CZM Rewind: Part One: The Jane Collective: Direct Action Abortion Access Works

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

Original Air Date: 5.9.2022

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Episode Transcript

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

Speaker 2 (00:04):
Welcome to cool people who did cool stuff with your host,
Margaret Killjoy. But it's a rerun episode. I bet you
never would have guessed, despite the fact that it was
in the title. You might have noticed that only one
episode went up last week and that I'm interrupting the
middle of a story to run reruns. And I'm just

(00:24):
letting you know that everything is fine. It's just that
life sure got in the way. And as you might
be able to tell from my voice, I'm also sick,
which is a particularly fun thing when your voice is
your job. But this week we're going to rerun an
episode that I thought we had already rerun, but we
have not, and that is a terrible shame because this

(00:46):
is an important episode and the third episode we ever
ran of this show, because we're going to be talking
about the Jane Collective of Chicago, and we're going to
be talking about the direct action abortion access that happened
and pre Roe v. Wade and is totally happening. I mean,
it would never admit that crime is happening post Roe v.

(01:07):
Wade because people need to be able to control their bodies,
and I don't know, it's an important part of the struggle,
And so here we are running this episode. I think
it's been a while since I've listened to it. I
think at the beginning, when we first started recording, I
think Roe v. Wade hadn't even been overturned yet, and

(01:28):
maybe we were both like, oh, I sure hope this
doesn't become necessary, but maybe it'd already had. I don't
know you're about to find out, but I don't know
because I'm sick. So actually, now I better understand what
you all are about to understand, which is that we
recorded this episode years ago when I think the memo
was first being leaked or whatever that Roe v. Wade

(01:50):
was going to be overturned. But I want to just
go ahead and shout out here at the beginning. Probably
this episode plugs, but if not, it should plug. The
National Network of Abortion Funds is a really good place
to donate to. Also, I want to direct people towards
Plan cpills dot org. Plan C basically is a word
for medicated abortion that can be self managed. And if

(02:13):
you want to know a bunch about self managing abortion,
which is substantially safer than it was during the period
that the Jains were working. There's an excellent zine that's
free published by Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness that you
can get at Tangled Wilderness dot org. And there's like
a free version online. You can also buy bulk copies

(02:34):
for cost or print them out yourself and distribute them.
And it's called how to Do It Anyway by Hazel Acacia,
and that is a step by step guide written by
an abortion worker talking about how to use medicated abortions,
how to use Plan C pills. So those are some resources. Anyway,

(02:56):
here's the show. Hi, Margaret here with Samantha today's guest,
recording a new introduction to this episode because a lot
has happened since we recorded it only a couple of
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

(03:16):
an exceptional moment because when we recorded this episode, which
is about abortion access and direct action abortion access, specifically
the Jaine 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, I think during
the course of recording about not joke but we say, well,
the overturning of Roe v. Wade is a potential threat.

(03:37):
And since then we've obviously all seen that there's a
leak 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. Wade. Samantha, do you
have a better overview than that.

Speaker 3 (03:53):
So here is what we have been able to read
and what we know that in this late document, they
have already voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, and they
did it through the Supreme Court case of Dobb's v.
Jackson Women's Health Organization, which is based out of Mississippi,
which also is a trigger state. And if you don't

(04:14):
know what trigger state is, it means they are ready
to go the minute Roe v. Wade is overturned, that
there will be in 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

(04:36):
that has written this up, it is ninety eight pages
long with like forty something 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

(04:57):
reading this 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

(05:21):
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 row and 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,

(05:45):
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, is that privacy, the right to privacy which
is not necessarily mentioned, but it is based in this

(06:07):
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

(06:27):
be quote deeply rooted in this nation's history and tradition
and implicitly 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 a constitutional thing and should not be allowed

(06:51):
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 he and a certain amount of people have
the right to tell you what your liberties are, and

(07:14):
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 they took something out of context from an eighteen
sixty eight idea of this constitutional conversation. So where we

(07:39):
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. When I was talking about earlier
with the trigger states. The states are Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, Texas, Louisiana, Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri, Arkansas, Mississippi,

(08:06):
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
clinics and abortion facilities telling them go ahead and get ready.
And so a lot of the clinics have stopped taking
appointments and canceled appointments at this point in time. So

(08:28):
it's very very dangerous and 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 unquote okay,
it is those who are what would be the red
states that could be heavily heavily affected.

Speaker 2 (08:46):
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 blue state is actually not
incredibly dramatic. It's not like the red states are all, like,
you know, right now, tinety 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 Americans?

Speaker 3 (09:08):
Right, seventy percent you 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 silly red state, though we proved 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 core because

(09:31):
nothing like some things 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

(09:52):
people of color, are all about our current senators and
those who are pushing to that point. But jerry mandering
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,

(10:15):
he's already had he being Governor Kemp has already put
in the sixth week ban and just kind of sitting
in a court right now, and if these things change
is over.

Speaker 2 (10:25):
Yeah. Well, honestly, I mean, besides the fact that we
have an unelected shadow council that makes all the decisions
about what happens 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

(10:48):
as 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 prepared for all of the
p number cases, which are cases that put forth the
idea that consutitutional due process implies a right to privacy.

(11:09):
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. But other

(11:33):
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,

(11:55):
how you can meet those directly, if you or help
other people meet their needs directly through lots of different ways.

Speaker 3 (12:02):
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

(12:23):
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 IUDs being illegal. So that means someone who

(12:43):
has an IUD, which has become very effective, may be prosecuted.
As well as the fact that those who are going
through things like topic pregnancy, which is when again I
think we talk about it later, the egg is the
fertilized egg is stuck in Europhilippian tube and kills a person,
can kill a person damaged and severely. This will be

(13:04):
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 (13:24):
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

(13:48):
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 what would you suggest?

Speaker 3 (14:05):
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,

(14:26):
as we said, and I'm going to call the safe states,
I don't know if that's what they're called. We're 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 states because they are in deep danger as
I said before about losing everything very quickly.

Speaker 4 (14:47):
Very fast.

Speaker 2 (14:48):
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 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 managed

(15:11):
abortion or for helping end 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 3 (15:21):
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 being
used 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 (15:39):
And here's the episode. Hello and welcome to Cool People
Who Did Cool Stuff, the podcast that needs no introduction.

Speaker 1 (15:48):
No, no, no, Margaret, it needs an introduction.

Speaker 2 (15:52):
Okay, welcome to the 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 kildoy, 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 3 (16:13):
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 (16:23):
Yeah, I'm really excited. Okay, So I've also Sophie on
the call. Sophie's the producer. How are you doing Superheroes?

Speaker 1 (16:31):
Sophie over here doing I'm doing.

Speaker 2 (16:35):
Okay.

Speaker 3 (16:37):
This is that is that is a theme of one,
twenty whatever year it is we're doing time. It's not real.

Speaker 2 (16:47):
It does not 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 (16:53):
Oh gosh, yeah, I hope so.

Speaker 2 (16:56):
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 3 (17:06):
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 gonna say, I'm pro everything about it,

(17:29):
and let's go ahead and say, nah, bra get out
of it. Well. Is that a long winded answer.

Speaker 2 (17:37):
No, No, this is great. It would be a very
different in short podcast appear answer was wildly different from that.

Speaker 1 (17:42):
I was like, Margaret, I have this really great person
that I want to have on this specific topic that
comes on and it's like.

Speaker 3 (17:52):
Oh, yes, well 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, and they're very conservative

(18:14):
people who have always voted on moralities, including anti choice
a 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 say, but wait, the biggest conversation is

(18:37):
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 headspind because you know, you
want to acclimate and be a part of whatever your
society or community you're in.

Speaker 4 (18:59):
Give me a while to be youre out. Oh god,
that's gross.

Speaker 3 (19:01):
What is happened? You know 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 (19:10):
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

(19:32):
to like get out of the situations they were in,
you know, because they had that access. But right, 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 were going to talk
about fucking cool, and I'm going to be talking about
direct action abortion access, and in particular, I'm going to

(19:55):
focus on one crew of women out of Chicago, the
Notorious Jane Collective.

Speaker 3 (19:59):
Yeah, oh, this is one of my favorites.

Speaker 4 (20:05):
Come on, I'm ready, let's go.

Speaker 2 (20:08):
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

(20:29):
isn't a women's issue in the modern context. I want
to acknowledge upfront that abortion is not just a women's issue.
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 INTERSECX 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 floating around

(20:51):
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 how to phrase all

(21:12):
this right because it's a kind of a moving target
to understand how we talk about this stuff. 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

(21:33):
need to affect like every single woman to be a
woman's issue, 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

(21:54):
the context that I'm coming from, is that 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, and 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

(22:15):
language about the people that we're going to be talking
about will be referring to people as women and will
be approaching it primarily from this lens of 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 as the best way to
frame it. So that's my disclaimer. They spent more time

(22:39):
on than like the rest of it. That's not true.

Speaker 4 (22:41):
It has to you have to though, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (22:44):
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 to 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.

(23:07):
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

(23:29):
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

(23:49):
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 the 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

(24:11):
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 3 (24:25):
If you are looking at the QAnon level of U
of the mom groups is an interesting fight they have
and a part of the solution, and part of that
fight is to birth their own babies, meaning like typically
white children, and making sure that that the neeedae continues
in this big olf fight in the q Andon war.

Speaker 4 (24:47):
It's a whole rabbit hole in itself.

Speaker 2 (24:50):
I wish I didn't know that. Thanks for telling me
this terrible thing that's happening. Oh my god, It's like
it doesn't surprise me at all. No, it doesn't surprise
me at all. But I'm like, of course they're doing that.
God damn it.

Speaker 4 (25:01):
Yeah, I'm so sorry.

Speaker 2 (25:03):
No, no, no, no, I no, these.

Speaker 3 (25:05):
Are the no. I will tell you. I probably should
have given you that heads up as on our show
on Stuff, Mom've never told you I am the pessimist. Okay, okay,
hoose that brings out the unfun facts. So apologies in advance.

Speaker 2 (25:20):
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. But I love that.

Speaker 3 (25:28):
I love that.

Speaker 2 (25:29):
I love that we have this balance today. It's perfect.

Speaker 3 (25:34):
Fun fun facts with Samantha McVay. That should be a show. Welcome,
you should have a show.

Speaker 2 (25:38):
I want to be a guest on that.

Speaker 3 (25:40):
It should be fun facts Samantha. Okay, you need to
start this up. You're the creator of all shows. Let's
do this.

Speaker 2 (25:46):
I'm in, I'm in, 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

(26:07):
and so they just were like, uh, it's okay to
nott have babies for this moment, right, And I think
there's a lot of 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

(26:30):
he only does bad things. And Okay, 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
Aid 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 typ you know

(26:51):
of criminal punishments and the non payment of alimony, and
on certain modifications on Levor's legislation.

Speaker 4 (26:57):
That rolls right off the tongue. That was amazing job.

Speaker 1 (27:01):
On certain modifications in divorce legislation. Yeah, all right, I
was just making sure I got yeah, yeah, okay, cool
cool obviously.

Speaker 2 (27:13):
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 didn't I don't remember
the actual year, and an anarchist became the first min
the first woman minister of health, and like one of

(27:35):
the first women ministers in government in Europe. This 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

(27:55):
thing that happened, and it didn't really go very well,
and Spain got fascist own instead of legalize abortion. So
close to getting it right, no, 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

(28:16):
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,

(28:36):
it's because they.

Speaker 3 (28:37):
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, it's for making children, you can't handle
having children, you shouldn't be having sex. Like it's 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,

(29:00):
abortion didn't happen till like the nineteen sixties in the US,
like why are we back here? But yeah, 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?

Speaker 4 (29:15):
Like that's the conversation.

Speaker 2 (29:17):
Totally, No, totally yeah, because yeah, you're literally anti people
choosing to have like, you know, sane, consensual whatever the
phrasing is, the safe sex that's consensual and happy 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's heroes, they
weren't necessarily even just fighting for the legalization of abortion.

(29:39):
One of the 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 de medicalization 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

(30:00):
and to have direct control over their own bodies, which
doesn't necessarily mean like diy at home abortions, but it
means abortions performed by like 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

(30:20):
going on in the witch hunts in Europe in medieval
Europe were 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.

(30:43):
And actually a lot of I think gay men and
other 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

(31:04):
health was a violent process that required mass murder. You
just 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

(31:29):
to like balance the moral weight of abortion today, I
just want to like celebrate heroic, badass women who refuse
to go along with a society that told them they
couldn't recontrol their own reproductive health. And so I want
to celebrate the Jain collective.

Speaker 3 (31:42):
Amen, Yay, I'm proud.

Speaker 2 (31:46):
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 there's 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 as, 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,

(32:09):
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,

(32:32):
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 3 (32:45):
I like that, but yeah, I agree that 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 and I know

(33:06):
we're gonna 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 they're now

(33:27):
making an underground essentially network for them to get access
when they need it by giving as many people 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 by talking about this story,
and I'm so glad you're bringing this up because we

(33:49):
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 (33:58):
Yeah, No, I, what are you talking about? This is
a history podcast. History doesn't have lessons for the present.

Speaker 3 (34:04):
Right, we don't have to learn history. What.

Speaker 2 (34:07):
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 like.

Speaker 3 (34:16):
You're speaking to my soul, We're going to be what
I need.

Speaker 2 (34:22):
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

(34:43):
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

(35:05):
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

(35:26):
of a critical if Complicated chapter of 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,

(35:47):
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's 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. Was a big part

(36:09):
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 constructure. 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 fello. Knew really

(36:30):
quick and the doctor she eventually reached, as best as
I can tell, was a surgeon named T. R. M. 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,

(36:55):
but you know, he's black man fighting for civil rights.
I don't know the Emmett Till case, which again I'm
I'm going to tell you about cool people. I've to
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

(37:15):
the civil rights movement. And during that trial, discriminatory gun
laws wouln't let him own weapons, but he did anyway,
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

(37:36):
a huge move Even if the political action was largely
non violent, people weren't people were fine with self defense,
and a lot of that movement was armed. So he
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

(37:58):
a legal abortionist, which she considered part of his civil
rights work, which also just rules. And he was arrested
nineteen sixty four and nineteen sixty five for providing abortions
in Chicago, although he was never convicted. So Heather Booth
reaches out to him and he's like, yeah, bring your
friend's sister to my office. So word gets around quickly
that Heather Booth has the hookup with safe abortionists, because obviously,

(38:21):
regardless of law, people are still getting abortions in the
United States at this point. Right, Yeah, I'm shocked, but
it's weird. It's almost like it anyway.

Speaker 4 (38:32):
Right, just because it's outlawed.

Speaker 2 (38:34):
What Yeah, we thought we got rid of that. We
made a law and.

Speaker 4 (38:39):
It definitely stopped everything for sure.

Speaker 3 (38:41):
It didn't make everything else dangerous for the low socioeconomic
status and ezy access for the rich people who still
kept getting abortions.

Speaker 2 (38:48):
What wait, did you read my script? Did I share it?

Speaker 3 (38:53):
We're just in tune. We're I'm saying as we're best friends. Yeah,
we had coming to remind people I'm their best friend
and they.

Speaker 2 (39:00):
Don't know the name of your podcast should be your
best friend tells.

Speaker 3 (39:08):
You about your best friend.

Speaker 4 (39:09):
Obviously that's the perfect title.

Speaker 2 (39:14):
Yeah, yeah, totally, we're professional.

Speaker 3 (39:20):
I'd love I have to say that every few hours,
just to remind myself and others around me. Love.

Speaker 1 (39:24):
Yeah, speaking of being a professional, Margaret's you know what
time it is?

Speaker 2 (39:29):
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

(39:50):
might 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 3 (40:09):
I was gonna say, if they're not, it's Robert Evans' fault.
I can say that, Yes, that's true.

Speaker 2 (40:13):
Everything is Robert.

Speaker 3 (40:14):
Anything you don't like is Robert's fault. That's how I
live my life.

Speaker 2 (40:19):
That's true. Though. 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 3 (40:29):
Director of Tweets, and your emails to him please thank
you very much, him, not me, thank you.

Speaker 1 (40:37):
All right.

Speaker 2 (40:37):
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 the which is still three years before v Wade.

(41:01):
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

(41:21):
and then well meaning and competent doctors, but you didn't
necessarily have a way to determine which one you're gonna 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 3 (41:40):
Yeah, it was really interesting to see that layer, as
when you start like finding out these backgrounds, you're like wow, wow, okay, okayafia, okay.

Speaker 2 (41:52):
Yeah. They're gonna come up a couple of times in
this story intrigue, 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 (42:07):
Well, let's not in danger anybody today.

Speaker 2 (42:09):
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 be pre Jaine.
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

(42:31):
to 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

(42:52):
she's a receptionist, not a surgeon or whatever. But in
the nineteen forties and fifties, abortion law started being in
forced more strenuous. 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,

(43:14):
abortion law gets enforced more strenuously, and 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,

(43:37):
like I mean, it's illegal, but you know, to be careful,
also to be medically safe, and then 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

(43:57):
things are legal, we still need people to advocate for us.
And so 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 in nineteen sixty nine. By nineteen

(44:18):
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 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 Council in Service of the Chicago Women's

(44:39):
Liberation Union a little bit shorter, yeah, And they were like,
you know, just let's just call it Jane. They mostly
call it the Service 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

(44:59):
the Jane collect which is a better name than the
Abortion Council the Service of the Chicago Women's Libration Union.

Speaker 3 (45:03):
Yes, it's a cooler name. It definitely like rings like, oh,
this is a good mystery novel, let's go oh good point.

Speaker 2 (45:11):
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 in triplicate. No,
it should be fucking like exciting.

Speaker 3 (45:33):
The collective. I mean, come on, is the Jain Collective.
So obviously they're badass espionage parts to this somehow, in
like secret coded languages and all that.

Speaker 2 (45:44):
Kind of stuff.

Speaker 4 (45:44):
Come on, you gotta be good.

Speaker 2 (45:46):
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. So okay,
So they spend months landing 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

(46:08):
so 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.

(46:29):
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 (46:46):
It's so snazzy.

Speaker 3 (46:48):
I like it, I know, I know, like it was
a whole system.

Speaker 2 (46:51):
Yeah, yeah, I love it.

Speaker 3 (46:53):
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 they it was this level.

Speaker 4 (47:01):
It is phenomenal.

Speaker 2 (47:03):
Yeah, and we will hopefully never need it again. But
it's an interesting anecdote about history.

Speaker 4 (47:10):
It'll make me cry.

Speaker 2 (47:12):
Come on, Yeah, Okay, 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.
A gonna say they put in air quotes. But that's
what I'm doing, is the air quotes. You often see
it because Nick Mike is a crime guy, Like that's

(47:37):
his thing, through and through. 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
know to believe if you've heard one way or the other,
I'd be curious.

Speaker 3 (47:56):
But yeah, I did hear a link to the mafia
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 (48:07):
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 3 (48:15):
Oh wait wait, I missed that. As much research as
I've done and trying to get this stuff that I
did not see.

Speaker 4 (48:22):
So now like, well, I gotta have a picture.

Speaker 3 (48:24):
Come on, but are quoto?

Speaker 2 (48:28):
No, I don't think there's pictures of quote. I don't know.

Speaker 4 (48:31):
We don't actually have an identity for him.

Speaker 1 (48:34):
He wasn't around, but they wanted to know that he
is a babe.

Speaker 5 (48:38):
Like, I need to know who said this? So Jane
collective something, it was one of the Jaine collective. I
can't remember off the top of my head. It wasn't Jodi,
because it was someone who would go and meet with him,
and it's in one of her accounts. It's from an interview.

Speaker 2 (48:50):
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 a
life I've part from and that that's studies in my memory.
You know, that is amazing yeah, I'm always looking for
the subtext, you know, like like who's who's fucking who?

Speaker 3 (49:09):
And like this has become a drug, 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 I have a feeling because it was the sexies seventies.
He had the mustache, I know he did. He had
to have the mustache right, totally.

Speaker 2 (49:30):
Yeah, probably, and 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. I'm not convinced. I
think my friend had been watching a lot of is
Eddie Izzard.

Speaker 3 (49:51):
That's amazing And that turned out to I really wish
I don't want like idy 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 (50:04):
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

(50:25):
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 still wasn't
cheap and he was in it for the money. Most

(50:46):
abortions at the time wereunt six hundred dollars to one
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 all for cheaper, and one of the founders, Jody Howard, was.

Speaker 1 (51:04):
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 3 (51:11):
Yeah, totally, that's all you need to know. Come on, Mike, Nick,
Mike and middle name totally.

Speaker 2 (51:23):
Yeah, yeah, he was. He never actually lied about anything.
He just his name was Nick, last name Mike, and
the first names.

Speaker 3 (51:33):
Okay, this one mysterious man anyway, going on.

Speaker 2 (51:42):
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
trying to make assumptions because people might still be alive.
But 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 and her own Jody Howard's own entry

(52:06):
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 dislikely
as not kill her, and doctors 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 about this is she basically like,
give me an abortion or I'll kill myself, and they

(52:29):
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 was the first one to figure out,
apparently kind of quickly, that handsome man crime doct Nick

(52:51):
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, and she
knew it.

Speaker 1 (53:01):
So once again, only thing that's actually accurate about Nick
Mike is hot.

Speaker 3 (53:07):
Yeah, possibly that was by one It is it is
it is now in stone.

Speaker 2 (53:16):
Well, if one person thinks you're sexy, you're sexy, you know.

Speaker 3 (53:19):
Okay, oh god, anyway, keep going.

Speaker 1 (53:23):
All right?

Speaker 2 (53:24):
So she decides not to tell anyone at first, because
she's like, everyone's going to freak the fuck out. 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
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

(53:46):
to make it all more mystery novel crime novel, they
start 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 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 can who get abortions

(54:08):
already have children, and so they provided childcare at the
front as well. 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 night of the place.

(54:31):
It's still better than the Soviet names. Actually, there's also
kind of sound like anyway, whatever.

Speaker 3 (54:35):
It looks sounds very coded and wonderfully good.

Speaker 2 (54:39):
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 communicate with people
about what's going on. Some of the reports I was
reading and say, this doesn't always work. Sometimes they were like, hey,
I'm like I'm your new best friend, you know, and

(55:01):
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 rather they took people from
the front to the place and from the place to
the front. And these were in somewhat short supply, apparently

(55:21):
because most of the Janes were students at the University
of Chicago and so, 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

(55:44):
barely three year span, it was like nineteen sixty nine
to nineteen seventy three. A later obsidstrician 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

(56:05):
a few different ways because making things illegals really fucked up, right,
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,

(56:27):
I look like a millionaire, you know.

Speaker 1 (56:30):
I mean.

Speaker 3 (56:30):
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 told 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 whatever circumstance, whether it's trying to

(56:54):
not be disapproved by the parents or the family, or
society or whatever, having the level of being alone and
trying to do whatever you can no matter the cost,
and then not realizing there is another option until.

Speaker 4 (57:07):
It's too late.

Speaker 3 (57:08):
That's that whole level in itself that just breaks your
heart 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
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

(57:30):
anxiety moments of like, oh my god, why do 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 anatomy works,

(57:54):
didn't have full understanding what was happening with you. We
already know there's sexual trauma within even normal situations that
could be sexual trauma. And when I say normal, I
mean consensual situations or whatever it was consensual, like having understanding,
would these jays coming in and be like, let me
counsel you and let's have a deep conversation, but also

(58:15):
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.

Speaker 4 (58:27):
To get those illegal abortions.

Speaker 3 (58:28):
Really feeling like these are professionals, Like that's wow, Like
that's above and beyond.

Speaker 4 (58:33):
I love that.

Speaker 2 (58:34):
Yeah, No, that and thinking about like I mean, you know,
not at anywhere the same level of scale of what
some other people out 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.

(58:57):
And I went to go get an STI 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 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, and like

(59:20):
I'm 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. Like 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 3 (59:37):
You know, this is a bad first and foremost, I'm
so sorry that you went through that. That bullshit on
every level and it was wrong and that person should
be arrested and they are assholes for a foremost. Yeah,
I've had enough of my day with just people being
bad people, and what happened to you, Oh my god,

(59:59):
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 we can watch and make

(01:00:19):
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 (01:00:29):
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's whatever, if I talk about this too much,
ILL start crying, But like I was so excited that
I could like fill out the form and actually write

(01:00:50):
down that I'm like, you know, 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 being seen as a woman sucks. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:01:03):
That's definitely just the 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,

(01:01:26):
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 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 Yeah,

(01:01:51):
you being angry. Yeah, you're better than I because.

Speaker 2 (01:01:54):
I think I would like.

Speaker 3 (01:01:57):
Rage everywhere.

Speaker 2 (01:01:58):
But you know, yeah, that's a whole different conversation about me.
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 3 (01:02:12):
Yeah, and yeah, coming back to I love that the
Jain 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, and it

(01:02:33):
is concerning. I will say when I first read that,
I was like, oh, that's 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've 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

(01:02:54):
coming through about who was getting penalized and who was
really getting targeted, and so they had less and less options,
and why not if they can truly do a good job.
And the big thing was getting the right equipment and
getting sterilized equipment. I know that was a big factor in.

Speaker 4 (01:03:11):
It as well.

Speaker 2 (01:03:12):
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 3 (01:03:29):
You know one of our sponsors was playing b hell
yeah fuck yeah cool, So there you go.

Speaker 2 (01:03:35):
Okay, well and then we're sponsored by that and whatever.
This other stuff is.

Speaker 3 (01:03:46):
Back from the break. That was a long one. Let's go.

Speaker 2 (01:03:48):
Yeah, And you know who else kept going was was
the Jaine Collective because 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.

Speaker 1 (01:04:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:04:03):
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 (01:04:21):
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 is this casual thing? You go join this like

(01:04:42):
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 dining room. Each new volunteer
was paired with a big sister who would get them
onboarded like a mentor. And at each meeting, they would

(01:05:04):
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

(01:05:26):
unquote real doctor, and.

Speaker 3 (01:05:29):
Did we change did we change his name to Nick Man? No?

Speaker 2 (01:05:33):
Nick Mike? Sorry, I yeah, no nick Man, sexy man,
Nick Mike. I don't know.

Speaker 3 (01:05:37):
Yeah, I've misstarted.

Speaker 2 (01:05:40):
No wrong, everyone's listening to the right answer.

Speaker 3 (01:05:44):
We don't amazing amazing by the sexy nick Man.

Speaker 2 (01:05:50):
Yet sexy sexy sexy guy. Uh, it's okay. So people
take the news really card 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

(01:06:12):
and the latter camp stayed, and many of the people
who stayed. You know, I've read some said that half
of the Jane's 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

(01:06:32):
seventies in terms of how it was done. 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

(01:06:55):
still applicable to the Dame, which ones are not. So
Nick Mike, he makes himself oppas 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
one 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,

(01:07:17):
His trail goes cold. Did you ever have you ever
heard anything else?

Speaker 3 (01:07:19):
There's just 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

(01:07:40):
were investigating different types of organizations, and because the doctors
had 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. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:07:55):
I like to think that he rode away into the
sunset on a motorcycle while smoking and then live to
one hundred and seven. That's that's the version of him.

Speaker 3 (01:08:02):
Yeah, sexy Nick Mike has got He's got it to
be in the sunset somewhere.

Speaker 2 (01:08:07):
Yeah, totally.

Speaker 4 (01:08:08):
For some reason, he is Mike Nick for me.

Speaker 1 (01:08:11):
But I hear what I'm saying, Nick, Mike is Mike
Nick for me, And you know what, that's just a
personal preference.

Speaker 3 (01:08:17):
I guess it is Nick Mike. Mike Nick can be
whoever you need him to be, because he's just the
sexy man he really rode away.

Speaker 2 (01:08:26):
Who shows up and teaches you how to provide abortions
and then rides off at the sunset.

Speaker 3 (01:08:30):
Apparently there you go, who knew this is what we
needed in our lives?

Speaker 2 (01:08:35):
Yeah, But the greatest part is they only needed him
for a little while, just a little while, 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

(01:08:57):
of the one of the Janes Ruth Circle, in an
interview quote, it was one of the things we talked
about a lot. 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.

(01:09:18):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:09:25):
So I like that.

Speaker 2 (01:09:26):
They like basically 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

(01:09:47):
that suited them best. They were callback Jane's who talked
to the patients, and big Janes whould handle the coordination.
At least one Jane later pointed out that decision making
was kind of fraught within the collective. They 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 issue is happening.

(01:10:08):
And I'm gonna trying to like single them out for this.
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 rerem 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

(01:10:29):
the trees down right now, you know, right, And so
I think they had some of that going on, at
least according to to least one of them later.

Speaker 3 (01:10:37):
It wouldn't be surprising. And I go, of course, we
don't know all of the Janes I came through, but
it was pretty much ran by white women. Yeah, 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

(01:10:58):
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 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

(01:11:20):
people were 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

(01:11:42):
word of mouth went through who didn't go to typically
of 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 planned
parenthood and the gettings of that. So you know, we
know that there is things that happen within movements and

(01:12:06):
who was leading movements and what that could have been
on the underbelly of it totally and you know more
than I do.

Speaker 2 (01:12:14):
But 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,

(01:12:35):
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, oh,

(01:12:56):
they advertised in the student papers, and I'm like, Okay,
it's really cool students have access to abortion, but that
is not necessarily like the majority of the people in
Chicago or whatever.

Speaker 3 (01:13:05):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:13:07):
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 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,

(01:13:27):
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 it was ever tested. Well, the
fact that white women getting arrested ended up. Okay, was tested,
but I don't believe any I believe Louise was the
only black Jaine and certainly the only one I ran across.

Speaker 3 (01:13:46):
Right, 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 doing an underground the totally.
But yeah, absolutely that's dangerous on so many levels. And
we understand that.

Speaker 4 (01:14:06):
And in Chicago in itself, long ugly history of segregation
and such.

Speaker 2 (01:14:12):
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

(01:14:33):
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

(01:14:53):
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.
So it's kind of a like a please pay it back,
not a you must pay.

Speaker 4 (01:15:05):
It honor system.

Speaker 2 (01:15:07):
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

(01:15:29):
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 3 (01:15:37):
I'm just so excited that we're talking more about this.
I 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,

(01:16:01):
and then when we start criminalizing people try to just live.
Like that's just totally but I'm excited that we are
talking about it.

Speaker 2 (01:16:08):
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,
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, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:16:27):
And nobody's perfect besides.

Speaker 3 (01:16:29):
Dogs, correct, besides dogs, And my dog's a dick. But
I love her, but yeah, on top of the I'm honest,
we're honest about it. But yeah, she's the best part perfect. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:16:45):
Sure, So he gets angrier and angrier at the idea
that the dog might not be perfect.

Speaker 3 (01:16:50):
No, you can't say it, you can't, don't say it,
but yeah, like I think, And that's the thing is like, honestly,
what comes down to what I love discovering and I
know we're gonna 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

(01:17:12):
something about it, Poe. And that's what we get to
celebrate totally, 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 1 (01:17:34):
Samantha, anything you want to plug before we head out?

Speaker 3 (01:17:37):
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

(01:17:59):
Believe is Instagram and then Sam McVeigh on Twitter. Y'all,
I'm struggling. I'm not really active, but sometimes I exist.

Speaker 1 (01:18:09):
There's a very cute dog picture on your Instagram where
you're wearing matching Halloween outfits. So what I've become, that's
that's what I would like to plug at the end.
Here is that photo?

Speaker 3 (01:18:21):
You're pumpkins. Yeah, anyways, we'll see, we'll see, We'll see
y'all Wednesday. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:18:31):
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