[In the 1960s and ’70s, a Chicago group known as “Jane”
helped tens of thousands of women get abortions. ]
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I WAS IN AN UNDERGROUND ABORTION NETWORK BEFORE ROE V. WADE  
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Carter Sherman
January 20, 2022
Vice
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_ In the 1960s and ’70s, a Chicago group known as “Jane” helped
tens of thousands of women get abortions. _

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In 1971, Laura Kaplan
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24 years old and a recent transplant to Chicago. Kaplan wanted to get
involved in the women’s movement, and the city was awash in
political activism. She found her way to a group of women who,
officially, went by the name Abortion Counseling Service of Women’s
Liberation—but, around Chicago, were more often known simply as
“Jane.” 

If you were pregnant and didn’t want to be, you called Jane.

Between 1969 and 1973, before abortion became legal across the United
States, the 100-plus women who made up Jane—mothers, housewives,
teachers, college dropouts—helped people procure abortions. They
estimate that they performed more than 11,000 abortions themselves.

Saturday, Jan. 22, marks the 49th anniversary of _Roe v. Wade_, the
1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion nationwide and
that led Jane to dissolve. But _Roe 
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not see its 50th birthday
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since the Supreme Court is now deliberating
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a case that threatens to topple the landmark ruling_. _And if Roe
vanishes, leaving states free to regulate abortion, 26 states are
likely to ban [[link removed]] the procedure.

In order to understand what this future may look like, VICE News
turned to the past—to the stories of the people who’ve had
front-row seats to the last half-century’s fight over abortion.
Kaplan spoke to VICE News about her time in Jane as part of VICE
News’ new series about the legacies left by veterans of the U.S.
abortion wars.

_This article, told in Kaplan’s words, has been edited for clarity
and length. _

All that most of us knew about abortion was that it was rare, and that
every once in a while, a woman had an illegal abortion and she died
from it. When women started talking to each other, they realized that
lots and lots of women wanted abortions. Lots of them got them. In
many cases, they weren't very pleasant experiences. 

There were women who reported that they'd been demanded sexual favors
in exchange for the abortion. There was no quality control. But there
were some good practitioners. Groups all over the country—including
Jane, when we started—sussed out the underground abortion network in
their area and figured out who were the competent and non-abusive
practitioners, and then helped the women raise money because they were
expensive. An illegal abortion cost $500, and you could rent a decent
one-bedroom apartment in Chicago for maybe $125 a month. 

The original members of Jane realized very early on that just sending
somebody off and saying, “Well, we've sent other women and they all
come back alive” was not really the best situation for women. And so
that earliest group said, “In order to give women power over this
experience, we need to take control of this.” So they looked for a
practitioner who was willing to work fairly closely with them. And
they found somebody. 

_[Originally, the members of Jane thought that this practitioner was a
physician. But some women eventually discovered that, in fact, the man
wasn’t a doctor at all—he had just learned to do abortions from
one.]_

He was there to make money. He said to me, “I thought abortions were
like mink coats. Lots of women wanted them, but only some of them
could afford them.”

When you break through the wall, it's like going through the looking
glass. It's like landing in Oz. Suddenly it's in color and not black
and white.

He became very close with one of the central people in the group, and
she pushed him to allow other women to come and sit during the
abortions. She told me that it was his idea that she actually pick up
the instruments. At first, she just said, “No, I'm not doing
this.” The idea of actually using instruments inside a woman's body
was outrageous.

But in this instance, according to her, he talked her into it. When
you break through the wall, it's like going through the looking glass.
It's like landing in Oz. Suddenly it's in color and not black and
white. It takes a lot of guts to do that. But it's exhilarating once
you do it, once you break through that barrier that says,_ You cannot
do this. _

I came when the practitioner was leaving and the women were taking
over. I first found Jane when one of my dear friends from the
university discovered she was pregnant from a failed IUD and found her
way to Jane. After her abortion, she came to my apartment and she was
so excited by the experience. I mean, she just had an illegal
abortion, she'd been blindfolded—and she was almost literally
bouncing off the walls of my apartment in excitement from this
incredible experience she had just been through. 

So I signed myself up.

IN 1971, LAURA KAPLAN JOINED ‘JANE,’ A GROUP IN CHICAGO THAT
PROVIDED ABORTIONS BEFORE THEY WERE LEGAL IN THE CITY. (PHOTOGRAPHY BY
GILAD THALER, GRAPHICS BY RAQUEL REI, VICE NEWS GRAPHICS)

We had a number: 643-3844. That number really had gotten around the
city of Chicago pretty good. If someone needed an abortion, she would
call that number and she would get an answering machine. Answering
machines were really rare. This one, our first answering machine, was
the size of a suitcase.

A woman would call and she'd get a message that said, “This is Jane
from women's liberation. If you need assistance, if you need help,
leave your phone and your name and phone number and someone will call
you back.” And then one of the members of our group, who was known
as Call-Back Jane—very creative with the names here—would call
that person back and say, “This is Jane, you called. What are you
looking for?” We always waited for the woman to say what she
wanted. 

I first found Jane when one of my dear friends from the university
discovered she was pregnant from a failed IUD and found her way to
Jane. After her abortion, she came to my apartment and she was so
excited by the experience.

Her information was taken by the call-back person. It would be her
name, her age, her address, her phone number, her last period, how
many previous pregnancies, how many kids, how many miscarriages, any
medical problems.

We would say, “We charge $100. If you can't afford that, what can
you afford?” So those cards went to our main administrative person
who we called Big Jane—again, creative names—and Big Jane did the
scheduling, figuring out who was going to be scheduled on what
workday. 

Those names were then given to counselors. If I was a counselor, I
would call the woman and say, “Hi, my name is Laura. Jane gave me
your phone number and I'm going to be your counselor. Let’s pick a
time when you can come to my apartment and I can explain everything to
you then.” We would encourage women to bring someone with them—a
sister or mother or their husband or boyfriend, whoever they wanted
for moral support. 

Women would come to our apartments and we'd make a pot of tea and and
we would explain all the steps—not just what happened in the
abortion itself, but what that day would look like and feel like and
what they would see and what they would hear. We knew, for ourselves,
the _not knowing_ was the thing that made you most nervous. We
wanted women to be as comfortable as they could be.

We never asked women what the reasons for wanting or needing an
abortion. That was their business and not ours, and we certainly
weren't into judging.

We knew, for ourselves, the _not knowing_ was the thing that made
you most nervous. We wanted women to be as comfortable as they could
be.

We would say, “So when you're scheduled, I'm going to call you and
tell you what day it is, and I'm going to give you an address and this
is a place we call the Front, where people just gather. And then in
groups of four or five, you're going to be taken to another apartment
where the abortions will be done. _[The members of the group called
this location “the Place.”] _This is who you'll see there. This
is what you will experience and what will happen afterwards. You'll be
taken back to the Front. You'll be given post-abortion medications. We
encourage you to bring someone with you. You'll go home and we’ll
keep in touch with you for the next 10 days to two weeks to make sure
everything's OK. Here's the kind of problems you could have. Here’s
what we do about these kinds of problems.”

I don’t remember balancing my checkbook before that, but here I was
doing this life-and-death thing.

The Fronts were mostly apartments around Chicago that belonged to us
or our friends. So my apartment got used. You'd have a lot of people
shoved together, total strangers. The guys would maybe be watching
sports on TV, or there'd be a card game. There'd be food. 

In the Place, we worked out of two rooms, so there were two abortions
going on at the same time. We did them on regular beds, on plastic
sheets that we wiped down with alcohol, with surgical equipment,
forceps and curettes. We only used local anesthetic. 

I would say to women, “You could do anything but scream, because
we're in an apartment.” 

There were usually two people in each of those rooms. One was a fully
trained abortionist and the other one who was called an assistant and
usually in training. _[Today, people who support abortion rights
don’t usually use the term “abortionist,” because abortion
opponents sometimes deploy it like a slur.]_ 

I would say to women, “You could do anything but scream, because
we're in an apartment.”

The fully trained person would be sitting with the woman and holding
her hand and talking with her about whatever she wanted to talk about.
At some point, the two women would switch positions—the assistant
would then sit with the woman and hold her hand, and the other person
would then do the abortion. 

That switch was really quite critical. It was a way of saying, “We
are all in this on the same level.” It's not like the doctor comes
in and is in a special position. The switching of the roles was, I
think, really key to give women the sense that this was a fluid thing
and that we were there to support her. And that she, too, could get
off that bed and join us and begin the process herself. 

We would say to people, “This is not going to be comfortable. People
have different levels of what's tolerable for them, so we can't tell
you this is going to feel outrageous. It's nothing you can't
handle.” We would say that to every woman: “You can handle
this.”

LAURA KAPLAN WROTE A BOOK ABOUT ‘JANE’ AND THE GROUP’S WORK TO
PROVIDE ABORTIONS FOR PEOPLE IN CHICAGO. (PHOTOGRAPHY BY GILAD THALER,
GRAPHICS BY RAQUEL REI, VICE NEWS GRAPHICS)

You’ve got to remember that in those days, there were no shelves of
books in bookstores on women's health. There was nothing. And women
knew very little about how their bodies worked. So we saw our job as
really educating women, because knowledge is power. So they would have
some power over their own lives.

When we started out, we were just there for any woman who needed us.
In the early days, it was everybody under the sun. Students.
Housewives. Working women. Black women. White women. Young, older. 

You’ve got to remember that in those days, there were no shelves of
books in bookstores on women's health. There was nothing. And women
knew very little about how their bodies worked.

Once New York legalized abortions in the summer of 1970, you could fly
to New York, get an abortion, and fly home the same day to Chicago for
around $300. Our demographics really changed after that. We saw more
and more women of color, more and more very young women, women whose
circumstances were such that they really couldn't even leave for a
day. A lot of women who'd never left their neighborhoods, so the
thought of going to O'Hare Airport and getting on a plane and flying
to New York was completely out of the question. 

By the end, maybe 60 to 70 percent of the women we saw were poor women
of color from the south side and the west side of Chicago. Here were
women who were very, very different from the women who were in the
group, who were coming to do something illegal and trusting—out of
desperation, more than anything else—strangers with their lives. We
would say to them, “We're trusting you with our lives as well. We're
in this together. We're not doing it to you. We're doing it with
you.”

Was the work emotional? Of course it was emotional. Doctors are
trained to keep a distance. We were the reverse of that. Even though
we didn't pry, some women confided in us. This is before the battered
women's movement, before any talk about incest or sexual assault. Then
you have some 14-year-old coming with her father for an
abortion? _Ding, ding, ding._ We were brought into another level of
reality. 

By the end, maybe 60 to 70 percent of the women we saw were poor women
of color from the south side and the west side of Chicago.

Things could have gone incredibly wrong at any point, and they didn't.
But the more you do, the more you start feeling it's just a matter of
time. Even in the best of circumstances, when you're doing surgery,
things go wrong. 

We were committing multiple felonies every day. We're talking serious
jail time here—not to mention practicing medicine without a license.
But that was minor compared to felony abortion charges. In Chicago,
typically, when a woman came in with a problem from an illegal
abortion, the police were called in right away, and she was usually
told that she was going to die, whether she was or not. And so they
wanted some deathbed confession. _Give up the names. _

But the majority of the women in the group—not all, but a majority
of us—were white, middle-class young women in our 20s. I think we
were in denial a lot. We didn't think anything bad would happen to us.
So it was kind of shocking when it did, when we actually got busted.

A woman came to us with her sister-in-law. Her sister-in-law didn't
like what she heard, so she went to a local precinct. And the homicide
cops followed the driver from the Front to the Place. They knocked on
the door, and somebody opened. They wanted to know where the man was
and where the money was.

We were committing multiple felonies every day. We're talking serious
jail time here—not to mention practicing medicine without a license.
But that was minor compared to felony abortion charges.

They quickly figured out who was in the group and who wasn't, because
the women in the group wouldn't give up their names. And then they
went to the Front and took everyone— boyfriends, husbands, mothers,
friends, children—down to the precinct. It was like a zoo. And the
seven members of Jane were arrested and put in Cook County jail. They
got bailed out and arraigned.

_[The bust occurred in May 1972. The arrested members of Jane hired a
female attorney, who gave them some interesting information.]_

_“_There's a case that's making its way through the Supreme Court
right now. We think it's going to go your way, and if it does, you're
not going to serve any jail time.” Of course, that was _Roe v.
Wade_, and that's exactly what happened.

In that period, four of the seven women who were arrested decided to
come back to the group. I think those four women didn't want the
Chicago cops telling them what they could and couldn't do. 

We thought the cops were just going to keep busting us. But there was
a point at which the attorney told them that if a certain lieutenant
had not been on vacation, the bust would have never happened. So then
we figured there wasn't a grand plan to get us. And pretty much went
back to business as usual. 

At the time of the bust, we had something like 300 women waiting for
abortions. We did about 100 a week. So that meant whoever was
scheduling—and in those days it was often me—had to play God,
figure out who could wait, who had to go right away. There's no way to
get a stack of 300 cards into 100 slots, no matter how hard you try.
And let me tell you, I tried pretty hard. 

_[In January 1973, in a 7-2 decision, the Supreme Court ruled
in _Roe. Wade_—and the justices’ decision legalized abortion
nationwide.]_

What I can remember, of when _Roe v. Wade_ was decided, was this
overwhelming feeling of relief, primarily. First, this was going to
save my seven friends, who were waiting on their pending, criminal,
multiple felonies. Second, we were only seeing a tiny sliver of the
women who needed abortions. It wasn't like Jane was going to save the
world. We were only doing what we could do in our little piece of
it. 

We waited till the first legal clinics opened in Chicago. Then we had
a pretty contentious meeting about whether we should fold or continue
on. There was a contingent that felt that the abortions that we
provided were like no other abortions that women were going to get
from a doctor. We didn't feel the medical establishment really
respected women. In those days, there were very few women doctors—or
women anythings, other than nurses and schoolteachers and secretaries
and librarians. So that we wanted to continue, that sense that you are
responsible for your own health care, that you make the decisions. To
give women this different sense of what a medical experience could be
like, where you were the center of it and not acted upon, not the
object of it—that was educational and empowering. 

Others felt like whatever protection we had, it's going to be gone
once the clinics open. We’ll be taking money out of the hands of
doctors. Nobody's going to come to our aid. Many of us were pretty
fried. You know, it was a lot. It was our whole lives. It was all day,
every day. So I think a lot of us were feeling it was time to move
on. 

I worried about Roe’s survival—maybe not from the very beginning,
but certainly once the Hyde Amendment got passed. 

_[The Hyde Amendment, first enacted in 1976, blocks the use of federal
funds for paying for abortions, except in cases of rape or incest, or
when a pregnancy endangers the mother’s life. People thus can’t
use Medicaid to pay for most abortions.] _

That was, in a way, the beginnings of a death knell, because one thing
that was true pre-_Roe_ was all women, whether they were rich or poor
or white or Black or 18 or 40, faced the same or similar difficulties.
Rich women could fly to other countries, they would have a sympathetic
physician who would sign them in for an appendectomy, that kind of
thing. But generally, we were all in the same boat, regardless of
finances.

Once the Hyde Amendment passed, there was a sword separating women
with means from women without means. For women in most of the country,
it's as if _Roe_ never happened. There's no access.

I worried about Roe’s survival—maybe not from the very beginning,
but certainly once the Hyde Amendment got passed.

Until this current iteration of the Supreme Court, I used to say
they'll never overturn _Roe_, but they'll accept every crazy, crucial
limitation that any state presents to them. But given who's on the
court right now, I think these people have enough hubris that they may
very well likely just overturn _Roe_. The fact that they let this
Texas law, which is so clearly in violation of _Roe_, stand, tells
you where they are. 

So is it going to make it worse? Yes. Are women going to suffer? Yes.
Are women probably going to die? Yes.

It's important to realize the desperation that women felt, to go
through an underground network of women who didn't look like them,
whose backgrounds were so different from theirs. Think of that: _How
desperate you must be. Your life is at stake._ Those of us who were
in Jane did everything we could to make women feel comfortable. But
the difference in those later days between us and so many of the women
we counseled—not all of them, but so many of the women we
counseled—was so vast. 

When I think about it now, all I can think of is how desperate they
must have been. They'd heard, “You can trust these women.” But
still, they had in their minds the crumpled bodies in the alleys, the
news stories of women who had been butchered.

I don't think that can be underestimated, to tell you what lengths
women will go to, to do what they feel they must. For other people
judging them and saying, “Oh, well, this isn't so bad, you can do
blah blah blah”—it shows such cruelty and lack of compassion that
it's kind of horrifying to me. 

Women are not going back. I don't know what form the resistance is
going to take. But the resistance will be there.

_More articles by Carter Sherman.
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