Moira Donegan: Jane's World

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https://www.bookforum.com/print/2903/reconsidering-a-pre-roe-abortion-service-in-the-post-roe-era-25072

THE PATIENT was a twenty-six-year-old mother of two, and she had just been sterilized. After getting a diagnosis of Hodgkin’s disease, a lymphatic cancer, during her second pregnancy, the young woman had realized that giving birth again would likely kill her. She had harangued a doctor for months, until he finally agreed to schedule a tubal ligation. When the anesthetic lifted, the first voice she heard was the surgeon’s. “The sterilization procedure was a success,” he said. “And congratulations, you’re eight weeks pregnant.”

The young woman asked her hospital for an abortion; her doctors backed her up. But the hospital board said no. Her life would be endangered by the pregnancy; it wasn’t endangered yet. They kept saying no until finally she convinced two psychiatrists that she would kill herself if she wasn’t given an abortion. Then they said yes.

Similar stories are now playing out in red states across the country, but this scene took place in Chicago in 1968. The young cancer patient, Jody Howard, had never considered abortion in a political context until she needed one and couldn’t get it. Her experience of being denied an abortion—the abjection and terror of it—had seeded a new understanding. No doctor would ever stand in her way again. Eventually, Jody joined Chicago’s underground feminist abortion provider: Jane.

Jane, an illegal, women-run abortion service that operated in Chicago from 1968 to 1973, has become a minor legend in the intervening decades. The group’s story periodically reemerges in the feminist consciousness, gripping younger women’s imaginations. Jane is part cautionary tale, part inspirational narrative. The story of ordinary women, defying the law to take control of their own lives, shows both the desperation and danger of the pre-Roe reality, and the possibilities for solidarity and subversion in a post-Roe landscape.

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