SMNTY Classics: How the Jane Collective Helped Women Get Abortions

Before Roe v Wade made abortion legal, women still needed them. In this classic episode, Bridget Todd is joined by Heather Booth who started an underground network to give women abortion access.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, this is Annie and Samantha and welcome to Stuff
I Never Told You production of iHeart Radio. So we
recently did a feminist movie Friday on the Jains, which

(00:25):
is uh an HBO documentary about the Jain Collective. And
uh it's something we've been talking about a lot, given
what's going on with rov weight in the United States,
um an abortion in the United States. And on her podcast,
on Bridget Todd's podcast, there are No Girls on the Internet,
she recently we ran this, but we thought we would

(00:45):
too because it's just something we really wanna get out everywhere. UM,
So we have a classic for you on the Jain
Collective and please enjoy. Hey, this is Bridget and you're
listening the Stuff Mom Never told you. And today we're

(01:14):
continuing our series all about Abortion, bringing you stories about
abortion 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 a pregnancy meant taking

(01:37):
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, Heather Booth was a nineteen year old college

(01:59):
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 in a 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 start a network, known officially as the

(02:21):
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

(02:41):
before a Row of View Wade made abortion legal in
nine 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 doctor who risked his license by doing

(03:03):
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 raided by the police. During
the raid, police asked all the women identify 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 called them the Jane Seven. After being indicted

(03:25):
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. I am so so humbled and

(03:45):
thrilled to be joined by the legendary Heather Booth. Heather,
thank you so much for being well you are your
your a legend. Well, I'm so glad to be talking
with the amazing bridget Todd and what service you're doing
for the public providing this information out about some of
the stories that are not as well known exactly. That's

(04:06):
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 know. You know,
the Jaine Network was such a critical thing for these
women who were living, you know, while before Reviewade was enacted,
and you know, people don't even really know about it.

(04:29):
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 the story of organizing the Jane Network is

(04:50):
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 before you started Jane. Yeah, a little
bit about my life and also a little bit about
what women's lives were like in general. Ah. For me,
I was brought up in a family UH that was

(05:13):
very loving and believed that people should uh 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 you may have heard about it, because that

(05:33):
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 and potential power to shine a spotlight on

(05:58):
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 black men whose hands have been bound or
feet chopped off. And those murders weren't even investigated once

(06:22):
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 for some of the ideas that led to Jane,

(06:43):
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
point in her bed in off campus housing. We went

(07:07):
with her to Student 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 Students
Health would cover gynecological exams and people would be given

(07:31):
careful comforting counseling, and there also is support and attention
about the crisis of rape on campus. Those changes happened
because people organized. We still look much further to go.
There's still our attacks on Women's health plan parents that

(07:53):
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 were treated broadly UM,
I formed a pulled together a group called the Women's

(08:14):
Radical Action Program or wrapped w r A, and we
did studies about UM and supported women to promote women's
positions on campus. This it's probably was the first campus
women's organization of the new and emerging women's movement in

(08:37):
and we found that professors gave four times as much
attention to men's students as to women's students, called the
significant response, how often would a teacher actually engage with
the students? And because of that and other things, we

(08:57):
found ways to support women on campus UM. The foundly
was discrimination against women faculty members. 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 within the context of lessons from

(09:21):
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 into public life,
and yet we're not treated equally. So there was this

(09:41):
emerging women's movement developing, and also in the context of
the 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 love that. So really,

(10:05):
one of the big takeaways from what you've done with
Jane 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 bad up against so many fights, But
actually if you're if you really work hard and organized,

(10:27):
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 her sister was pregnant and was nearly

(10:47):
suicidal because she wasn't ready to 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 of
as part of the Golden rule, trying to one to others.

(11:09):
I went to the network of doctors from the Medical
Committee for Human Rights, which was the Civil Rights Medical Arms,
and I found a doctor, doctor TRM. Howard, who had
a clinic on sixty three Street in Chicago, Friendship Clinic UM.

(11:31):
I didn't know its history at the time, but he
had been a dynamic 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 next Sally. I didn't really think much more
about it, but word must have spread because short time

(11:55):
later someone else called. I thought it was a coincidence
in in where it must have spread, and someone else called.
At that point I realized they really one is the
broader problem that needed to be addressed, and being an organizer,
I decided to create a system and called it Jane.

(12:16):
Over time, the women of Jane themselves performed eleven thousand
abortions between nineteen six and nine seventy three. When Roe
became the law of the land and the experience of
Jane both improved the lives of the women who came

(12:39):
through who are looking for a way to 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. UM. And it also provided

(13:02):
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

(13:23):
of Jane the era'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

(13:44):
of hesitant pause on the phone, and I just knew
immediately what they were probably calling about. UM. They 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

(14:06):
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 I had
been pregnant, what the medical history was a little bit, um.
And then we'll just go through the details of what

(14:28):
to expect. Um. They want to know what how long
does it take, would there be pain, their 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

(14:50):
through how much it cost. Initially Jane costs five um,
though we negotiated down the prices. 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 and then even sometimes got three for the price
of one. We sometimes I would ask for special arrangement

(15:14):
if someone didn't have money, and and then we arranged
where people 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

(15:36):
with them as they as they left after the procedure.
That was the first stage of Jane, where I was
doing the 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 and to

(16:00):
provide the procedures. His name was Mike and uh we've
basically had the same process, though he had a suburban
effort and UM the numbers were increasing so much as
the numbers of people coming through. I was about to

(16:23):
have my first child, and I was very busy and
many other things to getting a graduate 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,

(16:46):
and I go to meetings and at the end of
the meeting would say, if anyone wants 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

(17:06):
quality of care that we wanted to see for all
the women who came through UM. And then with that
I turned over the effort to another group of women
out Jodie Parsons and Ruth's Cercle with the two leads
women who helped coordinate it. At that point, As the

(17:29):
numbers increased, more hands were needed. One person 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

(17:51):
a license position, and they thought, well, if 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.

(18:16):
Partly because it was illegal. UH. Everyone wanted it to
be as safe as possible so that no one would
be hard, no one would be UM, there wouldn't be
a UM 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

(18:40):
for their wishes. They're also UM. It 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

(19:01):
procedures UM. In fact, at the after row became the
law of the land. That was a study done by
University of Illinois program called the pre Sectorship, which was
about entry into uh positive medical care within Chicago, and

(19:23):
they did an analysis of the outcome from Jane and
the outcomes from clinic service for abortion and found 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

(19:46):
started to take on doing procedures themselves, and in 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

(20:10):
or one apartment someone's apartment that was designed in a
very cozy, homely supportive 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

(20:34):
the apartment where the procedures would be done, and then
they were supported and given care while they were recovering
from the procedure, and then would be sent off as
full information um about what to do if there are
any issues if there often are with any medical procedures

(20:56):
and given health and then UH told umbers to call
and people could be 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
Kaplan called Jane Because Jane an abortion Story. There's also

(21:20):
a movie about it, and actually I'm now told there's
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, now you're a

(21:41):
part of this really robust tradition of Jewish activism. 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. Indeed, it was part of my moral upbringing.

(22:05):
I believed, as it's said in the Bible, justice justice
that shall pursue, saying justice twice because it's that important,
really believing UH that the stories of the prophets should
guide us in some ways, that it's the people who

(22:30):
should rise and not just those in wealth and power. UM.
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

(22:51):
land of greater promise h to to escape oppressions, and
I believe that was a tradition that was worth embracing.
So that was part of the moral lu ringing that
I had, and had tried to carry that on into

(23:12):
the organizing work I've done, and since that time, I've
tried to carry it on in so many ways. I
started a training center for organizers called Midwest Academy. People
encourage your listeners to pursue Midwest Academy because it's a
it's a place to learn the skills of organizing UM.

(23:34):
Their website is www. Midwest Academy dot com UM. I've
also ended up running some large scale organizations for advising them.
I was strategic advisor for the immigration reform campaign, the
Alliance for Citizenship. I ran the campaign for financial reform

(23:55):
that won the Dodd's Bank Bill. I with the coordinator
around the marriage equality campaign. Um I just was the
field director around the campaign to stop these of tax
breaks for the millionaires and billionaires. That will mean that
there will be an excuse to make cuts in social security,

(24:17):
Medicare and medicaid, and education and other essential human services.
So the struggle continues 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 organize,
and if we organized, we can change the world, and

(24:41):
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
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

(25:02):
I'm so glad that we have you, Uh read the words,
spread the message. I'm so glad we have those who
are listing in. I hope they'll take they probably have
been taking action. We need to continue taking action and
unify and give people confidence that we can organize and

(25:22):
when we organize even in times that seemed the most difficult.
We have changed the world in the past, and we
can change the world for the future. Let's take a
quick break. Well it's been to listeners now. I know

(25:44):
abortion can seem like an issue that we no longer
have to fight for that we did in the seventies,
but that's actually not true. In March, Mississippi's governor signed
a law banning abortion at fifteen weeks, the earliest abortion
ban in the country. The law is temporarily blocked by
a federal judge, and some states only have one left
that provides abortions thanks to restrictions specifically aimed at forcing
providers to close. Reproductive freedom is constantly under attack, so

(26:08):
let's stay vigilant and get organized to help protect our
right to access. What did you think of Heather story
Let me know. You can find us on Instagram at
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Stuff at how stuff works dot com.