This inspirational new documentary of events from half a century ago could hardly be more timely or relevant to current events, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s recent decision in the Dobbs case to overrule Roe v. Wade, and thereby revoke the constitutional rights of women to control their own reproductive freedom, specifically the right to obtain abortions.
The Janes is the story of a small collective of young women in Chicago, who in the early 1970s came together to create an underground network to help women obtain abortions, which were still illegal at that time.
Building on their own experiences, and those of friends and family members, the group tried a variety of approaches for providing illegal abortions. In the beginning, they relied on existing illegal abortion providers, and used their organizational skills to handle information dissemination, set up secret communications, and provide scheduling, funding and transportation for young women who lacked the skills, connections and money to find abortionists themselves. That in itself was a remarkable achievement for a small group of young amateur conspirators.
However, as several of the now-elderly members of the group recount in the film, they soon realized that the skills required to safely do an abortion as a routine medical procedure were not impossible to acquire, even for people who had not been trained or certified as medical doctors or nurses.
Eventually, several of the young women learned to perform abortions themselves, and were then aided by the collective in setting up constantly-moving one-day clinics in borrowed homes and apartments, to which the patients would be driven using the same sort of clandestine operational methods used by spies, terrorists, resistance fighters and criminals. And they were criminals – at least to the local police in Chicago, based on the existing laws and social norms at that time.
For a short time, they managed to safely arrange and carry out many hundreds of abortions. But like most ongoing black market activities involving many consumers, eventually the authorities got wind of it, and managed to raid one of their pop-up clinics, capturing several of the principals and charging them as illegal abortionists. And it would have gone badly for them, except for the timely intervention of the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in Roe v. Wade in 1973 (by a 7-2 margin) that abortion was a constitutional right of all women in the United States, before their prosecution could be concluded.
The story of the Janes collective, so well told in this documentary, has become legendary as an example of the kinds of bold early feminist militancy that arose in the 1970s, where women began to make the difficult decision to consciously refuse to be limited by sexist laws and male-imposed control over their bodies and reproductive choices.
As we are seeing in the resistance to the Dobbs decision, this determination of women to control their own bodies and their destinies has not abated in the intervening half century. Their determination is being demonstrated in the rapid rise of new political and legal activism in support of the right to prevent and end pregnancies, as well as in the formation of new networks (again, sometimes clandestine) to provide information, medications and services to women living in areas where abortion has been outlawed.
This film provides an enlightening history of the desperation women feel when their right to choose has been taken away by law and society, for the particular enlightenment of several generations of Americans who have never lived under these conditions. It also shows the kinds of creative acts of resistance to state control and meddling in private medical decisions that can be expected whenever abortion is banned, as is now happening again in so many states. Highly recommended.
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