[Heather Booth and the Jane Collective helped thousands of people
have abortions before Roe. Their example is once again relevant.]
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A LEGENDARY ABORTION RIGHTS ACTIVIST ON WHAT COMES AFTER TEXAS  
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Heather Souvaine Horn
September 8, 2021
The New Republic
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_ Heather Booth and the Jane Collective helped thousands of people
have abortions before Roe. Their example is once again relevant. _

Heather Booth is second from the left, front row., Heather Booth

 

When Heather Booth helped a friend’s sister obtain an abortion in
1965, she thought it would be a one-off situation. Instead, it became
the start of a legendary underground operation known as the Jane
Collective, or simply Jane
[[link removed]].
In the years leading up to the 1973 _Roe v. Wade _decision, the Jane
Collective helped thousands of pregnant people in the Chicago area and
beyond obtain abortions in defiance of strict statewide
bans—establishing procedures to protect and support those seeking
them and those providing them, and also to promote safety.

Now, following Texas’s law to ban abortions
[[link removed]] after
six weeks (before many people know they are pregnant) and award
private citizens $10,000 for suing anyone remotely involved in a
procedure beyond those weeks, the right to an abortion, already
something that existed more in theory than reality
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much of the country, seems ever more uncertain
[[link removed]].
Many activists are turning to earlier generations for lessons on how
to resist restrictions and get care to those who need it. I called up
Booth to ask her about Jane’s history and her perspective on the new
law.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

WHEN _ROE V. WADE_ WAS DECIDED, DID YOU THINK THAT ERA OF ILLEGAL
ABORTION WAS GONE FOR GOOD?

What I felt was relief that women would now have the freedom to decide
when or whether to have a child. And I was relieved for all the women
who would otherwise have been affected by laws that were hostile to
women, and hostile to women having full participation in society. I
was also relieved because there were seven women who had been arrested
for working on Jane, and once _Roe_ was decided the charges were
dropped and the case became moot. So mostly I felt relief. There also
was some concern about the medicalization of abortion: We knew that
Jane was providing such quality care and support for the women, and
such quality of care in the procedure, and we wanted to make sure that
that continued.

DO YOU SEE THE PRE-_ROE_ ERA RETURNING?

When abortion was criminalized before 1973, three people talking about
arranging for an abortion was treated, in Chicago, where I was, as a
conspiracy to commit a felony. And we’re now going back to those
days.

But now in some ways it’s worse: It’s become a partisan political
issue—which it was not really in 1973—because the Republican Party
in particular decided that this is the way to win votes and build a
base in part among evangelicals. The opposition to abortion is much
more intense now, and much more vicious and vindictive to all people
involved—those who are seeking the procedure for themselves, or
people who care about those seeking the procedure, family, friends,
supporters, people in the medical profession, and others.

What’s passed in Texas is a vigilante law that even goes beyond the
partisan support. It is encouraging people to inform on each other.
It’s pushing society toward something like life under an
authoritarian government, where you don’t know if you can trust your
neighbor or relative or friend or your driver. And it leads to a
society based on distrust and paranoia—not even paranoia, because
paranoia is a word for when you fear something and it’s unwarranted,
and this fear is warranted.

HOW DID YOU FIRST START HELPING PREGNANT PEOPLE OBTAIN ABORTIONS?

The origins of Jane really begin with the civil rights movement. I had
been involved with Congress of Racial Equality
[[link removed]],
around support for the sit-ins at Woolworth, which wouldn’t let
African Americans sit at their lunch counters in the South. We went to
Mississippi in 1964 and saw the incredible courage of Black people in
the South who were being denied the right to vote, and I learned
several key lessons from that. One was that if you organize, you can
actually make enormous change. But you have to take action—it
doesn’t happen on its own. The second lesson was that you sometimes
need to stand up to illegitimate authority. In the 1964 summer
project, we were involved in what should have been a routine
registration effort—all we were doing was encouraging people to
register—and a short while later I was in jail. And the third big
lesson that I learned was that people know what they need and want,
and you need to listen to local people.

Those three lessons guided what followed. Once I had returned to
campus, a friend mentioned that his sister was pregnant and was nearly
suicidal and was not prepared to have a child, and asked whether I
could find someone to provide an abortion for her. I hadn’t really
thought about the issue before, but I went to the Medical Committee
for Human Rights, and I found a doctor, T.R.M. Howard
[[link removed]]. (I learned later he
had been a leader in the civil rights movement in Mississippi
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And I talked to him about my friend, put him in touch with her, and I
thought that would be the end of it. But she must have spoken to
others because a short while later someone else called. And then
someone else called. And at that point, I realized as an organizer I
should find out what’s involved in these procedures. So I found out
medically what’s involved, what you do to protect yourself, what the
cost is, etc. We negotiated on price—whether it could be lowered to
two for the price of one, three for the price of one, because more and
more people were then coming.

After a while we lost contact with Dr. Howard, so I found someone
whose name was Mike. We set up the same operation that I had with Dr.
Howard. By 1968, I was pregnant with my first child, and I was in grad
school and working full-time and involved in other movement work, and
there were too many people coming through. I couldn’t handle it
myself. So I went to meetings and would say at the end, if there’s
anyone who wants to work on abortion come see me. And when I had about
12 or so people, I convened a series of meetings, told them what was
involved in the procedure, and we did role-playing on counseling and
supporting the women who were coming through, and how to connect with
Mike (through an associate of his), and I passed the operation over to
a larger set of women. Over time that set of women grew to about 100.

They eventually found out that Mike wasn’t a physician, wasn’t a
licensed M.D., and yet the procedures had been safe. (In fact,
after _Roe,_ one of the women who was working in a health research
effort at the University of Illinois, did an analysis of the
successful outcomes, comparing Jane to a licensed facility
after _Roe,_ and found that Jane had an even higher rate of safety
and success and support.) So the women who were involved with Jane
decided, well, if he can do it, they can do it. And Mike, to his
credit, taught them how to do the procedures. And that continued so
that about 11,000 women went through Jane, with the women themselves
performing the procedures.

When the police raided in 1972, this man burst into the room and said,
“Where is he? Where is he?”—“he” being the doctor. And of
course there was no man there, only women, and they arrested the women
involved in Jane, still thinking it was someone else doing the
procedures. No one would testify against the women. And then
when _Roe_ became the law of the land, the cases were dropped.

WHAT IS DIFFERENT THIS TIME AROUND?

There are many things that have changed in a positive way
since _Roe__._ For one thing, there are now many providers who have
learned how to do the procedure. They’re experienced, they’re
capable and able to provide support. The pills you can take for a
self-induced abortion
[[link removed]] are
another huge change. There’s the National Abortion Federation, which
is a support center for clinics that provide this care. There’s
legal help. There’s a history of case law nationally and in states.
And there are now thousands, rather than hundreds, of activists
involved in the caring, protection, and support for women’s health.
So the expansion of what was an underground then, and the expansion of
services—from Texas, even now, you can get transportation, funding,
housing
[[link removed]],
medical care, you can be referred to options elsewhere
[[link removed]]—is
a big change.

On the negative side, there’s this partisanship around the issue,
and the amount of money that’s being poured into the opposition. And
then there’s the whole idea of placing a bounty on the heads of
anyone who helps—rewarding people who turn in others who are seeking
help for someone who needs an abortion after six weeks, after a period
of time in which someone may not even know they’re pregnant. Before
they can know what the health implications for them personally might
be.

This bounty creates a police-state kind of mentality. And that really
is taking this to another level. It was designed for what Texas’s
right-wing lawmakers believed was needed to pass muster on _Roe_;
they believed that the court was telling them, don’t have the state
enforce this. So if the state’s not enforcing it then the next step
was to enforce it by having neighbor report on neighbor. And that’s
actually the worst aspect—state-sponsored distrust. State-sponsored
destruction of community.

Another thing to consider is that corporations are giving money to
these legislators, even as they try to make a name for themselves
saying they are advocates for health care or advocates for women’s
rights. AT&T is one of the corporations, according to a
newsletter, Popular Information
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tracked how corporate money is backing the opposite of what the
corporations say they want to do.

WHAT LESSONS DO YOU THINK CURRENT ACTIVISTS CAN TAKE FROM YOUR EARLY
WORK ON THIS ISSUE?

I think many things are needed. Jane was a service. And it was a
service that ended up being most important for people who couldn’t
travel out of state or internationally to obtain abortions. We do need
to expand services. But what we really need to do is build the
political power to stop these abusive laws. And that will take
organizing, building political and electoral power. It will take legal
support. It will take visibility and cultural action. It will take
people speaking out, broader education, informing people more about
what their options are. And also it means providing people information
about contraceptives, medically accurate information about birth
control and reproduction. And support for women having full
participation in society.

WHAT’S YOUR BIGGEST WORRY ABOUT HOW THE CHANGES UNDERWAY IN TEXAS
ARE GOING TO PLAY OUT IN THE COMING WEEKS, MONTHS, AND YEARS?

It all depends on what we do: if we organize and how skillful we are.
Are we talking only to those already involved, or are we reaching out
to those who don’t understand the consequences yet, who don’t know
that they can have an impact? People need to learn that change for the
better happens when we organize. We need to organize.

There are a wide array of organizations for people to participate in.
There is a demonstration being called for October 2
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and I’m sure there’ll be a lot more visibility around it. I think
there will be interest from grassroots groups and health care groups
and women’s groups and faith organizations and community and social
action organizations. We all need to come together on it, both to
organize power to support people who are making these decisions about
their lives and also to convert it to political power so that we
overcome the Republican gerrymandering—essentially new Jim Crow laws
that are depressing votes—and can move toward small-_d_ democracy
and justice for all.

_Heather Souvaine Horn
[[link removed]] @heathershorn
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_HEATHER SOUVAINE HORN is a deputy editor at The New Republic._

_THE NEW REPUBLIC was founded in 1914 as an intellectual call to arms
for public-minded intellectuals advocating liberal reform in a new
industrial age. Now, two decades into a new century, TNR remains, if
anything, more committed than ever to its first principles—and most
of all, to the need to rethink outworn assumptions and political
superstitions as radically changing conditions demand. Subscribe to
THE NEW REPUBLIC
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