Through their testimony, we get an entirely compelling account of what it was like to live and work through this, what it truly means to risk your life and your well-being for people you don’t even know. Where the real power of the documentary lies is in the interviews it features with some of the women who were involved with the organization and who helped make this safe abortion access possible and available to the women of Chicago. It gives a chronological account of the Janes’ actions interspersed with archival footage of protests that happened in Chicago, speeches from political figures, and of the septic abortion wards of Chicago hospitals where many women who underwent unsafe abortion procedures ended up. It doesn’t rely on sharp edits or graphics to help tell the story. The documentary itself is much less flashy than a lot of the documentaries and docuseries we see coming from various distributors. So, their work became even more layered and more hazardous than just connecting women to a doctor willing to perform the procedure. Throughout the time they worked to provide these services, the women of the Janes also had to work to ensure they weren’t caught and that the women who were coming to them weren’t detected either.
Over the following four years, the Janes learned from Mike how to perform abortions themselves and were able to provide over 11,000 abortions to mostly low-income white, Black, and Latina women in the Chicago area. Once enough people were involved, the Janes put a structure in place that not only helped provide safe abortions to women who needed it, but also allowed the Janes to provide before and after care to these women and ensured that women could pay what they were able whether that was $5 or $700. A few years later, in 1968, Booth began going to meetings held by anti-war and civil rights activists to recruit more women to help her.īy the end of that year, she had recruited 10 women and an abortionist named Mike to help her create the Abortion Counseling Service of Women’s Liberation, codenamed “Jane” for short because it was a plain enough name that the women who were calling could use when they called. Booth found a doctor willing to perform the abortions for $500, and as word of the work she was doing spread, more and more women began coming to her for help. At the time, only way to obtain an abortion that wasn’t deemed a medical necessity was through Chicago’s organized crime syndicates, which was both extremely costly and extremely dangerous. Wade, Heather Booth, with some assistance of the medical arm of the Black Panther Party, began organizing safe abortions for women she knew.
In 1965, eight years before the Supreme Court codified abortion rights into law through Roe v. In the new HBO Max documentary The Janes, directors Tia Lessin and Emma Pildes document the almost four years of action on the part of The Jane Collective, a group of women in Chicago who came together to provide safe abortion access to women who needed it. Since safety for the people who undertake these great responsibilities is an issue, it’s rare that we get a close look at what these organizations have done and even rarer that we hear it directly from the people involved.
Meaningful political organization happens in a variety of ways, but oftentimes, the work that makes a true, material difference in our communities has to be stealthily concealed because it’s been deemed “criminal” by the apparatuses of the ruling class.
LGBTQ Television Guide: What To Watch Now.