell you what is orderly. So this is why
we're talking about how this is going to overturn it
because he's able to make this a state's right thing,
in which he said that's how it's always been, that's
how it's always should be. Roe v. Wade overstepped because

(05:58):
they took something out of context from an eighteen sixty
eight idea of this constitutional conversation. So where we are today, Yes,
there's back and forth right now about it's not that
big of a deal because the states can govern. It's
not an outright ban technically what we were talking about earlier,

(06:23):
what I was talking about earlier with the trigger states.
The states are Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, Texas, Louisiana, Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri, Arkansas, Mississippi,
North Dakota, South Dakota, and Oklahoma. And even though in
my state of Georgia, they don't necessarily have a trigger law,
yet what they have done is come at the abortion

(06:44):
clinics and abortion facilities telling them go ahead and get ready,
and so a lot of the clinics have stopped taking
appointments and canceled the appointments at this point in time.
So it's very very dangerous in where we are, even
though it's not necessarily a trigger state. Those who are
sitting in most likely more liberal left leaning are quote

(07:06):
unquote okay, it is those who are what would be
the red states that could be heavily heavily affected.

Speaker 2 (07:13):
Yeah, And what people I think often forget when they're
like sitting comfortably in their blue states or whatever, is that,
you know, the margins that we're talking about. The difference
between a red state and a blue state is actually
not incredibly dramatic. It's not like the red states are
all like, you know, ninety percent people who want to
get rid of this or something like that. It might
be fifty one percent or even well, I guess actually
abortion itself, what is it like sixty nine percent of

(07:35):
Americans right.

Speaker 4 (07:36):
Like seventy percent who want to keep it, and in
the state of Georgia is sixty eight percent as well.
So even though people think of us as just like
the you know, silly red state, though we prove them
wrong in the last few elections. And I know this,
I am with one hundred percent with everyone when I
say this government is bullshit and there's things to be
so many things changed, and I am frustrated to the

(07:57):
core because nothing like somethings are better and this is
better than it was, but at the same time, what
happened in twenty sixteen really really fucked up everything else,
and what we are seeing is the detriment of that. However,
it's not a fix all. I understand this, But what
we're saying is in the state of Georgia, the majority
of the voters, who are typically women of color and

(08:20):
people of color, are all about our current senators and
those who are pushing to that point. But Jerry Manderin
has made it almost impossible as well as voter suppression,
to get to move and push it to the right direction. Nearly,
I do say nearly, and it's frustrating because yes, we
are going to be affected, even though Georgia is not
a trigger state as we were talking about earlier. Obviously

(08:43):
he's already had he being governor, Kemp has already put
in the six week ban and just kind of sitting
in a court right now. And if these things change
is over Yeah.

Speaker 2 (08:53):
Well, honestly, I mean, besides the fact that we have
an unelected shadow council that makes still the decision about
what happened with our bodies. Really, the point of this
episode that you all are about to listen to is
about direct action abortion access and how even when the
law is not on your side, this is still going
to happen, and how can we make it happen as

(09:15):
well as possible, as safely as possible. There's also, unfortunately
other effects that could happen beyond just this. I was
talking to my lawyer, the amazing Moira Meltzer Cohen, who
said that we need to be prepared for all of
the penumber cases, which are cases that put forth the
idea that constitutional due process implies a right to privacy.

(09:36):
This was called the Penumber basically during Griswold versus Connecticut,
which is the case that legalized birth control, and so
basically saying that they had a penumber a sort of
shadow that implied rights to privacy, and lawyers on both
sides have been arguing that this is a terrible and
flimsy legal standing for a very long time. There are

(10:00):
things that rely on that include, as I mentioned, birth control,
but also gay sex or really any sex that isn't
for procreation could theoretically be criminalized once again. And so
what we're going to do is we're going to link
to a lot of resources in the show notes encourage
people to look into things, look into ways to contribute,
look into ways to if you have your own needs,

(10:22):
how you can meet those directly, if you or help
other people meet their needs directly through lots of different ways.

Speaker 4 (10:29):
And for those who are in a point I know
people are filling a time crunch, because there is a
time crunch. Abortion is still legal and accessible. The home
abortion pill is FDA proved to be sent by mail,
so if you need to do that, do that. That
is still accessible and it's still around. And we do
see organizations that are coming through kind of like the

(10:50):
Jain Collective did on a better, bigger level, which I
love every bit of that. That's kind of that silver lining.
And again, yeah, things that we'd see such as birth control,
we are seeing things in play. Missouri and Louisiana has
decided to put in a clause in their trigger laws
that includes iud's being illegal, so that means someone who

(11:10):
has an IUD, which has become very effective, may be prosecuted.
As well as the fact that those who are going
through things like a topic pregnancy, which is when again
I think we talk about it later, the egg is
the fertilized egg is stuck in Neurophilippian two burst and
kills a person can kill a person damaged and severely.

(11:31):
This will be if you try to extract that, that'll
be considered abortion as well. So this is why these
laws are so important that we pay attention to it. Again,
that privacy clause. That's what they're coming after. And that
includes gay marriage, that includes consensual adult sex, that includes
so much more. And that's why this is so damn scary.

Speaker 2 (11:52):
Yeah, and we'll leave it to the listener's imagination about
the methods that might be necessary when the democratic process
has failed. But one thing also will say is that
I love this episode that you're all about to hear,
but don't listen to it to determine how to self
manage abortions. Look elsewhere for information about how to self

(12:15):
manage abortions. Medicated abortions are readily available, at least at
the moment, and are substantially better than what is available
and what was available to the heroes of today's episode.
So what can people do? Like if people have if
people want to donate, what would you what would you suggest?

Speaker 4 (12:32):
So I don't want to give you specific organizations because
it affects different people, different in different places. But one
of the things I would say is planned parenthood is
not necessarily where you should donate. Maybe start looking at
specific clinics and funds that you are appreciative of or
think that they can do a good job. Research who
you're donating to. Also, if you're in a safe state,

(12:53):
as we said, and I'm going to call this safe state,
I don't know if that's what they're called. I'm just
going to quote it, like in one of the states
where the government is allowing and talking about, Yeah, abortion,
it should be part of healthcare. Then maybe look to
the trigger states that we mentioned earlier and help donate
to those days because they are in deep danger as
I said before, about losing everything very quickly, very fast.

Speaker 2 (13:16):
Yeah, And the people I've been talking to and asking
for advice about where to put your energy in terms
of organizations to support, have also suggested that abortion funds
are specifically the place to go. And then also one
other one that again my lawyer friend recommended, is called
the repro Legal Defense Fund, which is a fund that
supports people who are investigated, arrested, or prosecuted for self

(13:38):
managed abortion or for helping and their own or someone
else's pregnancy, and so that is a thing that legal
defense is going to have to become part of all
of this as well. Unfortunately.

Speaker 4 (13:48):
Absolutely, And if you kind of want to know what
is impacted and how you can impact better, you can
also go to the National Network of Abortion Funds and
they kind of have a list of who is in
need of services and what type of services are news
for what funds, and that could give you a kind
of at least an audited sheet of who you're giving
to and what they're doing.

Speaker 2 (14:06):
And here's the episode. Hello, and welcome to Cool People
Who Did Cool Stuff, the podcast that needs no introduction.

Speaker 3 (14:14):
No, no, no, Margaret, it needs an introduction.

Speaker 2 (14:17):
Okay, Welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, the
podcast that apparently needs an introduction. Every week I'm going
to bring you a new story of cool people who
did cool stuff. Thus the title. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy.
And this week I have on Samantha McVay, who is
the host of the also stuff related podcast stuff Mom
Never Told You. Samantha, how are you doing good?

Speaker 4 (14:38):
Thank you for having me on the show, and yay,
welcome to the fam and all the things. So excited
to have you as a part of our network family.

Speaker 2 (14:47):
Yeah, I'm really excited. Okay, So I've also have Sophie
on the call. So Sophie's the producer.

Speaker 4 (14:53):
How are you doing, Hi, Superheroes, Sophie over.

Speaker 3 (14:56):
Here doing I'm doing Okay?

Speaker 4 (15:01):
That is that is that is a theme of two
twenty one twenty.

Speaker 2 (15:07):
What it is we're doing.

Speaker 4 (15:09):
Time is not real. It does not.

Speaker 2 (15:12):
Exist, especially since what we're recording will make no sense
to people who are listening to it twenty five years
from now.

Speaker 4 (15:17):
Oh gosh, yeah, I hope so.

Speaker 2 (15:20):
But so, Samantha, I'm wondering, how do you feel about
reproductive rights? Would you say that overall you're pro or
anti you deciding what happens with your body?

Speaker 4 (15:30):
You know, as someone who does have a uterus and
feels the fact that I'm a pretty smart and capable woman,
that I should be allowed to have my choices, and
that being dictated by cis white men telling me that
they need control over my body because they're afraid of
the vagina in general and uterus and the power of
the uterus. I'm musa say I'm pro everything about it,

(15:53):
and let's go ahead and say nah, bra get out
of it. Well, is not a long winded answer.

Speaker 2 (16:01):
No, no, this is great. It would be a very
different in short podcast appear answer was wildly different from
that I have.

Speaker 3 (16:09):
I was like, Margaret, I have this really great person
that I want to have on for this specific topic that.

Speaker 4 (16:14):
It comes on, and it's like, oh, now you know
how I feel it used to be. Can I tell
you this. I grew up in a very conservative For
the listeners who are familiar with me, I grew up
in a very conservative town. My parents are white, I'm adopted,

(16:36):
and they're very conservative people who have always voted on moralities,
including anti choice lifestyle. And for the longest time, I
was told because I was adopted, I should be anti
choice or I wouldn't have existed. This whole like guilt
trip onto me about that, making it seem like I
was in the wrong for saying but wait. The the

(17:00):
biggest conversation is you're telling me that you really feel
like you can't trust me as an adult, as a person,
as an individual to make my own choices in life,
and that it needed to be dictated by a government.
But nothing else does. Okay, But it took me a
long time to get out of that headspin, because you know,
you want to acclimate and be a part of whatever

(17:21):
your society or community you're in. Give me a while
to figure out, Oh god, that's gross. What is happening,
you know, and what kind of control had it on there?
So honestly, if you'd asked me that twenty years ago,
we would have had a different conversation.

Speaker 2 (17:34):
Okay, no, that I mean, that's fair and like it.
You know, there's a lot of indoctrination that we all
feel with them. I'm almost sort of lucky in that,
like I was always just like such one of the
bad kids that I was pretty young when like my
friends started having abortions. And I'm so grateful that they
had that opportunity because a lot of them were able

(17:56):
to like get out of the situations they were in,
you know, because they had that access. But well, today's
heroes have come to similar conclusions that we have about
being pro people deciding what to do with their own bodies.
And because okay, people are going to talk about fucking
cool and I'm going to be talking about direct action

(18:17):
abortion access, and in particular, I'm going to focus on
one crew of women out of Chicago, the Notorious Jane Collective.

Speaker 4 (18:23):
Yes, oh, this is one of my favorites. Come on,
I'm ready, let's go.

Speaker 2 (18:32):
And so I think actually the podcast that you're on,
I don't think you are the host of this particular episode,
but the podcast you run actually did an interview with
the founder of Jane, Heather Booth. I just want to
acknowledge that, and so it was fucking cool and I
listened to that while I was getting ready for this
one and before I start getting too deep into it.
So I'm going to talk about abortion, right and so
I'm going to be talking about how it is and

(18:53):
isn't a women's issue in the modern context. I want
to acknowledge upfront that abortion is not just a women's issue.
A plenty of people who are not women can get
pregnant and might not want to be whether that's some
trans men, some non binary people, and some intersex people
who can all get pregnant. And I will say that
one day it's as likely as not that some trans
woman is going to get pregnant. And there's this meme

(19:15):
floating around that I really like, is that what will
really drive the right wing into a rage is when
the first trans woman gets pregnant. It's when the first
trans woman chooses to have an abortion. But I also
will say that so it's not just a women's issue,
but it is also a women's issue as well, and
I don't want to cut that out of the conversation either.
And I spent a while trying to figure out to
phrase all this right because it's a kind of a

(19:36):
moving target to understand how we talk about this stuff. Yeah,
so I would say the history of the limitation of
abortion access is entirely entangled with the history of misogyny
and with controlling women's bodies and denying us agency. And
there's plenty of women who can't get pregnant, whether it's
because of age, surgeries, hormone shifts, the way we were born.
But something doesn't need to affect like every single woman

(19:59):
to be a woman's say, to be something that affects
all of us, because patriarchal society wanting to control women's
bodies doesn't stop with the women who can get pregnant, right,
They want to control everybody. So I guess what I
want to say to anyone's listening and just to kind
of provide the context that I'm coming from, is that

(20:19):
when I'm talking about abortion access, I'm trying to talk
about it from both of these angles at once, to
sort of intersecting axes of oppression is people with the
ability to give birth and people who are women, which
is very often an intersection, right, but not always. And
then of course we're talking about shit that happened like
fifty years ago, right, And so a lot of the
existing language about the people that we're going to be

(20:40):
talking about will be referring to people as women and
will be approaching it primarily from this lens of being
a women's issue, and I'm trying to, well, I'm going
to try and be more directly inclusive throughout. I'm not
trying to like cast judgment on these people who framed
it in the ways that they understood it is the
best way to frame it. So that's my disclaimer. They

(21:01):
spent more time on than like the rest.

Speaker 4 (21:03):
Of the as it has to you have to though, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (21:07):
Okay, so abortion in legality, right, Abortion has been a
contentious issue since forever, and sometimes it's about morality, Like
on an individual level, a lot of people are against
abortion because of what they consider morality, and some religious
groups teach that life begins at conception or at the quickening,
which is when a pregnant person can first feel the
baby moving, which is usually about halfway through the pregnancy.

(21:30):
It happens I guess a couple weeks earlier in pregnancies,
after the first pregnancy that a person has. Other people
claim that life begins at viability, which is when the
fetus would be able to survive outside the womb, which
is usually around seven months. And then other religions and
other concepts and faiths teach that life begins at birth.
And it isn't as like simple as like this religion
believes this. This religion believes that there's not like one

(21:52):
answer about like how Christianity believes or whatever. Right, It's
all different and changing at different times. I also, frankly
don't care on some level like whether or not I
am or I'm not a religious person, Like I have
no interest in letting religion dictate the laws of society.
So there's this case that a lot of people make

(22:12):
that the restriction of abortion has nothing to do with
morality or religion, but instead about the control of bodies,
right of women's bodies and women's bodies. And then like
by extension all of the people who are in the
periphery of womanhood and I don't know, it's like and
sometimes they're relieve and open about this desire where it's
like literally just about controlling reproduction. A lot of countries

(22:34):
they say that motherhood is like patriotic, right, because really,
at the end of the day, it's about this, like, well,
we want more babies to throw into the you know,
gristmill of labor and war and shit.

Speaker 4 (22:48):
If you are looking at like QAnon level of uh
of the mom groups is an interesting fight they have
and a part of that solution, and part of that
fight is to burn their own babies, meaning like typically
white children, and making sure that that lineage continues in
this big olf fight in the QAnon war. It's a

(23:11):
whole rabbit hole in itself.

Speaker 2 (23:13):
I wish I didn't know that. Thanks for telling me
this terrible thing that's happening. It's like it doesn't surprise
me at no, no, it doesn't surprise me at all.
But I'm like, wait, like, of course they're doing that.
God damn it.

Speaker 4 (23:24):
Yeah, I'm so sorry.

Speaker 2 (23:26):
No, no, no, no, no, it's these.

Speaker 4 (23:28):
Are the no. I will tell you. I probably should
have given you that heads up as on our show
on stuff, Mo'm never told you I am the pessimist. Okay, Okay,
that brings out the unfun facts. So apologies in advance.

Speaker 2 (23:43):
No, no, no, that's perfect because I've tried to do this,
Like I mean, it's ironic. I picked this name kill
Joy and then I like dedicate my life to trying
to spread revolutionary hope.

Speaker 4 (23:50):
But I love that. I love that. I love that
we have this balance today.

Speaker 3 (23:55):
It's perfect fun fun facts with Samantha McVay show.

Speaker 4 (24:00):
They're welcome. You should have a show literally just called that.

Speaker 2 (24:03):
I want to be guessed on unfund facts.

Speaker 4 (24:05):
It should be fun facts, Samantha. Okay, you need to
start this up. You're the creator of all shows. Let's
do this. I'm in, I'm in.

Speaker 2 (24:15):
Okay. So the first European government to legalize abortion was
Revolutionary Russia as far as I can research, and in
October nineteen twenty they legalized abortion. And some people will
talk about how they did from a feminist point of view.
A lot of other stuff will say they did it
because they were all starving and so they just were like, uh,
it's okay to not have babies for this moment, right,

(24:37):
And I think there's a lot of a strong case
to be made for that that they didn't actually some
of them cared, some of them didn't care, I don't know.
Because they also got rid of abortion again various points,
and then they had like huge pro natal PR campaigns,
and then of course Stalin made it illegal again because
he's Stalin and he only does bad things. And Okay,

(24:59):
the law that he passed on June twenty seventh, nineteen
thirty six, is the most Soviet name I've ever heard,
which is the Decree on the Prohibition of Abortions, the
improvement of Material aide to women in childbirth, the establishment
of state assistants to parents of large families, and the
extension of lying in homes, nursery schools in kindergartens, the
tight you know, of criminal punishment and the non payment
of alimony, and on certain modifications on levorce legislation that.

Speaker 4 (25:22):
Rose right off the tongue. That was amazing, It was
so beautiful.

Speaker 3 (25:24):
Good jobs on certain modifications in divorce legislation. Yeah, all right,
I'm just making sure I got yeah, yeah, okay, cool,
cool obviously.

Speaker 2 (25:37):
Yeah. And then one of the other times that abortion
was legalized in Europe. I actually think was really cool
and not like, oh, maybe why are they doing this?
But during the Spanish Civil War in I guess probably
nineteen thirty six or so, I don't remember the actual year,
and an anarchist became the first men, the first woman

(25:58):
minister of health and like one of the first women
ministers in government in Europe. This is anarchist woman. Federica
Monsani became the Minister of Health of the Second Spanish
Republic and she legalized abortion because it was the right
thing to do. And then Franco successfully invaded the special
Second Spanish Republic and it was a whole war thing

(26:20):
that happened, and it didn't really go very well, and
Spain got fascist owned instead of legalized abortion. So close
to getting it right, I know, I almost like don't
know where to stick this. But one of the things
that I think about a lot when I'm talking about
how like why are they making abortion illegal? Is it
morality or is it social control? And I think that

(26:41):
as soon as you start throwing birth control into it too,
it becomes so obvious that it's not about morality, it's
about social control. Because all of the same stuff that's
illegalizing abortion is like, you know, I'm going to do
a whole episode about the birth control fight at some point,
But it's just this whole parallel thing where basically they're like, right,
you shouldn't have sex, that doesn't make babies. That's wrong, right,

(27:01):
it's because they.

Speaker 4 (27:01):
Just which is by the way, a new headline that
I've seen all of a sudden coming back round from
the right wing conversation is the same narrative of you
shouldn't have sex is for making children. If you can't
handle having children, you shouldn't be having sex. Like this
new I've seen it trending in I was like, what
is happening? Are we bringing that back again? Is this
really the nineteen eighties, seventies, sixties however, which, by the way,

(27:25):
abortion didn't happen till like the nineteen sixties in the US,
Like why are we back here? But yeah, it's I
agree with you, this whole level of like when we
really look at it, obviously, that's the conversation we've had
about is it really your pro life? Are you just
anti choice? Like that's the conversation.

Speaker 2 (27:41):
Totally, No, totally yeah, because yeah, you're literally anti people
choosing to have like, you know, sane, consensual whatever, the phrasiness,
the safe sex that's consensual and happening and all that shit.
But then, okay, so when I'm doing all this like
preface stuff, I'm going to get to Jane soon. A
lot of feminists, including today heroes, they weren't necessarily even
just fighting for the legalization of abortion. One of the

(28:04):
cases that I want to make because it kept coming
up as I was researching these people and a lot
of the other abortionists at the time, is especially the
feminists and the women involved, was that they were fighting
for the demedicalization of reproductive health. Basically, they were fighting
to take reproductive health like birth control, abortion, pregnancy and
birth out of the patriarchal field of western medicine and

(28:25):
to have direct control over their own bodies, which doesn't
necessarily mean like diy at home abortions, but it means
abortions performed by competent practitioners, whether they're in the medical
field or not. And there's this argument that my friends
have made very convincingly to me that I tend to
believe that a lot of the shit that's going on
in the witch hunts in Europe in medieval Europe were

(28:48):
basically a lot of it was about like, here are
these people who are health practitioners who are not tied
into the sort of male and academic field of health
that we're trying to build, and so we should murder
them all because we want to be the ones controlling
everyone's bodies instead of like all of these women and
actually a lot of I think gay men and other

(29:10):
people involved in sort of like swept up in the
whatever periphery of women. I don't know how to describe this.
And so it's just it's hard to control population in
people's bodies if there's all these like wild and free
practitioners running around helping people control their own bodies. And
one of the things that's so interesting about this argument
is that it basically means the medicalization of reproductive health
was a violent process that required mass murder. You just

(29:34):
killed all the practitioners, as you probably guessed anyone listening
to this. I'm not here to convince you to be
pro choice, because I'm assuming that you are anyone who's
listening to this, and if you're not, you should. Maybe
you'll get something out of this episode. Maybe listening to
it would be good for you. Maybe you'll just hate me,
that's fine. And because I'm not really here to like
balance the moral weight of abortion today, I just want

(29:56):
to like celebrate heroic, badass women who refuse to go
along with this US society that told them they couldn't
recontrol their own reproductive health. And so I want to
celebrate the Jaine collective.

Speaker 4 (30:07):
Amen, yay, Amen, I'm proud.

Speaker 2 (30:11):
Sometime around nineteen sixty five, there's a lot of arguments
about exactly what year had happened. I'm actually the person
who does know is alive, but lots of people writing
lots of different things on the Internet and in books
because everything doesn't match up with this off anyway. In
nineteen sixty five is a white Jewish socialist student in
Chicago named Heather Booth who got a call from her
friend and her friend was despondent. His sister was pregnant

(30:33):
and she didn't know what to do. Abortion was illegal
in every state in the US at that point, with
a few medical exceptions here and there, different in different places,
and Heather hadn't given much thought to abortion access until
that moment. But she was like, all right, I'll see
what I can do. And basically, just with that willingness
to step up when someone needed help, she started one
of the most radical and interesting abortion access groups in history,

(30:57):
which is a lesson to everyone that sometimes you just
step up when the call to adventure happens. This isn't
part of my script. I'm griffing badly.

Speaker 4 (31:09):
I like that, but yeah, I agree like that. We
see we're seeing it happen. Unfortunately, as it has become
evident that we're back into this fight again, we've almost
like started over, and it feels like we're starting over
into this point, and funds are being created to make
sure that if it does happen, if it's outright ban

(31:30):
and I know we're going to talk about this probably
in a bit, that we will have an underground network
essentially to continue to help the people who need this access.
And I know it happened in Chile too and Poland too,
where the neighboring countries have set up these funds. As
Poland has passed one of the strictest abortion restrictions, that

(31:50):
they're now making an underground essentially a network for them
to get access when they need it by giving as
many people uh travel reimbursement as well as places to
stay to get in that plan, be all of those things.
So yeah, I think unfortunately, I'm so excited about talking
about this story, and I'm so glad you're bringing this

(32:12):
up because we are repeating history and we may have
to look at this as an example of all right, y'all,
let's get it, let's get it together. We've got to
do something and become radical essentially.

Speaker 2 (32:22):
Yeah, No, I what are you talking about? This is
a history podcast. History doesn't have lessons for the present.

Speaker 4 (32:28):
Right, we don't have to learn history.

Speaker 3 (32:30):
What.

Speaker 2 (32:31):
Yeah, it's just random that I picked this topic. No,
I really like and please continue with the how it
ties into everything because it's like.

Speaker 4 (32:39):
Lovely, Oh, you're speaking to my soul. We're gonna be
the friends what I need.

Speaker 2 (32:46):
So good? Okay. So Heather Booth was already a radical
right in nineteen sixty four, she joined Freedom Summer, which
is when activists flooded to Mississippi to defy the KKK
and register black voters and set up schools and libraries,
which didn't go smoothly. At least seven people were murdered
by right wing forces, including black residents and both white

(33:07):
and black civil rights activists from outside the area, and
something like seventy black homes, churches, and businesses were bombed
or burned, eighty activists were beaten, and more than a
thousand activists ended up arrested, including Heather Booth. During all
of this, it also wasn't like it's like, it wasn't
perfect and rosy either. I mean, I just described all

(33:29):
the horrible stuff that happened, but it also led to
some resentment, at least according to some of the sources
I read. I suspect that people had a lot of
different opinions about what happened. Some local black residents felt
that there was a kind of a paternalistic, white northern
savior thing that had just happened, and they weren't necessarily
excited about it. But I believe that that is, you know,
people have very different opinions about things, and it's sort

(33:50):
of a critical, if complicated chapter the civil rights movement,
and Heather Booth was part of it. And I think
this is also important because it's always important to talk
about how all of the people fighting for all these
things always come from intersections or believe in intersectionality, even
if that term didn't exist yet, you know, Like I
did another episode once on abolitionists and realized that all
the abolitionists were feminists, and all the feminist were abolitionists,

(34:11):
not universally, but the ones who were cool enough to
make it into my podcast. And so anyway, so it's
not coming out of nowhere this, you know. So she's
back in Chicago after that summer, and she was helping
form feminist groups where women talked about the issues facing them,
a process that a few years later got more widespread
and be called consciousness raising groups. It was a big

(34:33):
part of feminist movement in the United States in the
sixties and seventies. And this is probably how she ended
up being the person her friend thought to call. But
that's just conjecture. I don't know why a friend called her.
So she gets the call and she asks around the
medical community within the civil rights movement, basically being like,
you know, who can perform an abortion on my friend?
You know who wants to commit a felony really quick?

(34:55):
And the doctor she eventually reached, as best as I
can tell, was a surge named TRM. Howard, who gets
left out of this history sometimes and not always, which
is a shame, because he's a really fucking interesting guy.
He was more famous as a civil rights leader than
he was as a doctor. He was one of the
most prominent non socialist voices in the movement. Most of
the civil rights movement was substantially further left than this guy.

(35:19):
But you know, he's black man fighting for civil rights.

Speaker 3 (35:23):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (35:23):
So during the Emmett Till case, which again I'm I'm
going to tell you about cool people, I say about
all these horrible things that happened. Emmett Till is a
fourteen year old black kid who was brutally murdered by
a white mob in Mississippi in nineteen fifty five. And
during that case, Howard helped run the search for evidence,
and I believe that's where he became more prominent within
the civil rights movement. And during that trial, discriminatory gun
laws wouldn't let HI own weapons, but he did anyway,

(35:45):
and he kept a pistol and a secret compartment in
his car, and he slept with a Thompson machine gun
at the foot of his bed. And there's this whole
history that I also will want hopefully one day cover
about hidden within the civil rights movement. There was actually
a huge move Even if the pulical action was largely
non violent, people weren't people were fine with self defense,
and a lot of that's movement was armed. So he

(36:07):
was very politically engaged. He runs for Republican. He runs
as a Republican for Congress in nineteen fifty eight. He
doesn't win. But he also fought against the criminalization of
sex work, which rules. And he was a surgeon and
a legal abortionist, which he considered part of his civil
rights work, which also just rules. And he was arrested
in nineteen sixty four and nineteen sixty five for providing
abortions in Chicago, although he was never convicted. So Heather

(36:30):
Booth reaches out to him and he's like, yeah, bring
your friend's sister to my office. So Ward gets around
quickly that Heather Booth has the hookup with safe abortionists
because obviously, regardless of law, people are still getting abortions
in the United States at this point. Right, Yeah, I'm
shocked because it's weird. It's almost like it anyway.

Speaker 4 (36:51):
Right, just because it's outlawed.

Speaker 2 (36:53):
What, Yeah, we thought we got rid of that.

Speaker 4 (36:56):
We made a law and it definitely stopped everything. For sure,
it didn't make everything else dangerous for the low socioeconomic
status and easy access for the rich people who still
kept getting abortions.

Speaker 2 (37:07):
What wait, did you read my script? Did I share it?

Speaker 4 (37:12):
We're just in tune. What I'm saying is we're best
friends to remind people I'm their best friend when they
don't know. It's not a tactic.

Speaker 2 (37:23):
That's the name of your podcast. Should be your best
friend tells you bad things.

Speaker 4 (37:27):
I'm your best friend. Obviously that's the perfect title.

Speaker 2 (37:33):
Yeah, yeah, totally, we're professional.

Speaker 3 (37:38):
I love.

Speaker 4 (37:39):
I have to say that every few hours, just to
remind myself and others around me love.

Speaker 3 (37:42):
Yeah, speaking of being a professional, Margaret's you know what
time it is?

Speaker 2 (37:48):
Is it time to tell you about how great it
is to eat potatoes and other healthy food direct from
gardens instead of and how everyone should grow their own food,
and how this podcast is sponsored by the concept of
self reliance and inter reliance among healthy communities and no
other sponsors at all, except for a few that might

(38:09):
slip in after I stopped talking. Yes, here's some ads
and we're back. I hope you enjoyed those ads. I
hope all of them were for really positive things, and
none of them were for bad things, which is definitely
the way that advertising works.

Speaker 4 (38:30):
I was gonna say, if they're not, it's Robert Evans's fault.

Speaker 2 (38:33):
I can say that, Yes, that's true.

Speaker 3 (38:35):
Everything is Robert. Anything you don't like is Robert's fault.
That's how I live my life.

Speaker 4 (38:40):
That's true.

Speaker 1 (38:41):
Though.

Speaker 2 (38:42):
Robert is in charge of making all the decisions about
advertising for the network, and if you have problems with it,
you should hit him up on Twitter.

Speaker 4 (38:50):
Director of Tweets, and your emails to him please thank
you very much, him, not me, thank you.

Speaker 2 (38:58):
All right. So it's hard to keep stats on illegal shit.
For some weird reason, people don't like necessarily always telling
the government when they do illegal shit. But one nineteen
fifty five study estimated that anywhere between two hundred thousand
and a one million two hundred thousand abortions were happening
every year in the United States in nineteen fifty five.
Around nineteen seventy, which is still three years before Roe v. Wade,

(39:21):
the claimed number is more like one to two million,
But who knows abortions are happening. Rich women get the
hookup from their private doctors, or they fly to the UK,
where abortion law is generally more lenient and for less
privileged folks, it's a lot less rosy. The underground abortion
scene was like a mixed match of like sketchy grifters

(39:41):
and then well meaning and competent doctors, but you didn't
necessarily have a way to determine which one you're going
to get. And almost all of them are men, and
a lot of them are also connected to organized crime,
including some of the good ones. I think some of
the good ones were just like outright criminals attached to
organized crime.

Speaker 4 (40:00):
Yeah, it was really interesting to see that layer, as
when you start like finding out these backgrounds, you're like, wow, wow, okay, okay,
mafia Okay, Yeah, they're going to come up a couple
of times in this story, woo intrigue.

Speaker 2 (40:16):
Although not as much as they could because some of
the people involved in this are all still alive, right,
and so I'm not trying to make conjectures about certain things.

Speaker 4 (40:26):
Let's not endanger anybody today.

Speaker 2 (40:29):
Yeah yeah, okay. So, as an interesting note, Chicago actually
had one of the only women doctors that I found
when I was looking at women abortionists pre chain. I'm
sure there were more, but doctor Josephine Gabler performed more
than eighteen thousand abortions throughout the nineteen thirties, and her
patients were referred to her from almost two hundred different
medical facilities, and basically she would pay a kickback to

(40:50):
all the medical facilities that would send her patients. They
would get a quarter of the abortion fee because everything
is sketchy in crime Land. But she was also a
I believe, a safe and competent abortionist. And then in
nineteen forty she sold her practice to her receptionist, Adam Martin,
and she takes over the practice, but she actually hires
outside practitioners to perform the actual abortions because she's a receptionist,

(41:13):
not a surgeon or whatever. But in the nineteen forties
and fifties, abortion law started being enforced more strenuously. It
was always illegal, but it was like kind of a
lot of times in a lot of places. I was like, well,
if you don't kill anyone, we aren't necessarily going to
do anything. But then in nineteen forties, nineteen fifties, unfortunately,
right when this receptionist takes over, abortion law gets enforced

(41:34):
more strenuously, which of course shudders the safest abortion clinics
in the country and does nothing to stop women from
meeting abortions. So Heather Booth is compiling all the names
of the reasonable providers that she can run across, basically
keeping track of who could be trusted to be safe,
both like kind of legally safe, like I mean not

(41:55):
it's illegal, but you know, to be careful, also to
be medically safe, and also to be sexually safe, because
there was a whole problem with abortion providers creeping on
the patients in their care, which obviously legalization didn't stop.
But you know, that's why, even when things are legal,
we still need people to advocate for us. And so

(42:18):
more and more people start coming to her for referrals,
but she starts getting busier. In nineteen sixty seven, she
marries Paul Booth, who's an activist she met at a
sit in demonstration against the draft in the Vietnam War.
Because again, everything's intersectional, he went on to help found
Students for Democratic Society. By nineteen sixty nine, they had
two kids, and she had a job, and she was
in grad school and she couldn't handle running like underground

(42:39):
crime ring all by herself, so she called up a
bunch of other activists women and got them in on
her underground crime ring. And that's how Jane started. And
Jane wasn't called Jane. It was the not quite as
bad as a Soviet name, but it was the Abortion
Counciling Service of the Chicago Women's Liberation Union a little
bit shorter, yeah, And they were like, you know, just
let's just call it. They mostly called it the Service

(43:02):
within their own ranks, apparently, but they picked Jane to
be like kind of like the every woman name, right,
like you know, we're all Jane or whatever, like Jane Doe.
And history remembers that it's the Jain Collective, which is
a better name than the Abortion Council the Service of
the Chicago Women's Liberation Union.

Speaker 4 (43:19):
Yes, it's a cooler name. It definitely like rings like, oh,
this is a good mystery novel.

Speaker 2 (43:24):
Let's go oh good point yeah, no, totally yeah. And
then they get like the sense of intrigue in your life.
And if you're going to go do a crime, right,
you should get some intrigue in your life out of
it. It shouldn't be like the cold like Bureau of Crime
where you like go in and they're like, please fill
out a form for the crime you would like to commit,
and you're like, uh huh. They're like, we need it

(43:44):
in triplicate. No, it should be fucking like exciting the collective.

Speaker 4 (43:48):
I mean, come on, as the Jaine Collective, so obviously
they're badass espionage parts to this somehow, in like secret
coded languages and all that kind of stuff. Come on,
you gotta be good.

Speaker 2 (44:02):
I can't wait till we can talk about more of
the underground parts of the history. But I am not wishing.
I wouldn't wish them all along happy lives. Okay, So
they spend months planning out the whole thing before they launch.
They're trying to be really careful with their crime ring
they and also it's not just because it's crime. They
actually they're doing this because they care, right, And so

(44:22):
they're like, all right, what are we going to do
if one of our patients has a medical emergency? What
are we going to do if someone dies? What are
we going to do if one of us is arrested?
What are we going to do if one of our
doctors is arrested? They like mapped all this out for months.
They mapped it all very carefully. And then they opened
and they decided to keep minimal records and have different
volunteers handle patient contact and doctor contact because again crime.

(44:44):
And they also got an answering machine, which is like
a weird it's only notable to me because it's like
a nice visual detail because I think at the time
it's like a huge reel to reel machine. And then
and then they put up ads in all the student
and underground newspapers in Chicago and they say pregnant don't
want to be called Jane.

Speaker 4 (45:00):
It's so snazzy. I like it, I know, I know,
like it was a whole system.

Speaker 2 (45:06):
Yeah, yeah, I love it.

Speaker 4 (45:07):
It's kind of like they're trying to if you do
know during war times, I guess they were doing the
messages telegrams and trying to decode things. It was this level.
It is phenomenal.

Speaker 2 (45:17):
Yeah, and we will hopefully never need it again. But
it's an interesting anecdote about history.

Speaker 4 (45:24):
Don't make me cry, come on, Okay.

Speaker 2 (45:29):
So when they first started, they worked with a bunch
of different abortionists, and slowly they started using one guy
more and more, and some accounts call him Nick, and
some accounts call him Mike, and all of the accounts
put his name in like quotes, as gonna say, they
put in air quotes. But that's what I'm doing, is
the air quotes. You also see it because Nick Mike
is a crime guy, Like that's his thing, through and through.

(45:52):
Like one account just refers to him as like a
con man over and over again. But it's a very
positive account about like their con man, right. And some
accounts say he was a mafia abortionist, and some accounts
say he was independent and on the run from both
cops and the mafia. I straight up don't not to
believe if you've heard one way or the other, I'd
be curious.

Speaker 4 (46:09):
But yeah, I did hear a link to the mafia
at one point in time. But again, like that's kind
of like, this doesn't make me make it more intriguing
that this is what's happened, or doesn't make it more sinister.

Speaker 2 (46:20):
Right, Well, what's going to make it both more intriguing
and sinister is that at least one account wants you
to know that Nick Mike is the sexiest man alive.

Speaker 4 (46:29):
Oh wait, wait, I missed that. As much research as
I've done and trying to get this stuff that I
did not see so now like, well, I gotta have
a picture, come on, But I guess we don't have
a picture Margaret photo.

Speaker 2 (46:41):
No, I don't think there's pictures of quote Nick Mike.

Speaker 4 (46:44):
We don't actually have an identity for him. He wasn't around,
but they want to know that he is a babe.
Like I need to know who said this, So the
Jane Collective or something.

Speaker 2 (46:55):
It was one of the Jaine collective. I can't remember
off the top of my head. It wasn't Jody, because
it was someone who would go and meet with him,
and it's in one of her accounts. It's from an interview.
I think it's in the There's a zine that came
out in like two thousand and three or four called
Jane and that has a lot of the interviews and shit,
and that was where I pulled the Sexiest Man Alive
part from and that that stays in my memory.

Speaker 4 (47:15):
You know, that is amazing.

Speaker 2 (47:17):
Yeah, I'm always looking for the subtext, you know, and
like like who's who's fucking who?

Speaker 4 (47:21):
And like and this has become a DRW Like not
only has it become like an espionage things, it's kind
of becoming a soap opera or something along those lines
for someone to have to put that narrative in like
he's one of the sexiest men. I'm like, how sexy.
I have a feeling because it was the sexies seventies.
He had a mustache, I know he did. He had
to have the mustache, right, totally.

Speaker 2 (47:42):
Yeah, probably in long hair, you know, like but not
like full hippie long hair, just like kind of a yeah.
I was describing this to one of my friends and
they were like, oh, he probably had like a leather
jacket and said, chow a lot, you know, And I'm
not convinced by the chow part.

Speaker 4 (47:59):
I'm not convinced. I think my friend had been watching
a lot of is Eddie Izzard. That's amazing And that
turned out to be I really wish. I don't want
any like real because I don't want to focus on
him because he and himself was whatever. But the fact
that this was like a narrative around him is phenomenal.

Speaker 2 (48:16):
Yeah, totally. And when they would go meet him, at
least for a while, I don't know if he stayed
this way all the time. He would only meet one
Jane at a time because theoretically he wanted to avoid
conspiracy charges, and if you have three or more people
talking about a crime, then he can get conspiracy charges.
And I'm not trying to say that this is the
way you successfully avoid conspiracy charges is you never let

(48:37):
more than one other person in the room at the
same time. But theoretically that was what his whole thing was.
And so they liked their new con man, and they
started working more or less exclusively with him, and they would,
I guess, pick him up the airport driving motel and
they would bring him work. He wanted slightly less pay
than most of the other abortionists, but he was still
wasn't cheap, and he was in it for the money.

(48:57):
Most abortions at the time rant six hundred dollars to
a thought thousand dollars, which is four to seven thousand
dollars into twenty twenty two. Jane was able to offer
them for five hundred at the start, which is and
then after about five or six full price abortions, Nick
Mike would do a couple for cheaper, and one of
the founders, Jody Howard, was Mike.

Speaker 3 (49:15):
Nick Mike is still such a funny thing to me,
and that the only thing we know about them is
that they were hot.

Speaker 4 (49:22):
Yeah, totally, that's all you need to know. Come on,
ye Mike, Nick Mike. It's so funny. I want that
to be his first and middle name. Totally name.

Speaker 2 (49:33):
Yeah, yeah he was. He never actually lied about anything.
He just his name was Nick. Last name Mike and
the first names.

Speaker 4 (49:43):
Please. Okay, the whole around this one mysterious man anyway,
going on?

Speaker 2 (49:53):
Okay, So, so one of the founders, Jody Howard, was
particularly close with Nick Mike. And there's some kind of
like subtext in what I read, But again, I'm not
sure to make assumptions because people might still be alive.
But Jody decided, and this actually makes a lot of sense, right,
She was like, there needs to be a woman in
the room as you're performing these abortions, and so she
started insisting, and then started insisting that he apprenticed her.

(50:13):
And Jody Howard's own entry into the movement was kind
of interesting. She had had two kids in lymphatic cancer
and she was pregnant for a third time, and she
knew that childbirth would as likely as not kill her,
and doctor still wouldn't let her get an abortion. Theoretically,
the law at the time was if childbirth would kill,
you can get an abortion. So the only way she
felt like she could take matters into her own hands

(50:33):
about this is she basically like, give me an abortion
or I'll kill myself, and they were like, okay, you
can have an abortion now, and which is just a
like how cruel is a law that the only way
that you can control your own body is by like
threatening to end your own life. So she became an
abortion access crusader, imagine that. And she figured out, she

(50:56):
was the first one to figure out, apparently kind of quickly,
that handsome man crime doc Nick Mike wasn't a doctor.
He had a lot of things going for him, but
a medical license was not one of the things he
had going for him.

Speaker 4 (51:06):
And she knew that.

Speaker 3 (51:08):
So once again, only thing that's actually accurate about Nick
Mike is hot.

Speaker 4 (51:14):
Yeah, exact possibly that was one Yama it is it is,
it is now in stone he'll love that.

Speaker 2 (51:24):
Well, if one person thinks you're sexy, you're sexy, you know, Okay.

Speaker 4 (51:28):
Oh god, anyway, keep going, all right, So she decides
not to tell anyone at first because she's like, everyone's
going to freak the fuck out.

Speaker 2 (51:36):
And she's like, also, like, but if he can learn it,
and he's not a doctor, so can I. I'm not
a doctor, And so he made him teach her. And
at first Nick Mike is working out of motels, but
then one day an angry husband comes and like is
banging on the motel room door, and they realized they
had to step up their security. So in order to
make it all more mystery novel crime novel, they start

(51:58):
renting apartments all over the city and they need to
at any given time. First, they have the front where
all the patients come for counseling and consultation. It's where
it's also where they show up on the day of
the abortion, and they're encouraged to bring loved ones for support.
And of course most people who get abortions already have children,
and so they provided childcare at the front as well.

(52:20):
And working at the front was therefore this like really
demanding job. You were a counselor, you were a babysitter,
and you were also like an entertainer. You were passing
out like snacks and tea and soda and shit like
anxious boyfriends and probably girlfriends and siblings and all that shit,
you know. And then you had the place that was
the front, nay of the place. It's still better than
the Soviet names. Actually there's also kind of sound like anyway,

(52:40):
whatever it.

Speaker 4 (52:42):
Looks sounds very coded and wonderfully espionage.

Speaker 2 (52:45):
E Yeah, totally. And so the place is the apartment
where the abortion is actually performed on a bed with
like plastic and cloth sheets down. And they worked hard
to make the whole experiences like on medical as possible.
They work to be relaxing and inviting and communicy with
people about what's going on. Some of the reports I
was reading and say, this doesn't always work. Sometimes they're like, hey,

(53:05):
I'm like, I'm your new best friend, you know, and
they're like trying to be really nice. And then and
sometimes they're like, no, this is the worst day in
my life. Let's get this fucking over with me, you know.
And other times they were like, you know, friendly and stuff.
Then there are the drivers who took people from one
place to the other. They or rather they took people
from the front to the place and from the place
to the front. And these were in somewhat short supply,

(53:26):
apparently because most of the Janes were students at the
University of Chicago, and a lot of them come from
New York City where people just didn't have driver's licenses,
so the few drivers with driver's licenses were basically it's
like all of the jobs that any of the Janes
were doing were incredibly important, not just the abortionists, you know.
And they performed over eleven thousand abortions and like a

(53:48):
barely three year span, it was like nineteen sixty nine
to nineteen seventy three. A later obsistrician looking at their
record suggested it was as safe as any above ground
legal clinic. They never had a patient die, at least
not one that they performed an abortion on. They did
have one time where a woman came in in bad shape.
She tried and failed to enter pregnancy on her own
a few different ways because making things illegals really fucked up, right,

(54:13):
and she had a really severe infection. Jane determined it
wasn't safe to operate on her, and so they insisted
she'd go to the hospital, and she didn't. She went
home instead. And I kind of assume, I mean, I
feel like we've all been there or we've been like
someone's like you really didn't see a doctor, and you're like, doctor,
well look like a millionaire.

Speaker 4 (54:32):
You know right, I mean, And also again the stigma
and the judgments and if she was trying, if this
person was trying to do a self abortion, that in
itself tells you how a dire of a situation they
felt they were in and felt like they had to
do something whatever they could, and it killed them, which
is what that situation leads to. When you really feel

(54:53):
whatever circumstance, whether it's trying to not be disapproved by
the parents or the family, or or society or whatever,
having this level of being alone and trying to do
whatever you can no matter the cost, and then not
realizing there is another option until it's too late. That's
that whole level in itself that just breaks your heart

(55:14):
in this whole situation. But I love the setup about
the front and the place as you were talking about,
because as I was reading about these things, the idea
that going to a guidecologist going to get your yearly
check up is frightening, going to a doctor in general
is frightening as hell to me. It's probably one of
those anxiety moments of like, oh my God, why do

(55:34):
I have to be here? And to know that you're
going to do something that seems that you've been told
is wrong a B. So you have all of this
guilt on top of that. Whatever it may be, whatever
the situation is, and we don't know the outlying situation,
whether it is you did have consensual sex and you
didn't have protection, or because you didn't understand the way

(55:55):
anatomy works, didn't have full understanding what was happening with you.
We already know like there's sexual trauma within even normal
situations that could be sexual trauma. And when I say normal,
I mean consensual situations or what was consensual? Uh, like
having understanding? Would these jays coming in and be like,
let me counsel you and let's have a deep conversation,

(56:17):
but also we're going to set this whole place up
like a home so that you feel comfortable and like
not instead of being a sterile, scary back hall like
what people would search for at that point in time
trying to get those illegal abortions, really feeling like these
are professionals, Like that's wow, Like that's above and beyond.
I love that.

Speaker 2 (56:37):
Yeah, no, that and thinking about like I mean, you know,
not in anywhere the same level of scale of what
some other people had to deal with. I remember the
first time, just so now that listeners know way too
much about my sexual history and health. I went to
go at SCI screening the first time after I came
out as trends and was like willing to you know,
put down my actual gender on forms and things like that.

(56:59):
And I went to go get ice screening and like
you know, and was in this stupid room with a
stupid health practitioner who touched me in appropriately and like
came on to me while you know, touching my genitals
and like holy yeah, and I'm like and then and
then I it took me a long ass time before
I went and got STI screened again. You know, I'm

(57:22):
not proud of that, and I'm sorry everyone, you know,
but like but it's like and just thinking about what
it must be like, yeah, like you're talking about being
in this situation where you're like, fuck it, I'm giving
myself an abortion, you know. So I'm like really not
trying to shame this person who like chose not to
go to the hospital until it's too late.

Speaker 4 (57:39):
You know, this is a bad first and foremost, I'm
so sorry that you went through that. That is bullshit
on every level and it was wrong and that person
should be arrested and they are assholes first and foremost. Yeah,
I've had enough of my day with just people being
bad people and what happened to you, Oh my god,

(58:00):
I'm speechless in that. I hate that. Now I'm beginning
to know you that whatever anyone would ever have to
go through anything like that to a person that they
should be able to trust. Professionals are someone that we
should be able to trust. And you were kind of
talking about that with the Jane's being like ugh, Heather
being like, you know what, I think there needs to
be a woman present so you can watch and make

(58:21):
sure they don't feel traumatized that in itself. Oh god,
I am so sorry and that should not have happened
to you and that was wrong in every fucking level.

Speaker 2 (58:31):
Thank you. Yeah, it's funny to like, you know, like, oh,
I've like barely told people this and now I've told
however many people of this, but like I don't have
any I don't feel any like guilt or shame around it.
I'm just angry, you know, and like right, and I'm
angry that, like you know, I was like so excited
like it to whatever if I talk about this too much,
I'll start crying. But like, I was so excited that
I could like fill out the form and actually write

(58:52):
down that I'm like trans woman and shit like that,
and it's like, oh, I'm gonna have gender firming care.
I've never had gender firming care. And I'm like, oh,
actually be seen as a woman sucks. Sucks.

Speaker 1 (59:04):
You know.

Speaker 4 (59:05):
Yeah, that's definitely just a whole different level of like,
there's moments that you should be celebrating to be free.
Oh my god, I'm free here, I am I get
to be here and be who I am, and then
have this dick coming through and just ruining that moment
and then honestly portraying their betraying their professionalism, betraying their profession,

(59:28):
and showing off as like oh yeah you are evil
in general and therefore you should they should not be
a part of this profession. I yeah, whatever, whatnot. But
on top of that, yeah, that you had the audacity
to take someone's hope, yeah and safety, and I hate that.
I am so sorry. And again yeah, and I love

(59:52):
yeah you being angry. Yeah you're better than I because
I think I would like rage everywhere. But you, now,
that's a whole different conversation with me.

Speaker 2 (01:00:04):
Now I am I am totally fine with rage and
anger as a way of dealing with certain issues in
society and in my personal life when when people are
doing things.

Speaker 4 (01:00:13):
Yeah, and then yeah, coming back to I love that
the Jaine collective really kind of understood that level. And yeah,
I hate that that someone died and that's not someone
that they I know, like they were traumatized them, which
is why we've got Their whole attitude was like we
got to do better. That's why we as women. Even
though they were not doctors and medical professionals, it is concerning.

(01:00:35):
I will say when I first read that, I was like, oh,
it was a good idea, but understanding that they really
cared about these people that were coming in and was
all about giving them safety and understanding what they had
to do is what they had to do because the
doctors were no longer coming through because they were getting
like the row versus way was really coming through about

(01:00:57):
who was getting penalized and who was really being targeted,
and so they had less and less options and why
not if they can truly do a good job. And
and big thing was getting the right equipment and getting
sterilized equipment. I know that was a big factor in
it as well.

Speaker 2 (01:01:13):
Yeah, but you know who will sell you sterile medical
equipment that you can use? Tell me the products? Can
we get can we get a can we get sponsored
by by at home abortion Care?

Speaker 4 (01:01:31):
You know one of our sponsors was playing b.

Speaker 2 (01:01:33):
Hell yeah fuck yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:01:35):
So there you go.

Speaker 2 (01:01:36):
Okay, well and then we're sponsored by that and whatever.
This other stuff is.

Speaker 4 (01:01:48):
Back from the break. That was a long one. Let's go.

Speaker 2 (01:01:50):
Yeah, And you know who else kept going was was
the Jain Collective because as as you were pointing out
like this brush with death like shook them up because
they I mean, it wasn't their fault, right, they didn't
do anything wrong, but they care. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:02:05):
Yeah, that was the whole point of them starting is
because they wanted to prevent people from dying from this
type of process and this type of access. And so
even though it had nothing to do with them, it
was still a death because of something so preventable.

Speaker 2 (01:02:23):
Yeah. And I was trying to make a joke about
how they are actually just in it to make a
quick buck, but it wouldn't even work because it's so
obviously untrue. And so they keep going over one hundred
women work as Jane. So the course of the project, though,
generally is like twenty to thirty at any given time,
which is kind of interesting to have this high turnover rate, Like, oh,
like it's this casual thing. You go join this like

(01:02:44):
very above ground, underground organization that's like committing felonies, which
is fucking cool. One Jane named Jeanie Gallaser Levey, and
she'll come up more later. She described her first meeting
that she showed up to for orientation. There were like
thirty women crammed into the tiny room. Each new volunteer
was paired with a big sister who would get them
onboarded like a mentor. And at each meeting, they would

(01:03:06):
pass around index cards with all of the cases that
needed to be handled, and everyone would take the cards
of the cases that they wanted to handle, And of
course that meant they like everyone took the easy cards first,
you know, and then like the big complicated ones. Everyone's like,
but you know, we've all been there. And so in
nineteen seventy one, Jody Howard finally tells the rest of
the group that Sexy nick Man was not a quote

(01:03:28):
unquote real doctor, and.

Speaker 4 (01:03:30):
Did we change did we change his name to Nick Man?

Speaker 2 (01:03:33):
No, Nick Mike. Sorry, I yeah, no, Nick Man, sexy man,
Nick Mike.

Speaker 4 (01:03:37):
I like that better. I've mistarted. I'm mistarted, but I'm like, if.

Speaker 2 (01:03:43):
We no, no, I don't know. I probably said it wrong.
Everyone who's listening knows the right answer, but we don't.

Speaker 3 (01:03:47):
If we did, that's even better, amazing, amazing.

Speaker 4 (01:03:53):
By the sexy Nick Many, sexy, sexy, sexy guy.

Speaker 2 (01:03:57):
Uh, it's okay. So people take the news really hard, right,
and the reactions fall into two camps, and half of
them were like, we're no better than the back alley providers,
and the other half were like, well, if crime guy
can do it, so can we. And in general, the
former camp left and the latter camp stayed, and many

(01:04:18):
of the people who stayed. You know, I've read some
said that half of the Jains left, and I've read
other things that said that's an exaggeration. I don't know,
but a lot of the ones who stayed learned how
to provide abortions, and abortion was kind of having a
bit of a renaissance around this time, in the late
sixties and early seventies in terms of how it was done.

(01:04:39):
A lot of the abortionists. Yeah, we're sketchy back alley providers,
but the Jain Collective wasn't the only ones who are
taking it seriously and caring. Other people were working their
asses off to help people get abortions safely and effectively
despite state repression. And we're going to talk a little
bit later, I think in part two about some of
the things that the methods that people pioneered and which
ones are still applicable to name which ones are not.

(01:05:01):
So Nick Mike, he makes himself obsolete. He was a
crime guy at the end of the day, and he's
in it for the money, but he's willing to make
himself obsolete. So he teaches a lot of Jane's how
to do this because and they're like, well, we want
to charge on a hundred bucks and he's like, yeah, that's
not going to happen. So he teaches them how to
do it, and then he fucks off and he's just
like gone. His trail goes cold. Did you ever have

(01:05:22):
you ever heard anything else there is this?

Speaker 4 (01:05:24):
So like one of the things I read was that
that the mafia was after him and that's why he
just disappeared, But that could have been just someone trying
to make it a bigger story, and that's why we
don't have nothing of them. But it could be as
simple as he didn't want any part of it. They
it got a little hot. A lot of people were
investigating different types of organizations, and because the doctors had

(01:05:47):
pulled out, he pulled out too. And also he didn't
get enough money since they were trying to downgrade the cost.
So he was like, fine, never see you again. But yeah,
I did hear that the mafia might have come after him.

Speaker 2 (01:05:57):
Yeah. I like to think that he rode away into
the sunset on a motorcycle while smoking and then lived
to one hundred and seven. That's that's the version of him.

Speaker 4 (01:06:05):
Yeah, sexy Nick Mike has got he's got it to
be in the sunset somewhere. Yeah, for some reason, he
is Mike Nick for me.

Speaker 3 (01:06:13):
But I hear him saying Nick Mike, but he is
Mike Nick for me, And you know what, that's just
a personal preference.

Speaker 4 (01:06:20):
I guess Mike Mike Nick can be whoever you need
him to be, because he's just the sexy man that
rode away.

Speaker 2 (01:06:28):
Yeah, he really is. Apparently shows up and teaches you
how to provide abortions and then rides off at the sunset.

Speaker 4 (01:06:34):
Apparently there you go, who knew this is what we
needed in our lives?

Speaker 2 (01:06:39):
Yeah, but the greatest part is they only needed him
for a little.

Speaker 4 (01:06:44):
While, just a little while about right.

Speaker 2 (01:06:46):
Because he made himself obsolete. And then at that point
all of the work was being done entirely by women.
And they also it wasn't just enough that they like
did it in the cold medical way. They also still
wanted to again sort of de medicalize it, and they
wanted to teach clients what was happening and give them agency.
One of the Janes Ruth Circle, in an interview said quote,
it was one of the things we talked about a lot.

(01:07:08):
We were not doing something to this woman. We were
doing something with this woman, and she was as much
a part of it and part of the process as
we were. So that we would talk about how we
relied on them. If we got busted, you know, we
would explain that they were not doing something illegal. We
were doing something illegal, but we need their help, and
you know, you don't talk about it and we have
to keep quiet. So I like that. They like basically

(01:07:31):
they are like, look, because it wasn't illegal to get
an abortion, was illegal to give an abortion, so the
Janes were taking all of the legal risk. But they
basically brought everyone in and were like, look like you
rely on us, we need to rely on you, And
I think that's cool, right, Yeah, And not all of
them performed abortion, some of them. Everyone took tasks that

(01:07:51):
suited them best. They were callback Jane's who talked to
the patients, and big Janes, who would handle the coordination.
At least one Jane later pointed out that decision making
was kind of fraught within the collective. They tended to
suppress internal conflict and so everyone will like stay focused
on the task and we don't have time to address
the you know, power dynamics and the other issues happening.
And I'm gonna try to like single them out for this.

(01:08:13):
Every activist organization I've ever heard of does this, right,
It's like something that we just need to be aware of.
And I don't know whether this happens particularly in direct
action groups or if I think that because most of
the organizations I've been involved with rem or direct action groups.
But it's just a thing that happens where like people
are like, you know, like tree sitters are like, oh,
we can't talk about patriarchy within the movement. They're cutting
the trees down right now, you know, right, And so

(01:08:36):
I think they had some of that going on, at
least according to to least one of them.

Speaker 4 (01:08:39):
Later, it wouldn't be surprising. And I go, of course,
we don't know all of the jenes that came through,
but it was pretty much ran by white women. And
when we know what happens when it comes to feminism
and white women and where that can lead and who
actually gate keys what, there's always going to be situations
with that. And then when you have something that is

(01:09:00):
so as you said, fraud but like uncertain anything illegal
we know is going to be uncertain, is going to
have a lot of stress. And I can't imagine what
that looks like within a group, especially when we're also
handling medical procedures on your own as well. So I like,
there's so many things to that. And again, like talking
about who was getting access, a lot of people were

(01:09:23):
getting access, but it seeming like it was a lot
of like college students at this point in time. We
know that for young women to be in college, they
probably had some money. And even though they might not
have as much money as others in society, they still
had a little bit of access and higher economic status
than most. And again it says a lot too even
though they were trying to be accessible, but the word

(01:09:44):
of mouth went through who didn't go to typically middle
class women so or middle class people at that point
in time. So there's a lot to be said kind
of the same way that if we wanted to go
jump and I don't want to because I did this
with Robert a long time ago about play in parenthood
and the beginnings of that. So you know, we know
that there is things that happen within movements and who

(01:10:08):
was leading movements and what them could have been on
the underbelly of it. Totally you know more than I do.

Speaker 2 (01:10:16):
But no, no, no, I don't. And like, I mean, it's
funny because once again you're reading my script ahead of me,
and I not in a bad way, no, I just
I like that we're on the same page about this,
because yeah, that's one of the most important things to
understand with a lot of this is like it's mostly
white women. It's almost exclusively white women doing this work.
In nineteen seventy New York and a few other states, Hawaii, Alaska,

(01:10:37):
and Washington legalized most abortion, and suddenly there weren't as
many middle class patients from that point because people could
just fly or train out to New York and have
a legal abortion instead of going all the way to
the UK. And so they started serving the black community
of Chicago more and more, but it was still white
women doing it. And yeah, when I first read like,

(01:10:58):
oh they advertised in the student page, person, I'm like, Okay,
it's really cool that students have access to abortion, but
that is not necessarily like the majority of the people
in Chicago or whatever, you know, right, And I've only
run across one black chain, a woman named Louise, who
joined basically to be like, look, y'all are doing a
good thing, but it's like still kind of fucking weird

(01:11:19):
that you're all white. And then again and I read
that basically her friends were like, what are you fucking doing?
If these white women get caught, they'll get off, and
if you get caught, you're fucked right, And I don't
know that that ever had to be tested. I don't
believe it was ever tested. Well, the fact that white
women getting arrested ended up okay was tested, but I

(01:11:40):
don't believe any I believe Louise was the only black
Jain and it's certainly the only one I ran across.

Speaker 4 (01:11:46):
So yeah, and just the little research that I did,
I didn't see her name pop up like or who
she was. Also, Yeah, again, probably being identified is not
a thing you want to be. Yeah, doing an underground
the toe but yeah, absolutely that's dangerous on so many levels,
and we understand that. And in Chicago in itself long

(01:12:08):
ugly history of segregation and such.

Speaker 2 (01:12:11):
Yep. So now that Nick Mike is gone and they're
providing the abortions themselves, though their prices are able to
drop dramatically. Their abortions were nominally one hundred dollars, but
realistically they took whatever the patient could offer. They averaged
about fifty dollars. The drivers were the ones collecting the
money and somewhere between the front and the place, but

(01:12:31):
they didn't count the money. They just were handed money
and took it. Sometimes they were handed jars of change,
and when they could, twenty five dollars were taken out
of every you know, and if those at least twenty
five dollars, As far as I understand, twenty five dollars
was taken out and put into a revolving loan fund
where people could come and say, like I need a
loan to get it, and they would have a no

(01:12:52):
interest loan that kind of is a like, look, please
pay it back, but we're not like sending anyone to
your house if you don't pay it back, you know,
of a like right, please pay it back, not a
you must pay.

Speaker 4 (01:13:04):
It an honor system.

Speaker 2 (01:13:06):
Yeah, totally. And it's and it's kind of the thing
where it's like not just non our system, but like
I assume they weren't like, don't starve yourself to pay
us back, right, you know. Yeah, And you know, they
basically were just like, this is so that the next
woman who needs an abortion can have one if you can,
you know. And that's and that's where we're going to
leave it today with Jane in their heyday. They're an
all women collective providing safe for legal abortions and to

(01:13:27):
the people of Chicago, which is it's pretty fucking cool. Yes,
do you have any like final thoughts for today or
do you want to know?

Speaker 4 (01:13:35):
I'm just so excited that we're talking more about this,
like discovering all these things being on an intersectional feminist
show and coming to like, yes, let's keep talking about it.
This is amazing. I love it. But yeah, but being
realistic about you know, it wasn't glamour and it wasn't
as easy obviously as it should be. And this is
the problem when we have limited access or no access,

(01:13:59):
and then when we criminalizing people for trying to just live.
Like that's just totally but I'm excited that we are
talking about it.

Speaker 2 (01:14:06):
Yeah. Yeah, And I really want to, like, whenever possible,
I really want to do like a warts and all
version of the show, because like when you hold up
people as heroes and they're like this person was perfect, right,
and you're like, well, I'm not perfect. I can't be
a hero, you know, and it's like no, like these
people like got lots of things wrong and they just
did amazing shit anyway, right.

Speaker 3 (01:14:25):
Yeah, and nobody's perfect besides dogs.

Speaker 4 (01:14:28):
Correct, besides dogs. And my dog's a dick, but I
love her, but yeah, on top of the fact that
I'm honest, We're honest about it, but she's also perfect. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:14:41):
Sure, So he gets angrier and angrier at the idea
that the dog might not be perfect.

Speaker 4 (01:14:46):
I'm like dog perfect. I don't say it, but yeah,
like I think in that's the thing is like, honestly,
what comes down to what I love discovering And I
know we're going to keep talking about it, but about
these cool people is that it wasn't that they wanted
to be a hero and that they didn't do anything
wrong before or don't have ron perspectives or may have misspoke.
It's just that they saw a need and they did

(01:15:08):
something about it poorly. And that's what we get to
celebrate totally.

Speaker 2 (01:15:13):
And you can celebrate more with us on the part
two of this two part series on Wednesday, when we're
going to talk in more detail about exactly what services
they offered and how it all went down and some
of the other people who've taken up the torch in
the decades since them.

Speaker 3 (01:15:30):
Samantha, anything you want to plug before we head out?

Speaker 4 (01:15:33):
Oh yeah. So if this interest you and you like
to learn more about women in history and the intersectionality
of it all, you should come listen to Stuff Mom
Never Told You, which you can also find on the
iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can
follow us Stuff mom never told you. On Twitter and
on Instagram, you could also follow me McVeigh Sam I

(01:15:55):
believe it is my Instagram and then Sam McVeigh on Twitter.
I'm struggling. I'm not really active, but sometimes I exist.

Speaker 3 (01:16:05):
There's a very cute dog picture on your Instagram where
you're wearing matching Halloween outfits.

Speaker 4 (01:16:11):
So that's that's what I would like.

Speaker 3 (01:16:14):
To plug at the end.

Speaker 4 (01:16:15):
Here is that photo your pumpkins? Yeah?

Speaker 3 (01:16:19):
Anyways, we'll see, we'll see, We'll see all Wednesday.

Speaker 4 (01:16:23):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:16:30):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media,
visit our website fool zonemedia dot com, or check us
out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you

Speaker 4 (01:16:42):
Get your podcasts.