[The Janes felt only months ago like a warning. Now it feels like
a manual for action.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

HBO’S NEW DOCUMENTARY IS ABOUT THE EARLY 1970S, BUT IT COULDN’T
BE MORE TIMELY  
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Dana Stevens
June 8, 2022
Slate
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_ The Janes felt only months ago like a warning. Now it feels like a
manual for action. _

, HBO

 

“If you start worrying about all the little details,” declares
Eleanor Oliver, one of the 70- or 80-something women who are the
whip-smart, dry-humored subjects of the new documentary _The Janes_,
co-directed by Tia Lessin and Emma Pildes, “you won’t get anything
done.” “That was the beauty of Chicago, I think,” muses the next
interviewee to appear on camera, identified onscreen only as
“Peaches.” “It was a town where people did stuff.”

Getting stuff done was the stock-in-trade of the Janes, “Jane”
being the umbrella name, and the public code word, for a grassroots
network of Chicago-area activists who, in the last five years before
the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, ran a kind of underground railroad
for women seeking illegal but safe abortions. Over the course of five
years, between 1968 and 1973, the group was responsible for
facilitating something like 11,000 abortions, yet they went under the
radar of the legal system until 1972, when seven of the group’s
members were arrested after a Chicago cop’s sister-in-law was caught
seeking to terminate her pregnancy. Shortly afterward, the Roe v. Wade
decision made the group’s existence happily superfluous. Now, nearly
50 years later, Americans’ reproductive choice is again in jeopardy,
making _The Janes_ not only a crucial part of the historical record
but a searingly contemporary film about the power of mutual aid and
collective action.

_The Janes_ is not only a crucial part of the historical record but a
searingly contemporary film about the power of mutual aid and
collective action.

Many of the group’s members had their own experiences with
back-alley abortion. The very first testimonial we hear is from a
woman named Dorie who procured her procedure through a mob connection
in the early 1960s. That memory is a harrowing one, involving a
brusque male abortionist who spoke only three sentences to her the
whole time (the first being “Do you have the money?”) before
abandoning her in a dirty hotel room next to another bleeding young
woman. Years later, after the Jane network had been founded, Dorie had
a second abortion through the collective. She chokes up as she
describes arriving at the secret location where abortions were being
performed and hearing the voices of women speaking kindly to one
another: “It was the best medical experience I ever had.”

The second-wave feminists in the Jane group came of age in a
patriarchal medical establishment where, as one recalls it, “doctors
were like kings” and prescription birth control was accessible only
to married women. (A cheap wedding band slipped on before a doctor’s
appointment functioned as a common workaround.) Still, in the words of
one member, “It was a case where men underestimating women’s
abilities worked well for us.” Because most of the group’s members
were middle-class white ladies—though one exception, Marie Leaner,
is among the most fascinating of the talking heads interviewed—they
were able to operate for years under the noses of the legal and
medical establishment. A portion of the film deals sensitively with
these racial and class issues, which intensified after 1970 when
abortion became legally available in some U.S. states, enabling women
with means to cross state lines to obtain one.

Though _The Janes’_ format breaks no new stylistic ground—it’s
a familiar mix of talking-head interviews and well-chosen archival
images, including photographs of the impossibly young-looking subjects
in hippie-chic ’70s garb—the interviewees are so sharp, funny, and
thoughtful that the documentary never feels preachy or dull. When the
off-camera interviewer observes that it must have been scary to have a
college classmate show up bleeding in the aftermath of a back-alley
abortion, the subject being interviewed wryly adds that it didn’t
help that she had just finished getting high at the time. But a half
century later, the Janes still seem keenly attuned to the moral
outrage that set them on the path in the first place. One of them, now
a reverend who has herself had two abortions she regards as God-given
choices, lays out the moral stakes in language powerful enough to be
useful to present-day abortion activists: “It’s not a theological
argument. That’s a put-up job. To exclude women from ethical agency
excludes us from humanity.”

Another speaker rifles through a stack of the now-yellowed index cards
the Janes kept for each incoming client. These contained not just the
women’s personal information, but notes about their mental state
(“terrified,” reads one scrawled comment) and their legal
situation (“be cautious, father is a cop”). Bowing her head over
the cards, the subject murmurs, “I’m glad we were able to help
them, but they shouldn’t have had to go through that.” Among the
most memorable interview subjects is also a man, identified onscreen
only as “Mike,” who performed abortions for the group. The
revelation that he was not, as he let the women believe for several
years, a credentialed doctor landed as a shock among the Janes—but
it also made them realize that, if he could carry out the procedure
safely and successfully without a medical degree, so could they.
“Mike” trained several women in the group in how to dilate a
cervix and scrape a uterine wall. In one of many no-punches-pulled
moments in the documentary, one of them displays the tools she used to
do so and gives us a brief demonstration of the technique.

“We were thrilled, and we thought it was over, you know,” says one
former Jane, recalling the group’s jubilation on hearing of the Roe
v. Wade decision. “Who knew what would follow?” When this film was
finished last year, it was not yet clear how soon, and how starkly,
that question would be answered. Now that the reversal of that
landmark decision at the federal level looks to be inevitable, movies
like _The Janes_—or _Call Jane_
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a fictionalized version of the same real-life narrative directed
by _Carol_ screenwriter Phyllis Nagy and set for release this
fall—feel more urgent, and more necessary, than ever. What could
have felt like a celebration of the reproductive rights movement’s
history now looks more like a manual for its future.

_Listen to the first episode of __Slow Burn Season 7: Roe v. Wade_
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forgotten story of Shirley Wheeler, the first American woman ever
convicted for getting an abortion._

VIEW TRANSCRIPT
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* abortion
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* The Janes
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* HBO
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* mutual aid
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