The Truth About Jane

They were heroes, and human. They could be any of us.

(Photo by Leif Skoogfors/Getty Images)

Moira Donegan is an opinion columnist at The Guardian and the author of the newsletter Not the Fun Kind. She is a writer in residence at Stanford’s Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research. 

“My fear was that an outsider would paint us as superheroes or Amazon warriors, as extraordinary,” writes Laura Kaplan, one of the members of the service known as Jane, in a 2019 preface to “The Story of Jane: The Legendary Underground Feminist Abortion Service,” her exhaustive history of the Chicago feminist group that performed secret, illegal abortions in the late 1960s and early 1970s. “This is the opposite of the truth and certainly the wrong message to send to a younger generation.” 

In the intervening years, Jane members have taken on an unusually active role in shaping the historical understanding of their work, and this is why. Hero worship has a distancing effect: it makes the object seem far away, alien, even semi-divine. It makes the revered people’s lives, their personalities, seem unlike your own. But Jane, Kaplan says, was not some exceptional or otherworldly group. “We were ordinary women,” she insists. “I hope that everyone who reads this history will see herself in us and think: that could be me.” 

Still, these days the Jane service tends to get spoken of in hushed, reverent tones; a stand-in for the possibilities of a bygone world. I first heard about the group in the 2010s, as a young feminist in New York, and even back then, when Roe still stood, Jane had taken on a semi-mythic status. The pre-Roe, second-wave feminist abortion service had defied the law, usurped medical authority, and started doing abortions themselves—for everyone who wanted one, no matter whether she could pay or not. 

Jane, officially known as the Abortion Counseling Service of Women’s Liberation, was a direct action group that was formed in Chicago in 1968, emerging out of the city’s vibrant activist New Left movement. In the beginning, the conceit was simple: women who wanted abortions could call a telephone number and ask for Jane. Someone from the group would call them back, offer them counseling, and then connect them to a reliable abortion provider. The service helped women navigate the dangerous and opaque world of Chicago’s illegal abortion market, helping them stay safe and avoid providers who were incompetent or predatory. 

The dangers were real: at the time, Chicago’s Cook County Hospital, like most public hospitals in America, had a septic abortion ward to treat patients who had been hurt by incompetently performed abortions. And the overwhelmingly male providers on the black market were known to demand sexual favors in exchange for abortions, in addition to the extortionate prices. 

Jane also helped women pay: from the beginning, the group served not just as a referral service, but also as a loan fund, raising money from wealthy sympathizers around Chicago and asking all their patients to pitch in as much as they possibly could, to help cover the procedures of others who couldn’t afford their abortions. 

As time went on, demand grew, and so did Jane. Because they could bring in large amounts of business, they could extract concessions from the underground abortion providers they relied on. They could get abortions done at a lower cost; they could sit in on the procedures to make sure that women were treated well. Jane began setting up makeshift clinics three days a week in their members’ apartments; they would observe the abortions, connect patients with OBGYNs for aftercare in case anything went wrong, and provide sex education, including free copies of Our Bodies Ourselves. 

Eventually, they discovered that their go-to abortion provider wasn’t really a doctor, as he’d told them he was. Some of the Janes were outraged by this news; many of them left. But others decided to stay on. After all, they thought, the abortions he had been providing had been effective and safe. And if he could do it, why couldn’t they? 

That’s how Jane, a radical feminist group, became a training ground for new, uncredentialed, feminist abortion providers. Jane members, none of whom were medical professionals, learned to perform safe dilation and curettage procedures: according to the Janes, in this period they were performing about 30 abortions per day, three days per week. It is estimated that Jane provided 11,000 abortions in its five-year history, spanning from 1968 to 1973. As a referral, education, and fundraising group, Jane was not unique: feminists across the country were banding together in resourcefulness and determination to help women get abortions. But few did what Jane did here: usurped medical authority and took the tools of freedom into their own hands. In this way, Jane didn’t just defy the law, they defied a whole hierarchy of knowledge and authority that made women dependent on others. 

Four members of Jane were arrested in 1972, and charged with felonies that could land them sentences of over a hundred years in prison. But Jane kept working. When Roe v. Wade was decided that January, making abortion legal in Illinois and across the nation, the charges against the members were dropped, and Jane packed up shop. They weren’t needed anymore. 

There are dangers in drawing too close a parallel between Jane’s pre-Roe era of abortion illegality and our own post-Roe reality. In the era of abortion medication, which was approved by the FDA in 2000, illegal and self-managed abortions no longer carry the same risks that they did when they were carried out almost exclusively via the much more dangerous catheter or dilation and curettage methods. Jane’s organization and the scale of their operation was made possible in part by a very different style of policing, one in which cops were less politicized against abortion (many of them knew that their own wives, daughters and mistresses, and those of their bosses, were obtaining abortions through Jane). They were helped, too, by the privilege of whiteness—Jane was an overwhelmingly if not exclusively white group—and by the presumption of respectability and innocence that the women in it enjoyed. 

There are dangers, too, in idealizing Jane. The group performed safe abortions, but not all of its patients turned out okay. One of the first referrals Jane made was for a young Black woman, whose black market abortion provider botched the procedure so badly that she wound up in the hospital with a lacerated cervix. She recovered, and Jane never sent another abortion seeker to that provider, but her injury was partially their fault. 

Surviving group members now speak with great regret of a patient they had some years later, after the women began performing abortions themselves, who came in to have Jane address the results of an incomplete abortion she’d had performed elsewhere. The patient—a Black teenager—had developed an acute infection. When the women told her of the severity of her condition, she fled. She must have been terrified: alone, sick, and very, very young. She was doing something illegal and stigmatized to try and get some control over her own life. Jane found out a few days later that the girl had died at a local hospital. If they had intervened more forcefully—if they had risked arrest to put her in a car and drive her to an emergency room—she might have lived. 

The Janes themselves were not models of perfect solidarity and sisterhood. There were fights, cliques, and petty rivalries in the group. Officially, Jane was totally leaderless and horizontally organized; unofficially, the whole thing was run by Jody Howard, a charismatic young mother who had once been denied an abortion at 26 even though she had been diagnosed with cancer. Jody, who died in 2010, is described by other Jane members as a force of nature. She was implacable, manipulative, principled, tireless, and extremely intense. She wasn’t always easy to work for, wasn’t always easy to get along with. Neither were the others. 

I say all this not to diminish Jane, but to humanize them. They were not angels or saints; they were not a small army of Joan of Arcs, suffering serenely in pursuit of righteousness. They were petty, funny, determined people, who had flaws and made mistakes. They were fully human, fully fallible, the whole time they were doing their work. What they accomplished in spite of this should strike us all as a challenge. If these all too human people could accomplish something that we now see as heroic, what might you—in all your messy humanity—accomplish yourself? 

This isn’t a hypothetical. The fact is that Jane’s example of hard work, resourcefulness, and determination is being recreated in our own post-Roe era. Because almost everything Jane did in their own time—the fundraising, the referrals, the education, the counseling, the defiance—is being done now by abortion funds. And this is another reason why it might be misguided to put Jane on a pedestal: in looking to the past, we can overlook what’s right here in the present. We don’t need bygone heroes. The heroes are already here.