July 1, 2022 • 28 mins
In the wake of the devastating SCOTUS decision overturning Roe v Wade, I wanted to revisit my 2018 conversation with Heather Booth who organized an underground abortion network called The Jane Collective.
What a Story of 1970s Abortion Activism Can Teach Us Today: https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2022/06/the-janes-hbo-max-review-abortion-roe/661446/
Follow Heather Booth: https://twitter.com/hboothgo
Learn more about her work: https://www.democracypartners.com/partners/heather-booth-0
Donate to abortion funds: AbortionFunds.org
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
And right now people, I think especially need to learn
this lesson that even when time seemed the most difficult,
we can make progress if we organized, and if we organized,
we can change the world. And we need to change
the world. There are No Girls on the Internet. As
(00:26):
a production of I Heart Radio and Unboss Creative, I'm
Bridget Toad and this is there Are No Girls on
the Internet. In the wake of the devastating Supreme Court
decision over twnting Row versus Wade, the Supreme Court decision
that legalized abortion in the United States, I've been thinking
(00:46):
a lot about the Jain Collective and Heather Booths today.
Heather Booth is seventy six years young, and when she
was a young student in Chicago, she started the Jain Collective,
an underground network that provided some eleven thousand abortions from
nineteen sixty nine to nineteen seventy three, at a time
when abortion was illegal and most of the United States.
I spoke to Heather back in when I was the
(01:08):
host of the podcast Stuff Mom Never Told You, and
we're listening to her story this week. I was reminded
that when she was young, she was organizing to make
changes that must have seemed super far fetched until they weren't.
It's a story of hope and promise and I feel
like we could all use a little of that right now.
And just f y I I was a much greener
(01:29):
interviewer and podcast host back in so you know, keep
that in mind as you're listening. Hey, this is Bridget
and you're listening to stuff mom ever told you. And
(01:56):
today we're continuing our series all about abortion, brtting you
stories about a portion that you might not know about.
And today's story is the Jain Collective. Now I want
you to imagine it's nineteen seventy you're pregnant and you
need not to be but row of you Aide is
a few years away. An abortion is still illegal now.
Before this landmark nineteen seventy three Supreme Court decision, terminating
(02:18):
a pregnancy meant taking a gamble on a back alley
abortion provider. Maybe they'd be competent, maybe they wouldn't be.
But when you're pregnant and desperate, you don't really have
a lot of options. For women living in the sixties
and seventies, this was a reality. And then on Chicago
South Side, women began organizing an underground network to do
something about it. In nineteen sixty five, Heather Booth was
(02:39):
a nineteen year old college student at the University of Chicago.
Her friend's sister was pregnant and needed an abortion. Now,
Booth had been active in the civil rights movement and
connected her friend's sister to a doctor willing to perform
an a legal abortion. After that, she started getting more
and more calls from women, housewives, students, and the siblings
of police officers. That's when Booth knew she needed to
(03:00):
start a network, known officially as the Abortion Counseling Service
of Women's Liberation. Heather Booth started an underground network to
connect women to abortions, using the code name Jane. As
it was still a crime. I remember this ad that
said pregnant need help, called Jane, So I called Jane.
Jane ultimately served over ten thousand women before a Row
(03:23):
of View Wade made abortion legal in nineteen In the beginning,
the network connected pregnant women with doctors, but eventually they
realized that many of the people providing abortions weren't doctors
at all. That's when the women and Jane started performing
abortions themselves. The women were not doctors, but according to
the Chicago Tribune, their skills were attested to by a
(03:43):
doctor who risked his license by doing post operative checkups
on clients. At this point, the Jane Collective was providing
abortions for as many as sixty women a week. Jane's
facilities were rated by the police. During the raid, police
asked all the women identified the doctor who was performing
the abortions, obviously expecting to find a man, but there
was no man. The group was arrested and the media
(04:04):
called them the Jane Seven. After being indicted by a
grand jury, their case was only dismissed thanks to the
Supreme Courts legalization of abortion in nineteen After this quick break,
we'll hear from Heather Booth about how Jane got started. Today.
(04:25):
I am so so humbled and thrilled to be joined
by the legendary Heather Booth. Heather, thank you so much
for being your dying well you are your your a legend. Well,
I'm so glad to be talking with the amazing bridget
Todd and what a service you're doing for the public
providing this information out about some of the stories that
(04:46):
are not as well known exactly, that's really what we
want to do with this series. Everybody feels like they
know a lot about abortion and about you know, reproductive health,
but there are so many stories about abortion in choice
that people might not. Oh, you know, the Jane Network
was such a critical thing for these women who were living,
you know, while before Reviewade was enacted, and you know,
(05:08):
people don't even really know about it. Glad to describe
of how it came about and and Uh, I appreciate
your spreading the word to let people know that if
we organize, we can change the world. We have changed
the world, and we need to change the world and
(05:29):
the story of organizing the Jane Network is one important
example of that. So let's talk about Jane. So when
you started Jane, you were just a nineteen year old
student at the University of Chicago. So what was your
life like before you started Jane? Say a little bit
about my life and also a little bit about what
women's lives were like in general. H For me, I
(05:52):
was brought up in a family UH that was very
loving and believe that people should follow the Golden rule.
We should treat each other as we wanted to be treated,
and I carried that with me. I became active in
the civil rights movement. In nineteen sixty four, I went
to Mississippi with the Freedom Summer Project, and some of
(06:13):
you may have heard about it, because that was the
time when the civil rights movement was recruiting northern students
to come down to Mississippi because in Mississippi, black lives
did not matter in nineteen sixty four, and they thought
that the attention of northern students might bring additional visibility
(06:35):
and potential power to shine a spotlight on what was
going on in Mississippi. And during that summer, the three
young men, Andrew Goodman, James Cheney, and Michael Schwerner were
killed at the hands of the clan. What people may
not know is that while they were looking for the
bodies of the three men, they found bodies of other
(06:57):
black men whose hands have been bound or feet chopped off,
and those murders weren't even investigated once the bodies were
found until years later. But because people organized, there was
a voting right back within a year, and Mississippi now
is more African American elected officials than any other state
in the country. And mentioned that because it was formative
(07:22):
for some of the ideas that led to Jane, which
is that you have to stand up to unjust authority.
If you take action, you can make change, and that
sometimes there even are risks, but together we can really
build a better world. I returned back to my campus
and a friend of mine had been raped at nice
(07:44):
point in her bed in off campus housing. We went
with her to Students Help to get a gynecological exam
for her, but was told that Students Help didn't cover
gynecological exam and she was given a lecture on the promiscuity. Now,
because we sat with her, they called it to sit in.
But over time, because people protested and organized, now student
(08:09):
health would cover gynecological exams and people would be given
careful comforting counseling, and there also is UH support and
attention about the crisis of rape on campus. Those changes
happen because people organized. We still look much further to go.
(08:30):
There's still our attacks on women's health plan parents that
is under attack, but we make progress when we organized.
And those were some of the lessons that I learned
also from the civil rights movement on the campus. To
give a sense of how women retreated broadly, UM, I
(08:52):
formed a pulled together a group called the Women Radical
Action Program or wrapped w r a c H, and
we did studies about UM and supported women to promote
women's positions on campus. It's probably was the first campus
women's organization of the new and emerging women's movement in
(09:16):
nine and we found that professors gave four times as
much attention to men's students as to women's students, called
a significant response how often would a teacher actually engage
with the students? And because of that and other things,
(09:39):
we found ways to support women on campus. UM. The
club founding was discrimination against women's faculty members, as they
mostly were kept as adjunct professors and not allowed on
a tenure track, and there were other issues that people
need to understand. The emergence of Jane which in the
(10:00):
context of lessons from an emerging movement in civil rights,
context of UM, changes going on in the society where
on the one hand, women were at the universities and
entering into public life, and yet we're not treated equally.
(10:23):
So there was this emerging women's movement developing, and also
in the context of values that many of us shared,
believing that there should be a country that treated all
people equally, gave people equal support, and and respect. I
(10:46):
love that. So really one of the big hickaways from
what you've done with change is that organizing and people
power can really change culture and change laws and change
lives that you know, oftentimes we feel, at least I
feel overwhelmed that oh, just little on me. What can
I do to change this? This seems so batter up
against so many fights. But actually if you're if you
(11:07):
really work hard and organized, you can change things. Absolutely
absolutely to bring us up to Jane to explain how
my involvement with that and how that developed against this backdrop, um,
a friend of mine told me if the sister was
pregnant and was nearly suicidal because she wasn't ready to
(11:30):
have a baby and she wanted an abortion, I have
never thought about the issue before that, I recall, and
I've never had to face the issue myself, but I said,
I tried to do what I could do to help again,
sort as part of the golden rule, trying to go
one to others. I went to the network of doctors
(11:54):
from the Medical Committee for Human Rights, which was the
civil rights met go arms, and I found a doctor,
Dr TRM. Howard, who had a clinic on sixty three
Street in Chicago Friendship Clinic um. I didn't know its
history at the time, but he had been a dynamic
(12:18):
civil rights leader in Mississippi and came to Chicago when
his name appeared on a clan death list. I called
him up. He agreed to do the procedure. Actually, I
didn't really think much more about it, but word must
have spread because short time later someone else called. It
(12:40):
was a coincidence, and then where it must have spread
and someone else called. At that point I realized they
really was a broader problem that needed to be addressed,
and being an organizer, I decided to create a system
and called it Jane. Over time, the women of Jane
(13:02):
themselves performed eleven thousand abortions between nineteen and seventy three,
when Roe became the law of the land and the
experience of Jane both improve the lives of the women
who came through who are looking for a way to
(13:23):
decide when or whether they could have a child. It
changed the lives of the women who were in Jane,
letting them know what they could do to improve the
lives of women on a broad scale, and it also
(13:44):
provided a basis giving people confidence. I hope now to
say we can make change if we organize. So let's
say that I'm a woman who calls Jane. Can you
walk me through the logistics once I call? What happened? Well, first,
there were too UM kind of two or three eras
(14:05):
of Jane the Hero's UM. When I first started it,
it was a very small service. It just kept growing
and growing. When it started, someone would call up and
ask for Jane. And even before they said they were
asking for Jane, I knew immediately there was a sort
(14:26):
of hesitant pause on the phone, and I just knew
immediately what they were probably calling about. UM. They'd say
what that They usually said some version that they were pregnant, UM,
and we're looking for an abortion for some women. We
do the counseling on the phone. We then trying to
(14:48):
arrange a time where they could come in and have
a longer conversation and could talk with them and find
out what the details were, long they were had been pregnant,
what the medical history was a little bit UM, and
then we'll just go through the detail of what to expect. UM.
(15:14):
They want to know what how long does it take?
Would there be pain? There's side effects? What do you
need to do afterwards, how to take care of yourself
if there are any uh medical complications, what they need
to do, who they call. We go through how much
it cost. Initially Jane costs five dollars um, though we
(15:38):
negotiated down the price that the number of people came
through and then went for two for the price of one.
That we got it down to two fifty dollars. Then
even sometimes got three for the price of one. We
sometimes I would ask for special arrangement if someone didn't
have money and h and then we arranged where people
(16:06):
would go, where they would meet, how they would get
picked up, Um, that someone should be with them to
care of them, um, you know, to be with them
as they as they left after the procedure. That was
the first stage of Jane, where I was doing the
(16:28):
counseling and Dr Howard had explained to me in a
lot of detail what was involved. Dr Howard died natural
causes and I found another person to provide the procedures.
His name was Mike, and we've basically had the same process,
(16:51):
though he had a suburban effort and m the numbers
weren't creasing so much as the numbers of people coming through.
I was about to have my first child, and I
was very busy and many other things, getting a graduate
(17:11):
degree UM, working on other social change issues, and I
realized I couldn't handle it all just myself, and so
I decided I needed to recruit other people to be
involved with this, and I go to meetings and at
the end of the meeting would say, if anyone wants
(17:32):
to be involved in abortion counseling, please see me. And
I recruited a number of people. We did a training
and made sure that everyone understood the process and would
provide the high quality of care that we wanted to
see for all the women who came through UM. And
(17:54):
then with that I turned over the effort to another
group of women UM Jodie Parsons and Ruth Circle with
the two leagues women who helped coordinate it. At that point,
as the numbers increased, more hands were needed. One person
(18:16):
doing the procedures wasn't going to be enough. And then
it also turned out that the women that were helping
might do the procedures. And then Mike shared that he
actually wasn't a license position, and they thought, well, if
(18:36):
he could do it, so could they. Now though this
was the women doing the procedures, starting to learn how
to do the procedures. It was actually probably safer than
this medical procedure being done in a hospital or clinic
or other settings. Partly because it was illegal, UH. Everyone
(19:02):
wanted it to be as states as possible so that
no one would be hard, no one would be UH,
they wouldn't be a h an adverse effect. It also
was a women's culture who cared about women, and so
the priority wasn't the profit making, it was the care
for women and for their wishes. They're also UM. It
(19:29):
was the only thing that they were doing, and so
there was a lot of attention on it. It's not
like you were getting lost in the shuffle of oh,
am I doing an app inductivity or am i UH
doing a different procedures UM. In fact, at the after
(19:50):
row became the law of the land. That was a
study done by University of Illinois program called it Prospectorship,
which was about entry into UH positive medical care within Chicago,
and they did an analysis of the outcome from JANE
and the outcomes from clinic service for abortion and found
(20:14):
that the results from Jane were more positive than the
results in a clinic setting. Again I think for the
reasons that I just mentioned. So at that point the
women started to take on doing procedures themselves, and in
(20:35):
the course of that, there was a larger group that
was recruited to actually be the service, which is what
we called it, what they called it Jane or the service.
And as women came in, there was a a front
or one apartment, someone's apartment that was designed in a
(20:57):
very cozy, homely support of way. Sometimes they were kids there,
and a number of weight of women who would be
waiting for their own procedure would gather there and in
a supportive environment, and then they would be taken to
the apartment where the procedures would be done, and then
(21:21):
they were supported and given care while they were recovering
from the procedure, and then would be sent off with
full information um about what to do if there are
any issues if there often are with any medical procedures,
and given health and h told numbers to call and
(21:43):
people could be get in touch with them afterwards to
make sure that everything worked out okay. So that was
the broad process. There's a book about Jane by Laura
Chaplin called Jane because Jane an abortion story there's also
a movie about it, and actually I'm now told there's
(22:05):
at least two Hollywood made movies that are being made
about Jane, as well as a new documentary, and they're
more details of it captured in the book Uh that
Laura Kaplan wrote about Jane. So, Heather, No, you're a
part of this really a robust tradition of Jewish activism.
(22:26):
I actually read some place that at one point you
wanted to be a rabbi, but that you heard that
women couldn't be rabbis. Do you feel like your background,
as you know, part of the robust legacy of Jewish
activism and social change work. Did that also impact your
work with Jane? It did. It was part of my
moral upbring. I believed, as it's said in the Bible,
(22:52):
Justice Justice Special, pursue saying justice twice because it's that important,
really leaving uh, that the stories of the prophets should
guide us in some ways, that it's the people who
should rise and not just those in wealth and power. Um.
(23:20):
There also was a history of struggle of the past
over story pants overs coming, and the story of people
even going forty years in the desert to us the
land of greater promise UH to to escape oppressions, and
(23:41):
I believe that that was a tradition that was worth embracing.
So that was part of the moral of ringing that
I had and have tried to carry that on into
the organizing work I've done, and since that time, I've
had to carry it on in so many ways. I
(24:02):
started a training center for organizers called Midwest Academy. People
encourage your listeners to pursue mid West Academy because it's
a it's a place to learn the skills of organizing UM.
Their website is www. Newwest Academy dot com UM. I've
(24:22):
also ended up running some large scale organizations for advising them.
I was strategic advisor for the immigration reform campaign, the
Alliance for Citizenship, a round the campaign for financial reform
that won the Dodd Bank film. I was the coordinator
around the Marriage Equality campaign UM. I just was the
(24:47):
field director and the campaign to stop these UH tax
breaks for the millionaires and billionaires. That will mean that
there will be an excuse to make cuts in social security,
Medicare and Medicaid, and education and other essential human services.
So the struggle continues, and right now people I think
(25:10):
especially need to learn this lesson that even when time
seemed the most difficult, we can make progress if we organize,
and if we organized, we can change the world, and
we need to change the world. I could not have
put it better myself. These fights are still fights that
need to be fought. And we can get complacent and
(25:31):
we can get comfortable, but as you said, we need
to be organizing. And I'm so glad that you're in
the fight doing this work with us because we need you, Heather,
and I'm so glad that we have you well, and
I'm so glad that we have you. Uh, spread the words,
spread the message. I'm so glad we have those who
are listing in. I hope they'll take They probably have
(25:54):
been taking action. We need to continue taking action and
unify and give people confidence that we can organize and
when we organize, even in times that seem the most difficult,
we have changed the world in the past and we
can change the world for the future. Let's take a
(26:15):
quick break. Well, it's been to listeners, so I know
abortion can seem like an issue that we no longer
have to fight for that we did in the seventies. Okay, Hi,
it's two Bridget and wow, how wrong I was so
(26:37):
right here in the original episode, I started going on
and on about how even though Roe was the law
of the land, we still needed to be vigilant because
of state based attacks on abortion. And now here we
are in two and as you know, ro versus weight
has been overturned. And even though it is truly devastating,
abortion advocates have been preparing for this moment for a
(26:59):
very long time. There are organized networks of abortion funds
and bail funds and providers who are ready to assist
folks looking for abortions. We're not in a place where
scrappy college kids need to invent underground collectives at a
whole cloth like Heather did with the Jane Collective back
on the seventies. There are people who care and who
want to help, who are prepared for this moment. Go
to Abortion Funds dot org and support them. And you know,
(27:22):
in this moment, which I know seems so dark and
so tough, remember we are the majority. There are more
of us than there are of them, and we won't
back down. If you're looking for ways to support the show,
check out our March store at Tangodi dot com flash Store,
(27:43):
Got a story about an interesting thing in tech, or
just want to say hi, You can reach us at
Hello at tangodi dot com. You can also find transcripts
for today's episode at tangodi dot com. There Are No
Girls on the Internet was created by me Bridgeta. It's
a production of I Heeart Radio and Unboss Creative edited
by Joey pat John Van Strictland as our executive producer.
Terry Harrison is our producer and sound engineer. Michael Amatta
(28:05):
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get your podcasts.
And right now people, I think especially need to learn
this lesson that even when time seemed the most difficult,
we can make progress if we organized, and if we organized,
we can change the world. And we need to change
the world. There are No Girls on the Internet. As
(00:26):
a production of I Heart Radio and Unboss Creative, I'm
Bridget Toad and this is there Are No Girls on
the Internet. In the wake of the devastating Supreme Court
decision over twnting Row versus Wade, the Supreme Court decision
that legalized abortion in the United States, I've been thinking
(00:46):
a lot about the Jain Collective and Heather Booths today.
Heather Booth is seventy six years young, and when she
was a young student in Chicago, she started the Jain Collective,
an underground network that provided some eleven thousand abortions from
nineteen sixty nine to nineteen seventy three, at a time
when abortion was illegal and most of the United States.
I spoke to Heather back in when I was the
(01:08):
host of the podcast Stuff Mom Never Told You, and
we're listening to her story this week. I was reminded
that when she was young, she was organizing to make
changes that must have seemed super far fetched until they weren't.
It's a story of hope and promise and I feel
like we could all use a little of that right now.
And just f y I I was a much greener
(01:29):
interviewer and podcast host back in so you know, keep
that in mind as you're listening. Hey, this is Bridget
and you're listening to stuff mom ever told you. And
(01:56):
today we're continuing our series all about abortion, brtting you
stories about a portion that you might not know about.
And today's story is the Jain Collective. Now I want
you to imagine it's nineteen seventy you're pregnant and you
need not to be but row of you Aide is
a few years away. An abortion is still illegal now.
Before this landmark nineteen seventy three Supreme Court decision, terminating
(02:18):
a pregnancy meant taking a gamble on a back alley
abortion provider. Maybe they'd be competent, maybe they wouldn't be.
But when you're pregnant and desperate, you don't really have
a lot of options. For women living in the sixties
and seventies, this was a reality. And then on Chicago
South Side, women began organizing an underground network to do
something about it. In nineteen sixty five, Heather Booth was
(02:39):
a nineteen year old college student at the University of Chicago.
Her friend's sister was pregnant and needed an abortion. Now,
Booth had been active in the civil rights movement and
connected her friend's sister to a doctor willing to perform
an a legal abortion. After that, she started getting more
and more calls from women, housewives, students, and the siblings
of police officers. That's when Booth knew she needed to
(03:00):
start a network, known officially as the Abortion Counseling Service
of Women's Liberation. Heather Booth started an underground network to
connect women to abortions, using the code name Jane. As
it was still a crime. I remember this ad that
said pregnant need help, called Jane, So I called Jane.
Jane ultimately served over ten thousand women before a Row
(03:23):
of View Wade made abortion legal in nineteen In the beginning,
the network connected pregnant women with doctors, but eventually they
realized that many of the people providing abortions weren't doctors
at all. That's when the women and Jane started performing
abortions themselves. The women were not doctors, but according to
the Chicago Tribune, their skills were attested to by a
(03:43):
doctor who risked his license by doing post operative checkups
on clients. At this point, the Jane Collective was providing
abortions for as many as sixty women a week. Jane's
facilities were rated by the police. During the raid, police
asked all the women identified the doctor who was performing
the abortions, obviously expecting to find a man, but there
was no man. The group was arrested and the media
(04:04):
called them the Jane Seven. After being indicted by a
grand jury, their case was only dismissed thanks to the
Supreme Courts legalization of abortion in nineteen After this quick break,
we'll hear from Heather Booth about how Jane got started. Today.
(04:25):
I am so so humbled and thrilled to be joined
by the legendary Heather Booth. Heather, thank you so much
for being your dying well you are your your a legend. Well,
I'm so glad to be talking with the amazing bridget
Todd and what a service you're doing for the public
providing this information out about some of the stories that
(04:46):
are not as well known exactly, that's really what we
want to do with this series. Everybody feels like they
know a lot about abortion and about you know, reproductive health,
but there are so many stories about abortion in choice
that people might not. Oh, you know, the Jane Network
was such a critical thing for these women who were living,
you know, while before Reviewade was enacted, and you know,
(05:08):
people don't even really know about it. Glad to describe
of how it came about and and Uh, I appreciate
your spreading the word to let people know that if
we organize, we can change the world. We have changed
the world, and we need to change the world and
(05:29):
the story of organizing the Jane Network is one important
example of that. So let's talk about Jane. So when
you started Jane, you were just a nineteen year old
student at the University of Chicago. So what was your
life like before you started Jane? Say a little bit
about my life and also a little bit about what
women's lives were like in general. H For me, I
(05:52):
was brought up in a family UH that was very
loving and believe that people should follow the Golden rule.
We should treat each other as we wanted to be treated,
and I carried that with me. I became active in
the civil rights movement. In nineteen sixty four, I went
to Mississippi with the Freedom Summer Project, and some of
(06:13):
you may have heard about it, because that was the
time when the civil rights movement was recruiting northern students
to come down to Mississippi because in Mississippi, black lives
did not matter in nineteen sixty four, and they thought
that the attention of northern students might bring additional visibility
(06:35):
and potential power to shine a spotlight on what was
going on in Mississippi. And during that summer, the three
young men, Andrew Goodman, James Cheney, and Michael Schwerner were
killed at the hands of the clan. What people may
not know is that while they were looking for the
bodies of the three men, they found bodies of other
(06:57):
black men whose hands have been bound or feet chopped off,
and those murders weren't even investigated once the bodies were
found until years later. But because people organized, there was
a voting right back within a year, and Mississippi now
is more African American elected officials than any other state
in the country. And mentioned that because it was formative
(07:22):
for some of the ideas that led to Jane, which
is that you have to stand up to unjust authority.
If you take action, you can make change, and that
sometimes there even are risks, but together we can really
build a better world. I returned back to my campus
and a friend of mine had been raped at nice
(07:44):
point in her bed in off campus housing. We went
with her to Students Help to get a gynecological exam
for her, but was told that Students Help didn't cover
gynecological exam and she was given a lecture on the promiscuity. Now,
because we sat with her, they called it to sit in.
But over time, because people protested and organized, now student
(08:09):
health would cover gynecological exams and people would be given
careful comforting counseling, and there also is UH support and
attention about the crisis of rape on campus. Those changes
happen because people organized. We still look much further to go.
(08:30):
There's still our attacks on women's health plan parents that
is under attack, but we make progress when we organized.
And those were some of the lessons that I learned
also from the civil rights movement on the campus. To
give a sense of how women retreated broadly, UM, I
(08:52):
formed a pulled together a group called the Women Radical
Action Program or wrapped w r a c H, and
we did studies about UM and supported women to promote
women's positions on campus. It's probably was the first campus
women's organization of the new and emerging women's movement in
(09:16):
nine and we found that professors gave four times as
much attention to men's students as to women's students, called
a significant response how often would a teacher actually engage
with the students? And because of that and other things,
(09:39):
we found ways to support women on campus. UM. The
club founding was discrimination against women's faculty members, as they
mostly were kept as adjunct professors and not allowed on
a tenure track, and there were other issues that people
need to understand. The emergence of Jane which in the
(10:00):
context of lessons from an emerging movement in civil rights,
context of UM, changes going on in the society where
on the one hand, women were at the universities and
entering into public life, and yet we're not treated equally.
(10:23):
So there was this emerging women's movement developing, and also
in the context of values that many of us shared,
believing that there should be a country that treated all
people equally, gave people equal support, and and respect. I
(10:46):
love that. So really one of the big hickaways from
what you've done with change is that organizing and people
power can really change culture and change laws and change
lives that you know, oftentimes we feel, at least I
feel overwhelmed that oh, just little on me. What can
I do to change this? This seems so batter up
against so many fights. But actually if you're if you
(11:07):
really work hard and organized, you can change things. Absolutely
absolutely to bring us up to Jane to explain how
my involvement with that and how that developed against this backdrop, um,
a friend of mine told me if the sister was
pregnant and was nearly suicidal because she wasn't ready to
(11:30):
have a baby and she wanted an abortion, I have
never thought about the issue before that, I recall, and
I've never had to face the issue myself, but I said,
I tried to do what I could do to help again,
sort as part of the golden rule, trying to go
one to others. I went to the network of doctors
(11:54):
from the Medical Committee for Human Rights, which was the
civil rights met go arms, and I found a doctor,
Dr TRM. Howard, who had a clinic on sixty three
Street in Chicago Friendship Clinic um. I didn't know its
history at the time, but he had been a dynamic
(12:18):
civil rights leader in Mississippi and came to Chicago when
his name appeared on a clan death list. I called
him up. He agreed to do the procedure. Actually, I
didn't really think much more about it, but word must
have spread because short time later someone else called. It
(12:40):
was a coincidence, and then where it must have spread
and someone else called. At that point I realized they
really was a broader problem that needed to be addressed,
and being an organizer, I decided to create a system
and called it Jane. Over time, the women of Jane
(13:02):
themselves performed eleven thousand abortions between nineteen and seventy three,
when Roe became the law of the land and the
experience of Jane both improve the lives of the women
who came through who are looking for a way to
(13:23):
decide when or whether they could have a child. It
changed the lives of the women who were in Jane,
letting them know what they could do to improve the
lives of women on a broad scale, and it also
(13:44):
provided a basis giving people confidence. I hope now to
say we can make change if we organize. So let's
say that I'm a woman who calls Jane. Can you
walk me through the logistics once I call? What happened? Well, first,
there were too UM kind of two or three eras
(14:05):
of Jane the Hero's UM. When I first started it,
it was a very small service. It just kept growing
and growing. When it started, someone would call up and
ask for Jane. And even before they said they were
asking for Jane, I knew immediately there was a sort
(14:26):
of hesitant pause on the phone, and I just knew
immediately what they were probably calling about. UM. They'd say
what that They usually said some version that they were pregnant, UM,
and we're looking for an abortion for some women. We
do the counseling on the phone. We then trying to
(14:48):
arrange a time where they could come in and have
a longer conversation and could talk with them and find
out what the details were, long they were had been pregnant,
what the medical history was a little bit UM, and
then we'll just go through the detail of what to expect. UM.
(15:14):
They want to know what how long does it take?
Would there be pain? There's side effects? What do you
need to do afterwards, how to take care of yourself
if there are any uh medical complications, what they need
to do, who they call. We go through how much
it cost. Initially Jane costs five dollars um, though we
(15:38):
negotiated down the price that the number of people came
through and then went for two for the price of one.
That we got it down to two fifty dollars. Then
even sometimes got three for the price of one. We
sometimes I would ask for special arrangement if someone didn't
have money and h and then we arranged where people
(16:06):
would go, where they would meet, how they would get
picked up, Um, that someone should be with them to
care of them, um, you know, to be with them
as they as they left after the procedure. That was
the first stage of Jane, where I was doing the
(16:28):
counseling and Dr Howard had explained to me in a
lot of detail what was involved. Dr Howard died natural
causes and I found another person to provide the procedures.
His name was Mike, and we've basically had the same process,
(16:51):
though he had a suburban effort and m the numbers
weren't creasing so much as the numbers of people coming through.
I was about to have my first child, and I
was very busy and many other things, getting a graduate
(17:11):
degree UM, working on other social change issues, and I
realized I couldn't handle it all just myself, and so
I decided I needed to recruit other people to be
involved with this, and I go to meetings and at
the end of the meeting would say, if anyone wants
(17:32):
to be involved in abortion counseling, please see me. And
I recruited a number of people. We did a training
and made sure that everyone understood the process and would
provide the high quality of care that we wanted to
see for all the women who came through UM. And
(17:54):
then with that I turned over the effort to another
group of women UM Jodie Parsons and Ruth Circle with
the two leagues women who helped coordinate it. At that point,
as the numbers increased, more hands were needed. One person
(18:16):
doing the procedures wasn't going to be enough. And then
it also turned out that the women that were helping
might do the procedures. And then Mike shared that he
actually wasn't a license position, and they thought, well, if
(18:36):
he could do it, so could they. Now though this
was the women doing the procedures, starting to learn how
to do the procedures. It was actually probably safer than
this medical procedure being done in a hospital or clinic
or other settings. Partly because it was illegal, UH. Everyone
(19:02):
wanted it to be as states as possible so that
no one would be hard, no one would be UH,
they wouldn't be a h an adverse effect. It also
was a women's culture who cared about women, and so
the priority wasn't the profit making, it was the care
for women and for their wishes. They're also UM. It
(19:29):
was the only thing that they were doing, and so
there was a lot of attention on it. It's not
like you were getting lost in the shuffle of oh,
am I doing an app inductivity or am i UH
doing a different procedures UM. In fact, at the after
(19:50):
row became the law of the land. That was a
study done by University of Illinois program called it Prospectorship,
which was about entry into UH positive medical care within Chicago,
and they did an analysis of the outcome from JANE
and the outcomes from clinic service for abortion and found
(20:14):
that the results from Jane were more positive than the
results in a clinic setting. Again I think for the
reasons that I just mentioned. So at that point the
women started to take on doing procedures themselves, and in
(20:35):
the course of that, there was a larger group that
was recruited to actually be the service, which is what
we called it, what they called it Jane or the service.
And as women came in, there was a a front
or one apartment, someone's apartment that was designed in a
(20:57):
very cozy, homely support of way. Sometimes they were kids there,
and a number of weight of women who would be
waiting for their own procedure would gather there and in
a supportive environment, and then they would be taken to
the apartment where the procedures would be done, and then
(21:21):
they were supported and given care while they were recovering
from the procedure, and then would be sent off with
full information um about what to do if there are
any issues if there often are with any medical procedures,
and given health and h told numbers to call and
(21:43):
people could be get in touch with them afterwards to
make sure that everything worked out okay. So that was
the broad process. There's a book about Jane by Laura
Chaplin called Jane because Jane an abortion story there's also
a movie about it, and actually I'm now told there's
(22:05):
at least two Hollywood made movies that are being made
about Jane, as well as a new documentary, and they're
more details of it captured in the book Uh that
Laura Kaplan wrote about Jane. So, Heather, No, you're a
part of this really a robust tradition of Jewish activism.
(22:26):
I actually read some place that at one point you
wanted to be a rabbi, but that you heard that
women couldn't be rabbis. Do you feel like your background,
as you know, part of the robust legacy of Jewish
activism and social change work. Did that also impact your
work with Jane? It did. It was part of my
moral upbring. I believed, as it's said in the Bible,
(22:52):
Justice Justice Special, pursue saying justice twice because it's that important,
really leaving uh, that the stories of the prophets should
guide us in some ways, that it's the people who
should rise and not just those in wealth and power. Um.
(23:20):
There also was a history of struggle of the past
over story pants overs coming, and the story of people
even going forty years in the desert to us the
land of greater promise UH to to escape oppressions, and
(23:41):
I believe that that was a tradition that was worth embracing.
So that was part of the moral of ringing that
I had and have tried to carry that on into
the organizing work I've done, and since that time, I've
had to carry it on in so many ways. I
(24:02):
started a training center for organizers called Midwest Academy. People
encourage your listeners to pursue mid West Academy because it's
a it's a place to learn the skills of organizing UM.
Their website is www. Newwest Academy dot com UM. I've
(24:22):
also ended up running some large scale organizations for advising them.
I was strategic advisor for the immigration reform campaign, the
Alliance for Citizenship, a round the campaign for financial reform
that won the Dodd Bank film. I was the coordinator
around the Marriage Equality campaign UM. I just was the
(24:47):
field director and the campaign to stop these UH tax
breaks for the millionaires and billionaires. That will mean that
there will be an excuse to make cuts in social security,
Medicare and Medicaid, and education and other essential human services.
So the struggle continues, and right now people I think
(25:10):
especially need to learn this lesson that even when time
seemed the most difficult, we can make progress if we organize,
and if we organized, we can change the world, and
we need to change the world. I could not have
put it better myself. These fights are still fights that
need to be fought. And we can get complacent and
(25:31):
we can get comfortable, but as you said, we need
to be organizing. And I'm so glad that you're in
the fight doing this work with us because we need you, Heather,
and I'm so glad that we have you well, and
I'm so glad that we have you. Uh, spread the words,
spread the message. I'm so glad we have those who
are listing in. I hope they'll take They probably have
(25:54):
been taking action. We need to continue taking action and
unify and give people confidence that we can organize and
when we organize, even in times that seem the most difficult,
we have changed the world in the past and we
can change the world for the future. Let's take a
(26:15):
quick break. Well, it's been to listeners, so I know
abortion can seem like an issue that we no longer
have to fight for that we did in the seventies. Okay, Hi,
it's two Bridget and wow, how wrong I was so
(26:37):
right here in the original episode, I started going on
and on about how even though Roe was the law
of the land, we still needed to be vigilant because
of state based attacks on abortion. And now here we
are in two and as you know, ro versus weight
has been overturned. And even though it is truly devastating,
abortion advocates have been preparing for this moment for a
(26:59):
very long time. There are organized networks of abortion funds
and bail funds and providers who are ready to assist
folks looking for abortions. We're not in a place where
scrappy college kids need to invent underground collectives at a
whole cloth like Heather did with the Jane Collective back
on the seventies. There are people who care and who
want to help, who are prepared for this moment. Go
to Abortion Funds dot org and support them. And you know,
(27:22):
in this moment, which I know seems so dark and
so tough, remember we are the majority. There are more
of us than there are of them, and we won't
back down. If you're looking for ways to support the show,
check out our March store at Tangodi dot com flash Store,
(27:43):
Got a story about an interesting thing in tech, or
just want to say hi, You can reach us at
Hello at tangodi dot com. You can also find transcripts
for today's episode at tangodi dot com. There Are No
Girls on the Internet was created by me Bridgeta. It's
a production of I Heeart Radio and Unboss Creative edited
by Joey pat John Van Strictland as our executive producer.
Terry Harrison is our producer and sound engineer. Michael Amatta
(28:05):
was our contributing producer. I'm your host, bridget Todd. If
you want to help us grow, rate and review us
on Apple Podcasts. For more podcast from iHeart Radio, check
out the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you
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