The Jane Collective with Moira Donegan

"As long as the law is male, women must be outlaws." 

— Linnea Johnson 

This week, Moira Donegan takes us back to Chicago in 1969, when an underground feminist collective got fed up with doctors, and started providing abortions themselves. 

Moira's podcast In Bed with the Right
Moira in the Guardian
Moira on the tradwife

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https://www.bookforum.com/print/3004/lisa-selin-davis-s-confused-history-of-homemakers-25336
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Transcript

YWA - The Jane Collective

Sarah: He's said some stuff that made it clear he's learned a lot from the game Operation. 

Welcome to You're Wrong About. I'm Sarah Marshall, and today we are talking with Moira Donegan about the Jane Collective. Moira is a columnist. She is a writer whose work I've admired for years. She is the co-host of the In Bed with the Right podcast.

And if you listened to our last episode with Adrian Daub on Dungeons and Dragons, you'll know that he is the other co-host. And so I'm so lucky to be able to have her on as well and to have her tell me the story through her work as a historian of the Jane Collective, a group of feminists in Chicago who starting in the late 1960s, asked themselves the very important question, what would happen if we just learned how to provide abortions?

We have a couple of content warnings for this episode because in talking about a feminist collective learning to provide abortions, we first have to talk about why that was necessary and the forms of medical abuse that were involved in the act of seeking an abortion at that time. And of course, not just at that time. So that's a topic that we get into, and sexual assault is a theme in that as well. So listen with care. 

In addition, we also have a conversation that goes from about minute 35 to about minute 40, where we talk about some of the technical aspects of the procedure of a D&C abortion, both for the provider and for the patient. This is a really interesting part of the conversation and I think that the technical details and realities of abortion or really any other medical procedure that becomes highly politicized are always interesting to be able to learn about. But that might not be something that you want to hear about as you listen to this podcast today. So that's five minutes that you can skip if you need to, just skip on past 40 minutes or so, and we will be talking about something else. And that's about it. I'm really thrilled to bring you this episode and to cover a chapter of American history with Moira. 

I don't know if you've heard lately, but we're going to have an election soon. It's stressful to think about the human rights that might still disappear, but this is an episode about the hope that's still at the bottom of the box, regardless of what the law says. And it's an episode about what we can do for each other. We've got bonus episodes for you. If you liked the episode I did with Adrian on Dungeons and Dragons, we have one up this month or end of last month where we talk about Mazes and Monsters, the TV movie starring Tom Hanks and a lot of talented Canadians dramatizing the problem of Dungeons and Dragons, I mean Mazes and Monsters. So listen to that on Patreon or Apple+ subscriptions, if you feel like some 80s fear mongering. And I know I always do. 

Thank you for being with us. Thank you for listening. Thank you for journeying into the rest of the year with us. Enjoy your episode.

Welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast where we talk about the law and also about what it means to be an outlaw. And with me today is Moira Donegan. Moira, hello. 

Moira: Hi, Sarah. I'm so thrilled to be here.

Sarah: To quote Robin Hood, “I have an outlaw for an in law”. It doesn't make sense, but I've wanted to say it all my life.

Moira: I am thrilled to be here. I've been such a longtime fan of You're Wrong About. I think a lot of Millennials, it's been really core to my thinking and you've really changed the way I see the world. So now that I get to be on here, it really feels like a dream come true. 

Sarah: I find that shocking and amazing, because I have admired your work for such a long time. And I was saying to somebody not too long ago that I have been dining out on being like, Moira and I had a little drink once long ago, before so many other things happened in our lives. I've been watching the Twilight Zone this summer and thinking about how that show is made from an attitude of people living in a period where many unprecedented things have happened in a row. And there's a sense of what next? What can't happen at this point? And why not imagine robot grandmas and working-class guys just working in space? These are also unprecedented times. And I feel like something I was really excited about was bringing you on to talk about some recent unprecedented times and how we can learn from them. And do some history together. 

Moira: Yeah, this is one of my favorite moments in history because we're talking about abortion.

Sarah: Love it. 

Moira: We're talking about abortion during the new left, it's place in the new left. We're talking about abortion before Roe v. Wade And we're talking about this very complicated, contradictory, controversial, kind of crazy group of people and group of ideas that are collectively called, The Second Wave Feminist Movement. But we're also talking about, specifically, the Jane Collective. So Sarah, what do you know about Jane? 

Sarah: Yeah. I heard of the Jane Collective, I think, around the time that we met previously because I was as so many people already had been and continue to be at that moment, feeling interested in the specifics of how precarious abortion and reproductive justice felt in America.

Moira: So the Jane Collective, first of all, that they didn't call themselves that. They called themselves the Abortion Counseling Service of Women's Liberation. And the way that women found them was that they would call a number and ask for Jane. So Jane became their nickname. And they started off as something pretty typical, right? It was actually really common to find an abortion in the pre-Roe era, because abortions are, first of all, about as old as birth. People have been practicing pregnancy termination for millennia, and in the pre-Roe era, there was a really robust black market because abortions were really common. 

In fact, there's some evidence that they were a little more common than they were now. And Jane was also not that unusual as an activist group. There were groups of feminists and in fact, also of clergy, that were helping women to access abortions in the pre-Roe era. What makes Jane unique is a) their scale, they became much bigger and did a much higher volume of service work than a lot of these other groups managed to do. And b), which is that they wound up teaching themselves to perform D&C, or dilation and curettage abortions. And in fact, the feminists in that group, who were not doctors, wound up performing those abortions themselves. It is estimated that Jane, over the five years or so of its existence, from about 1968 to 1973, performed about 11,000 safe and illegal abortions. And that's pretty cool. 

These women who had been, a lot of them had been really young when Jane was operating. We're talking like the youngest were like 18, 19, so children, and the oldest were in their early forties. The Story of Jane: the Legendary Underground Feminist Abortion Service, this book was written by Laura Kaplan, who was a Jane member. And it was based on really extensive interviews, in which Laura Kaplan, she first published this book in 1995, I want to say. And everybody in this book has a pseudonym, including Laura Kaplan herself. She does not identify who was doing what at all. And around that same time, a documentary was made called Jane: An Abortion Service that also came out in 1995. 

And in that one, they interview a lot of Jane members. And they're all wearing sunglasses and like weird wigs and they will sometimes do that thing that television magazine shows used to do where they would just show the silhouette of somebody who's being interviewed anonymously and this black outline of a person tells you about their experience and that was because they had very real fears of harassment, right? Performing abortions is a great way to ruin your life personally, even if you're a doctor, even today. But also of prosecution, right? There was still some sense in which they feared the law and that was a legitimate fear. 

So to set up Jane and really show what these women did, I want to tell you a little bit about what life was like to be a woman and what trying to get an abortion was like in the 60s. How much do you know about it? 

Sarah: A bit, because I feel like I was very close to my mom growing up. I was an only child and I think I really had many of the attributes of a middle aged woman in the 90s. I was very close with her and she was born in 1948. So she was like, in college in the 60s and would talk about it a lot, as boomers famously do, that anyone who grew up raised by boomers grew up in the shadow of the long 60s, I feel. So my understanding of it was that it was legal in a couple of states early, I assume New York and California, and that often, if you wanted to get a legal abortion, and probably were like in college or something, you would fundraise to go to one of those places or try to get there. And if not, then you would presumably get something illegal. 

Moira: It actually wasn't legal anywhere until 1970 when New York decriminalized abortion up to 24 weeks. So more or less, if you want an abortion in the pre-Roe era, your options are to go overseas. People who could afford to were going to Japan, Japan was a big destination, England, some parts of Mexico where it wasn't legal, but it was accessible, and Puerto Rico. If you couldn't afford that, and most people couldn't, you would go onto a black market. 

And so in the black market, there are actually a lot of actual doctors performing abortions on the side. It is something that is considered like an easy way to pay off medical school debt. Prices were really high. So the Jane's talk about the cheapest black-market abortion available in Chicago in the late 60s is costing about $500. And average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Chicago at that time was $150. So you're talking about a couple months’ rent. And it's something that a lot of people can't really get the cash for because consider also that this is an era when there are not a ton of women in the workforce. Those who do go into the workforce get pushed out really quick, right? 

So there is no anti-discrimination protections based on sex or based on pregnancy or based on sexual harassment, right? It is totally legal for you to get fired when your boss finds out you're pregnant. It is totally legal for your boss to sexually harass you or demand sexual favors as a condition of your employment. And it's totally legal for him to fire you if you say no. 

And there's also not a lot of financial independence for women. This is also an era when a lot of women don't have the right to or access to their own credit cards or bank accounts. It is an era when divorce is legally a lot harder. No-fault divorce has not been widely adopted yet. And there is no concept of marital rape, which means there's no right to decline sex with your husband. There's also not a lot of contraception. The pill was approved by the FDA in 1960. It doesn't really work that well. The pill that the FDA approved in 1960 is not like the pill we have now. There's also no IUDs. There's no implants. There's no ring. There's none of that stuff. There's the pill. There's condoms, which are controlled by men, and there are diaphragms. The pill and diaphragms, you need to be married to get in a lot of states. Some states outlaw it entirely, right? 

So married couples didn't have a legally established right to contraception until 1965. Single people didn't have the right to contraception until 1972. So you have a lot of stories of women like buying a fake wedding ring for five cents at a Woolworths. And then wearing that to a doctor's appointment where they introduce themselves under a fake name as Mrs. So and so.

Sarah: As we learned in Goodbye, Columbus.

Moira: We learned so much from Goodbye, Columbus. 

Sarah: We really did, yeah. But it is just as you're going through this absolutely devastating list of legal non-existence. I'm just like, why do women want to go back to this? What's going, what? 

Moira: I think people forget actually what it meant and how bad it was. Like, if you're a millennial, you grew up with, as I did, like my parents telling me, stories about their glory days as hippies and leaving, for the most part, leaving this part out. 

Sarah: And it's no wonder the hippies were so pissed off at society because this was society. It's very reasonable to wear a poncho about all this.

Moira: I hate the smell of patchouli, but I'm like, I'm with them. But there's also just very little sex education. 

Sarah: Yeah. 

Moira: A lot of women don't know the names of their own organs. This is something that the Janes discover when they start providing and facilitating abortions. We need to intervene with sex education to empower these people who are coming to us. 

Sarah: Which again, it's like you look at 90s feminism and you're like, yeah, it was, by that point, it did perhaps seem a bit unnecessary for everyone to be so obsessed with looking at your vagina in a hand mirror. But think about what we were starting from. 

Moira: It was revolutionary. They'd never seen it before. 

Sarah: Yeah, like you really needed to. Yeah. 

Moira: There is this big black market of abortionists. Some doctors, a lot of guys who are not doctors, and they are really basically all guys. So the official gynecological world is, like most of the medical world, almost totally male. So in 1970, when Jane is operating in Chicago, 93% of OBGYNs in America are men.

Sarah: Which is simply excessive. Yeah. 

Moira: And they hold all the information; the information about women's bodies and the authority to control them is entirely in male hands. Yeah. 

Sarah: And I'm not going to say anything negative about men right now because I don't even have to. So why bother? It's just obvious that like a system where someone has absolute power over a patient who is seeking an expensive and illegal service that they can only get at the pleasure of the sole professional in the room, that's just a system that's ripe for abuse, you know? 

Moira: Yeah, and it was abusive, right? So when you do go, say you can find somebody who performs abortions, maybe he's a doctor, maybe he's not.

Sarah: We all saw Dirty Dancing. 

Moira: Yeah. Either way, you don't know, and you're doing something illegal. Yeah. And that means that there is no recourse if you're treated badly, and women were treated badly. The kind of famous stories about pre-Roe abortions are A), control of them was monopolized by the mob, right? People who were doing this were generally paying protection money to the mafia. And because it was an illegal procedure that also was stigmatized and seemed to reflect on the character of the women who needed them, the women who went for abortions were treated really badly, right? So it was common to wait at a pickup spot. 

And then have a mob guy come by in a car and pick you up. And it was very common to be blindfolded in the car. It was very common to be blindfolded during the procedure. It was very common for abortionists to be drunk, and it was very common for them to demand sexual favors. That was a really standard part of getting an illegal abortion. A lot of these guys were incompetent. A lot of them didn't clean the uterus out all the way, which led to really terrible infections. A lot of them were not gentle enough, so they could lacerate the cervix. 

And catheter abortions were really common, but a catheter abortion is really dangerous because it involves your cervix being open for a really long time, which is how you get infections. So a lot of people got infections. A lot of people got perforated organs. A lot of people got torn up on their inside because these are drunken people who don't care about you, who don't totally know what they're doing. And then fleeing the hotel room and leaving you bleeding. So every public hospital in the country had what was called a septic abortion ward. A lot of women survived those complications. Not all of them did. Deaths were common. 

Sarah: I don't know. I don't have anything to say to that except that it all feels so horrible and so close to where we are at this moment. 

Moira: This is the moment when we meet Heather Booth. Have you ever heard of Heather Booth?

Sarah: No.

Moira: She's still around. She's famous actually among like lefty activist types in our generation because she runs and has for decades run something called the Midwest Academy, which is like an activist training boot camp out of Chicago that teaches people how to be effective and organized left wing activists. And she was, in 1964, an undergraduate at the University of Chicago. 

Heather Booth was a nice suburban Jewish girl who had grown up in New York. And she was always a lefty. Her parents had been liberals. Her mom had read The Feminine Mystique when it came out in 1963 and had her like slightly older generation Feminist Awakening and Heather who's this lefty college student joins the Freedom Summer. What do you know about the Freedom Summer? 

Sarah: Was it primarily about largely white college students going to the South to register Black voters? 

Moira: Yeah, exactly. It was the summer of 1964. 1964, Heather Booth is bright eyed and bushy tailed. She was so cute. I've seen the pictures of her from this era. She’s got this brunette bouffant and these big eyes like saucers. She was adorable. And she goes down to the south to Mississippi and works on voter registration. And what happens with a lot of these white college students, especially the white women who join this effort, is that they see a different model of womanhood in these southern Black communities. 

These communities are pretty desperately impoverished. They are subject to a lot of racist violence and discrimination and political exclusion. But they are also communities in which women, Black women, from the south have a ton of leadership roles. They are respected. They are deferred to. They are seen as pillars of their community. That is really mind blowing for a lot of these young, white, middle-class women whose mothers have been housewives since World War II. So that is really eye opening, not just for Heather Booth, but for a generation of white activist college women. And it really sows the seeds of the radical feminist second wave. 

So Heather Booth finishes up her work on the Freedom Summer. She goes back up north to Chicago. And the next year, a guy she met down there on the Freedom Summer gives her a call. And he says, listen, my sister is pregnant. She's suicidal. She's freaking out. She doesn't want to have this baby. She wants to finish school. You have a lot of movement connections. Do you know somebody who can get her an abortion? And Heather Booth has never had to do this before, but she's the kind of person you call when you're in trouble. Those women, I'm sure you have some in your life who are just, they seem to have their shit together.

Sarah: I'm picturing one right now. 

Moira: Everybody thinks to call Heather and this guy thought to call Heather and she rises to the occasion. She calls a Black doctor who had connections to the Civil Rights movement and that guy gives this woman an abortion. And Heather is like, great, now I know how to get an abortion if I need one. Except that this first friend’s sister who she helps out then tells people, look, I got a good abortion and Heather is the one who helped me get it. So when other women are in trouble, they call Heather. 

By the way, they're calling a dorm room phone at the University of Chicago and Heather branches out. This one guy on the west side of Chicago, this Black doctor, he doesn't want a ton of white women hanging around his office. So she starts to look for other providers. And she finds one guy out in Cicero, which is a kind of shady suburb of Chicago at the time. And she's pretty sure he has mob ties. But what, a lot of women are doing this, right? These whisper networks about providers. 

What Heather Booth does that's a little different is that she calls the women who have gotten abortion afterwards and asks them how it was. So if it's gone really well, they tell her that. She's like, yeah, it was the price. He said he didn't pull any funny stuff. Everything seems okay. And then if it goes badly, they're like, yeah, no, he made me blow him, or no suddenly it was a hundred more dollars after, or I wound up in the emergency room because he didn't get everything out of there, and then I had an infection and I had to be on really gnarly antibiotics for a couple of weeks. She learns about what the underground abortion market looks like, and she also learns who's reliable and who's not. And this goes on for a long time. She becomes just like one woman clearinghouse. 

Sarah: And she has finals coming up.

Moira: What is this? Is this an old joke that you used to tell, teen lawyer? I think about it all the time now. 

Sarah: I'm so happy you remember teen lawyer. Yeah, because I had this idea for an imaginary TV show that I still want to do someday where it's a teenager who takes over her dad's law firm in Miami when he has to go on the run from the mob or something. It's the 80s. The tagline is that sometimes she's so busy being a lawyer, she forgets to be a teen. 

Moira: I think that like low key happens to Heather Booth, right? Heather Booth is holding the women of Chicago together with both hands. And at the same time, Heather Booth has become active in the nascent second wave, radical feminist movement in and around Chicago. So she knows a lot of women who are into this, and she starts branching out the work. She starts telling a bunch of her friends about what she knows. She starts telling some of the women who call her to call other people because it's a little too much for her. She does have finals coming up. By 1968, Heather Booth is married. She's in graduate school, and she is pregnant, and about to give birth to her first child, and meanwhile, demand for abortions is coming into her, has just grown and grown. 

Sarah: Wow. 

Moira: And she's like, listen, I can't handle this. And what she does is she decides to formalize this network that has been informal. She's like, I'm going to make it a real official group. I'm going to recruit feminists from this radical feminist group and these new left groups. A lot of women are becoming disaffected with the new left around this time because they're really misogynist. 

So there is hunger for these newly radicalized women to do something that's specifically about women's rights. And she brings a ton of women into her living room and starts recruiting and starts doing what sounds like a pretty rigorous political education. So she educates them about what an abortion is, which a lot of women don't know just mechanically how one works. She educates them about birth control. This group in Boston has just started putting out a little pamphlet called, “Our Bodies, Ourselves”. And the group that would become Jane, everybody got a copy and then they would give all their patients copies, eventually. 

And she starts doing a lot of really intense persuasion work with these women who are coming to these meetings about the need for direct action, the need to actually get the abortions to happen as opposed to doing more policy-based reform work, which is what groups like NOW and NARAL were starting to do around this time. And this goes on for kind of a long time, and it starts to piss off one of the women she's recruited. And this is a woman named Jody Howard, who's going to be our kind of second character. 

And Sarah, I love Jody Howard so much. She died in 2010, so she's not with us anymore. Jody Howard, in 1968, was a 26- or 27-year-old mother of two. She was already involved in the new left. She was working for the Chicago civil liberties union. So the local ACLU, and she had a cancer diagnosis. She was diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease, a kind of lymphoma during her second pregnancy, and she had not been able to get treatment for that cancer during her second pregnancy, which meant that the cancer, the disease really advanced while she was pregnant. Because the treatment would have damaged the fetus, right? And this experience almost killed her. 

And so after she gives birth to her second child, she starts banging down the doors of her hospital trying to get herself sterilized. She wants a tubal ligation. And the hospital says no. She gets letters from 10 different doctors. And they say no until they finally say yes. 

Sarah: Which is insane because patriarchal American medicine in the 20th century loves tying women's tubes, but only if the women don't know what's happening and haven't asked for it and don't want it. 

Moira: The other thing that's going on is that Jody Howard, through ACLU Here's some of the same hospitals that are denying her tubal ligation are in fact performing them on non-consenting Black women.

Sarah: And in the 1960s. When we talk about eugenics, we do tend to picture the 1920s. It's still with us. It never left. 

Moira: It was going on way later than you think. So Jody Howard gets her tubal ligation. She wakes up from the anesthesia and she hears through this kind of fog her surgeon's voice telling her, he said, okay, the surgery was a success. Your tubes are tied. You seem healthy. It all went well. And by the way Congratulations because you are pregnant. So the thing she was desperately trying to avoid happened. This thing that she very well believes will kill her. That she had to move heaven and earth to try and prevent. It's too late, she's already pregnant again. Jody is a person who is described in euphemism as impetuous, intense. She had a force of charisma. And she could also be, it's really clear, just a tremendous pain in the ass. 

And finally she does one of the most reliable and accessible ways to get an illegal abortion before Roe, which is that she convinced two psychiatrists, not one but two, that if she doesn't get an abortion she will kill herself. And then they give her an abortion. Jody Howard had never thought of abortion as a political issue before. She becomes radicalized by this experience, as I think you fucking would, right? 

Sarah: Trying to live, yeah. 

Moira: She's a 26-year-old mother of two with cancer who's on the board of the Chicago ACLU, and she is sitting in Heather Booth's living room being told how important abortion is. And she's like, fuck you, I know how important it is. This is like two different theories of organizing, right? There's one theory of organizing that says that you need to educate people before you can deputize them to go out in the world and organize and change things because that will prevent them from making mistakes. And there's another theory of organizing that says doing the work is what changes you. 

And Jody Howard very much believed in the latter, right? She's chomping at the bit. She's like, give me the number of your guy because I want to be able to direct people there. So what happens is they decide to set up a phone line. One of these women, her name is Eleanor, agrees to let it be just like her home phone answering machine. So it's just literally her home phone number and that is Jane's number. So the outgoing answering machine says if you have a message for the Oliver's or for Jane, leave a message and we'll call you back. So women will call in and they will leave some details usually about their situation, right? So date of last menstrual period, any allergies, their age, how much money they have. And these details will be written down on index cards. And then when Jane meets, I believe they meet once a week, these index cards get passed around the circle of women and women will select an index card of somebody to call back and counsel. 

One of the first things that Jane did was they would figure out what kind of service this woman actually needed, right? Because not all of their providers would do it for the amount of money this woman might have had. Not all of their providers would do it at the stage of pregnancy that she was at. Sometimes there were specific vulnerabilities, look, my husband can't know about this, or my father can't know about this, my dad's a cop, was something that some women said. Heather Booth had, during her time running Jane, solo already set up a loan fund. So she would charge women as much as she could get out of them, really. And women were really encouraged to come up with as much money as they could. And then when somebody was truly desperate, they would cover as much of it as possible. 

So the way abortion funds work now really is you pay, there's a big pot of money, anybody can pay into it and then when there is a deficiency of funds on the part of a patient, some of it gets covered. And then this gets a lot bigger, right? So they would meet one on one with these patients for a counseling session. It was very important to Jane that the woman, the patient, is the one who said abortion first. They would say, I understand you have a problem. Saying, “I want an abortion, I am looking for an abortion”, that has to come from the patient, both for legal reasons and also for ethical reasons. They really wanted the patient to have a sense of ownership, right? 

Counseling sessions would be work to establish that this patient wanted an abortion to educate them as much as possible about what an abortion was and what was going to happen. So they would do as much to be like, okay, this is what is going to be done to you. This is how your body works. But also this is what the day is going to look like. You're going to go to this place. He might say X, he looks like Y. But Jane was not with the women when they had those abortions in the early years. For a long time, they had no control over this period when the abortion was actually taking place. They would follow up later, they would ask how it went. But the abortionists themselves were like, I don't want all these people here. 

And then this is when Jody has the idea that they need an in-house guy. And they find an in-house guy in that Cicero, suburban, mob connected guy. Because everybody who's gone to him has had a great experience. And Jody's like, I have a negotiating tactic. Because the fact is we are getting a lot of business in, people are finding out about Jane. They have placed an ad in a newspaper, an underground feminist newspaper. They have put up flyers around college campuses all over Chicago. They have distributed a pamphlet with their number on it at all the women's liberation groups, of which there are a shocking number in Chicago at the time. And they start to realize that also the knowledge of their service is being passed around to OBGYNs. So OBGYNs will say, I can't help you get rid of this pregnancy, but if you call this number, maybe they can. And that's how a lot of women are coming to Jane, and they've got more business then they think they should be paying retail for. Jody meets up with a guy who says he's a representative of Dr. Kaufman, Dr. Kaufman is the guy out in Cicero. She gets there, she realizes pretty quickly that it just is Dr. Kaufman. And Dr. Kaufman, as far as I know, he's still alive, he's not, as far as I know, given his real name in public. It's not crazy hard to find out. He is a handsome dumbass. He's like, you can't take advantage of me. And Jody Howard proceeds to completely take advantage of him. She railroads this guy, she gets him to drop his price. 

Sarah: Fantastic. Just by promising a certain amount of business? 

Moira: At least 10 a week. 

Sarah: Oh wow, okay. 

Moira: And they have to hustle, but they do make it happen. And they start working with him really regularly. And this is where Jane really picks up steam. They've got leverage over this guy. They say look, we're going to bring you so much business, you're going to make so much money. But you're going to do things our way. For instance, we're going to be there. You're going to do it at a place that we tell you to do it. You're going to come to us, and we're going to be in the room. We are going to be treating these patients the way we want to treat them with all this education. And we're going to be treating them with a lot of respect. 

So they set up a situation where they start using their own apartments. They do three days a week. It's about 30 abortions a day, in which one apartment serves as what they call the front, which is where people are told to go. There's often kids there. So abortion patients’ children are running around. There's one anecdote in which they're making a pot roast because they want to give everybody lunch. There's often refreshments. And patients are allowed to bring with them to the front an emotional support person, who's often a sister or a friend. And then from the front, they are checked in and they are driven to what's called ‘the place’, which is where the abortions actually take place. It's another apartment. And they're driven in circles, right? You make a lot of turns, the money is collected in the car on the way, and they're supposed to get a little turn around and not know where they're going, and they're also supposed to evade being followed. 

Now, by the time Jane is operating this way, they already know that the police know what they're doing. People will come to them who are the daughters, the wives, the mistresses of police officers, DAs, judges, prominent businessmen. This is the preferred way to get an abortion in Chicago because everybody knows it's safe. Dr. Kaufman is, he's got high cheekbones. He's blonde. He's always tan. The pictures of him when he was young are like, oh, you're like a stupid surfer guy.

Sarah: He's like Dr. Kildare. He's serving doctor. 

Moira: Yeah, well he's not serving doctor. 

Sarah: Oh, okay.

Moira: And he's very informal, but he's very respectful. A lot of these black-market abortion providers that we talked about, they were drunk, they were rude, they were cruel, they were abusive, they were predatory. He's nice. He is saying, okay, we're going to do this together. This part's going to hurt, but it won't hurt a lot. This is not how medical care works at this time. That kind of interaction with a medical provider is not crazy to me. These women all report that it's nuts to them they're being looked in the eye, addressed by name, spoken to in soothing, friendly ways as an equal. And the other thing about Dr. Kaufman is that he's really good at his job. Not just at putting the patients at ease, but technically. Nobody has a problem. He's really good at it. He's not creating infections. He's not creating lacerations. 

Sarah: And maybe this is a good moment to talk about what the procedure actually involves for the most part.

Moira: And there are several different kinds. The one that Jane was performing was called a D&C or dilation and curettage. And what a D&C is, you dilate the cervix, so that you go in through the vagina, you dilate the cervix, and then you scrape out the inside of the uterus. So functionally, this means that when you're having it done well, a local anesthetic will be injected into the cervix because it hurts. I don't know if you've ever had an IUD inserted, but that also involves a cervical dilation and they usually don't use an anesthetic for those, because it's such a brief procedure. 

An abortion takes a little longer, and if you're having it done well, they will numb that area. Black market abortions almost never included pain management, precisely because you had to be able to get up and walk out of there really quickly, and also because it was harder to get. Jane, or really Jody Howard, had persuaded a sympathetic pharmacist to sell them in bulk. Syringes, anesthetics, antibiotics, and something called ergotrate, which is a useful post abortion drug that causes contractions of the uterus, which can help clear out anything that's left over. 

So you numb the cervix, right? And then once the cervix is numb, you start inserting a series of dilators. They look like long silver snakes. They're really long. And you start with a small one to begin to open the cervix. And then once that is in, you can insert a larger one. And then finally you can insert a speculum or the speculum has already happened. Sorry. You can insert a pair of forceps through the cervix into the uterus and you can use those forceps to clamp down on the solid matter which will be fetal matter and it will be placental matter. And you pull that out through the vagina and then you go in with a curette which looks like an impossibly long spoon and you use the spoon to very gently scrape the sides of the uterus to get the leftovers out. And that's an important part because if you leave something in there, a bit of placenta, a bit of whatever, that can become an infection that can kill you. So you really want to make sure you're scraping pretty thoroughly and getting everything out of there. 

And it's hard because when you're doing this, you can't really see what you're doing. You're going by feel and if you're doing a good job, you're trying to be really gentle. Both cause this is a person's body who is feeling what you're doing and has to live in that body. And also because if you're too aggressive, you can lacerate or even perforate the organs. You can lacerate the vagina, the cervix, or the uterus. And this is one way that people wound up getting really hurt or even killed is that something would go through those. 

Sarah: Yeah. I guess it feels like there's so many areas of possible error that could be either extremely dangerous or just unnecessarily painful.

Moira: Yeah. Often in the aftermath, some people bleed a lot. You want to have, in some cases, especially if you're in a non-medical environment like this, people, or Jane likes to prescribe a preventative antibiotic. And sometimes you want to be able to follow up afterwards to make sure that it's actually empty and that you're not at risk of infection. So another part of Jane's work was establishing a network of OBGYNs, like straight officials above board OBGYNs who they could call if they had a medical issue that they didn't understand or who they could send people to for follow up appointments. And this guy, he's really good at it. They don't exactly respect him, but they like him. But he seems a little shady. This one woman who was working with Jane at the time was like, yeah, one time I made a joke about how I was going to pursue this other career as a safe cracker and start robbing safes and Dr. Kaufman perked up and said, oh yeah, I know how to crack a safe and started giving me tips. So as you might have deduced by now, Dr. Kaufman was not a real doctor. 

Sarah: I didn't deduce that! I'm surprised. This is great. 

Moira: The way he tells the story, he grew up in Detroit and he was working as a union construction guy, and it wasn't making a lot of money. And he was like the ne'er do well black sheep of the family. And his brother was like, look, I'm going to set you up with a guy I know who does illegal abortions because that is reliable work. My mom used to tell me that when I grew up, I should be an undertaker because it was a recession proof industry. Abortion's like that. 

Sarah: Yeah, I'm sure that someone who knows more about economics could argue with that, but certainly I can't. Yeah, there's something very comical to me about going from being in construction to the thriving black market abortion industry. But he was good at it. I can't complain. 

Moira: He describes this as a big professional step up for him because he apprentices with a guy who is a real legit surgeon who is doing abortions on weekends and nights to make extra money. And he's assisting that guy and that guy eventually teaches him and his account is that the surgeon says the most important thing is to be gentle. You have to be very gentle. But he describes it as an advancement in his professional career. He's like, look, I was making more money for work that was much less physically taxing. And it wasn't dirty. He's like, I didn't get dirty. I got dirty working construction. I never got dirty performing abortions. 

But Jody, who is sitting in on hundreds of abortions by this point, it's 30 abortions a day, three days a week. It's a lot. It's high volume. She starts saying, what are you doing there? Tell me what you're doing. How do you- can I hold that? And eventually he says, you try it. And Jody performs her first abortion. Anybody who works in the medical field and OBGYN students now talk about this all the time. A lot of it is muscle memory. A lot of this is just doing something a million times so that you know what you're supposed to expect. You know what it feels like. You know what the motions are like. You know what to look for. And Jodi does it enough that she starts feeling confident to do it herself and she immediately starts training the other women. The doctor tells this story as, I wanted to get out of the business, I was done. Jane tells the story as we swindled this guy out of our own need for him. 

So suddenly the doctor, who is not a doctor anyway, is out of the picture. Now, I want to talk about medical credentials here, medical authority. Jody knew this guy wasn't a doctor, more or less from the job, right? The women who are closest to him have put it together. No medical school gave this guy a piece of paper. You know what I mean? 

Sarah: He said some stuff that made it clear he's learned a lot from the game Operation. 

Moira: Yeah. And that's a closely guarded secret. Officially, Jane is non-hierarchical. It's totally horizontally organized. There's no leaders. It's a collection of equals. Unofficially, at this point, Jody Howard is totally in charge. She is running everything. She's assigning people roles. She's scheduling the abortions. She's witnessing the abortions. It's Jody. And Jody doesn't tell the rest of Jane that this guy's not a doctor. 

Finally, somebody finds out, is upset, and is like, Jody, if you don't tell them, I will. So Jody tells a group of Jane, she's like, listen, he's not really a doctor, and this is really upsetting to the women who are working insanely hard, by the way. They are committing felonies. They are risking their freedom. They're risking their husband's freedom, right? A lot of husbands are effectively accessories to these felonies. They are letting this happen in their homes. They are driving women to this guy. They are counseling women. And in these counseling sessions, they are referring to the doctor, right? 

According to Laura Kaplan's book, about half of Jane leaves. And the other half says wait a minute, things are going well. These are medical successes and women who have had Jane abortions described it as the best medical experience of their lives because it was so friendly because it was so equal. And so that mystique of medical authority, the white coat, the name doctor, that gets exploded, right? And so the women who stayed became abortionists. And so women who were comfortable with the idea of referring their patients to an abortion provider who was not in fact a doctor, pretty quickly became comfortable with the notion of becoming the provider themselves and performing the abortion themselves. And this is really where Jane is historically unique. 

This is something that the other whisper networks, formalized abortion advocacy groups, this is actually not something they were doing. This is where Jane is actually different. I think Jane can get historicized in a way that makes it seem much more unique than it was. But this aspect of their practice is legitimately crazy and different. 

Sarah: And why do you think that they were able to make that leap where others didn't? 

Moira: I think Jodie Howard's experience and the force of her charisma kind of can't be understated. We talked about how Heather Booth is the woman who has her shit together, who you call when something is going wrong. Jody, I can almost hear myself defending her to her friends. They're like, we're exasperated by her. She's impossible. She was very intense, but I think the force of her confidence instilled a lot in these women, but also like the data acquired from experience. Because they had seen this happen so many times. It became so normal for them, because they were seeing like 90 of them every week, right? So its stigma got dispelled for them. It's mystery got dispelled from them. And I think through the force of experience, they changed their minds about what they were capable of. 

Sarah: And did the patients know? How much do we know about how all that worked?

Moira: Some patients had such good experiences that they then tried to help. That was one of the main ways that Jane recruited, actually. In its latter years wasn't just through the women's liberation movement, but they recruited new volunteers and members from their patient pool and the patients. A lot of the patients were really just scared. For some women, Jane was a means to an end. And for a lot of them, it was a genuinely radicalizing experience. But then something changes that makes this story a little more complicated from our perspective, because I want to talk about what happened in 1970. Do you know much about what happened in 1970? 

Sarah: No, tell me.

Moira: New York state becomes one of the first states to decriminalize abortion. It's the result of a really fearsome lobbying effort by New York state feminists. These are abortion bans that had been on the books for a hundred years in most states at that point. They were really old laws. Enforcement had really stepped up during and after World War II. But this had been something that had become, really, a public health crisis. So there had become this shift in public opinion around abortion in the years before Roe and a real pressure to liberalize and change these laws. And in New York, this decriminalization bill passed by one vote. 

Sarah: Wow. 

Moira: Of a guy who completely, he changed his vote at the last minute and completely sacrificed his own career. He was from a really heavily Catholic district. It's kind of interesting, it's also how the 19th amendment passed. One guy at the last minute changed his vote and gave women the right to vote. But this completely changed the landscape of who Jane was serving in Chicago, right?

Sarah: Okay, interesting.

Moira: It's one income threshold to be able to get on a plane and go to Japan or Puerto Rico. It's a much lower income threshold to be able to get on a plane and go to New York. You can go to New York from Chicago on a plane in the morning, get your abortion, and be back home in Chicago by dinner. 

Sarah: And your parents never know what happened.

Sarah: Indeed, a lot of people didn't. So everybody who could afford to, frankly, a lot of the younger white college students who Jane had been serving, those women were no longer in need of an illegal abortion because they could go to New York and get one for this three-year period. And so their clientele starts becoming almost exclusively very poor women of color. Jane itself is overwhelmingly white. And this is in a moment when the Black civil rights movement, and particularly the Black national movement, like the Black Panthers, actually opposes abortion rights.

Sarah: I didn't know that.

Moira: Because Black communities in the US, as we have talked about, are being subject to forced sterilization in really massive numbers. That birth control pill that the FDA approved in 1960, it had been initially tested on large numbers of Dominican and Puerto Rican women, not all of whom were consenting. Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, had allied with eugenicists at the beginning of the 20th century to try and popularize the notion of birth control. So the idea that birth control and abortion might be tools of white people to try and limit the number of Black people. That actually wasn't as crazy as it sounds now. 

Sarah: That's the thing. This is the kind of conspiracy theory where you're like, look, historically speaking, you're not wrong. 

Moira: To the Black Panthers’ credit, they really got rid of this by the end of their prominence, based largely because Black women pushed back, like Angela Davis’ writings about this, being like, you guys need to cut the shit, is worth reading. I think it's in Women, Race, and Class. And this means that Black women, especially poor Black women who might be involved in the kind of radical circles that were feeding people to Jane that Jane was overlapping with, were under this kind of double bind. And some of the Jane women talk about this coming up in counseling sessions because on the one hand they wanted to end their pregnancies, right? And they wanted control over their own body. But the people who are available to help them do that looked really white, it was a really white group. 

The Jane women are like, we're sure that we messed up and said something really insensitive and stupid, more than once, and I'm sure that happens too, if my own experiences with like white second wave feminists are any indication, they do say shit where you're like, don't say that. Please don't go there. But then on the other hand, they have these Black nationalists, the Panthers were really active in Chicago at the time, who they really admire, who are giving dignity and self-respect to their communities. But who are also saying, you are a traitor to us if you try to control your own body this way. Kind of nobody is doing great for Black women. Nobody is treating them quite the way that they deserve. 

Sarah: Yeah, not like now. 

Moira: Thank God we solved that, right? But Jane winds up in this uncomfortable situation where they're all white and most of their patients are Black. Yeah. To their credit, they were like, this isn't good. This looks bad. So Jane starts trying a little more assertively to recruit from their patient pool among these Black women who are like, I'm sorry, you want me to commit a felony? For sisterhood? They're looking at the risk that these white women are taking and they're like, that's a bigger risk for me than it is for you. 

Sarah: For those of us whose dads aren't judges. 

Moira: Yeah, exactly. It doesn't really work. They don't get a lot of takers. And frankly, Jane stays pretty white and for the rest of its existence, its clientele is pretty Black. 

Sarah: Which makes sense because it is fundamentally a criminal enterprise, right? And that is just something that, as a white woman society, historically, and particularly, a college educated middle or upper middle class white woman, you do have the ability to break a lot of laws and be like, oh, was that illegal?

Moira: I think you're setting us up perfectly for what happens on May 3, 1972, which is a typical day. They describe it as an especially busy day, and there's a pot roast in the oven. 

Sarah: Yeah, there's pot roast in the air. 

Moira: So it smells good, it's a little before lunch, and cops break into the apartment. This is at the place, this is not at the front, this is at the place. So they find a room full of women waiting. They start banging on the doors of the bedrooms, which is where the actual abortions are being done. 

Sarah: Why can't the police ever enter politely. 

Moira: apparently there was like a boot-mark on the door from when they actually kicked it in. But meanwhile, women who are having abortions are frantically trying to put on their clothes. They're saying the cops are here, the cops are here, Chicago PD. They're throwing curettes and dilators out of the window. They are apparently trying to eat the index cards that have the names and phone numbers and last menstrual period dates of all the women they're supposed to see that day. 

Four women of Jane get arrested. And they are charged each with 11 counts of abortion and conspiracy to commit abortion, which are felonies, and each of them are looking up to 110 years in prison.

Sarah: Jesus Christ.

Moira: So this has actually happened just a couple of weeks after Jane has lost their leader because Jody Howard has checked herself into a psych ward.

Sarah: Yeah, I bet it's been a stressful few years. 

Moira: This is an incredibly stressful enterprise. Everybody in Jane talks about it, not just as this almost lifetime original movie gauzy, inspirational story. They talk about it as one of the most difficult things they've ever done. 

Sarah: Oh my god. Yeah. Just from an admin perspective, can you imagine? 

Moira: It's a tremendous amount of work. 

Sarah: Yeah. 

Moira: But it also is putting them into prolonged, repeated, and very intimate contact with women who are in an incredible amount of emotional pain and fear. 

Sarah: Yeah. 

Moira: The way they actually get caught is that Jody checks herself into the psych ward. She's like, I can't do it right now. I have cancer. I have two children. I'm running this, it's too many spinning plates. I get the impression that it was hard to be Jody already, and she takes on this kind of enormous task. And so she has to take a step back. So she's not there. 

But what happens is that one of their abortion patients, who's a woman from the Polish community in Chicago, tells her sisters in law that she's pregnant and that she's having an abortion. And she hates their no-good brother. And the sisters in law, who are Catholics, go to the Chicago PD and say, our sister-in-law is going to have an abortion and we want you to stop it. And that's when the cops decide that they have to act. 

Sarah: So never tell your in-laws stuff is the moral of that one.

Moira: Don't tell anybody. This is how abortion criminalization happens, even now. It's that somebody you can't trust finds out and turns you in. And that's why what happened with Jane, and they were staring down a lot of jail time. They get bailed out because they are nice white ladies. They tell stories about being in jail overnight. One of them is a nursing mother. And has to empty her breasts into a dirty jail sink. They talk about being locked up with all these sex workers who've been arrested, who are trying to calm them down and tell them jokes. 

But then there's also people in there who are like withdrawing from drugs. Jail's not a nice place to be. So they do have to spend a little bit of time in jail, but they do get bailed out, especially the nursing mother, Judith, who gets out first, but then they've got a criminal case. They've got a felony case. And meanwhile, the arrest of Jane and the breakup of this abortion ring has been published, publicized all through Chicago. 

Sarah: They're the Chicago Four. 

Moira: They have, Sarah, the sexiest mugshots. They look so good. They look amazing. And they look very young and glamorous. And they've got like the frizzy, 1970 hair. And they look so cool. 

Sarah: Yeah. I love the hot women's lip, no makeup look, just slap on some big sunglasses and talk to the press. Yeah. It's the best. 

Moira: It's amazing. We got to bring it back. Jane is now not really a secret anymore, but this is crazy to me, they keep operating.

Sarah: Oh my god. 

Moira: Their demand goes through the roof. Jody has to check herself out of the psych ward. 

Sarah: Oh, poor Jodi. 

Moira: Well four of their best abortionists have been locked up and are out of the game. 

Sarah: Yeah. 

Moira: So Jodi has to come back. She starts performing abortions nearly constantly. 

Sarah: Oh my god. 

Moira: And meanwhile, the arrested women get a movement lawyer, this no bullshit woman called Joanne Wolfson. They hear about a case coming out of Texas, it's going to the Supreme Court. And Joanne says, look, I'm going to stall. And they ran out the clock until January 22nd, 1973, which is when Roe v. Wade is decided. The abortion bans of 46 States, including Illinois, are struck down as unconstitutional. And the charges against the Jane four are mooted. 

Sarah: Now that's some good lawyering. 

Moira: That's it for Jane. They throw themselves a party. They call it the Curate Caper. And they pack up shop, and they all go their separate ways. 

Sarah: This is like a League of Their Own. Although, obviously, different in at least one key way.

Moira: The League of Their Own has the kind of petty fighting. It's something that I really like about Jane is that many of them were quite petty people. You hear about their internal operations and there were Janes who annoyed each other. And there were Janes who had alliances and who would gossip about the other ones and who would disagree about how to run the place. And it was actually an incredibly human endeavor. These were profoundly normal people. 

Sarah: Yeah, it's a story of people in an imperfect time coming up with the best solutions they can thing by thing. And that's just what people do. And we'll keep doing it, I don't know. I would love to know what you feel excited about looking around today, the way people are. responding to our current moment. That might be a tall order though. 

Moira: Oh my god, no, I feel like actually what we're seeing, everything heroic about Jane: childcare, fundraising, transportation, sex education, all this stuff is being done by abortion funds. Donate to an abortion fund, volunteer with an abortion fund, if you think this is the kind of crazy heroism that you can only aspire to in your own life. I'm telling you, there's women who are doing it right now in your local area and you can help them. I think every story of oppression is also a story of resistance, right? That's true for every issue, for every historical epoch. It's always true that people fight back against injustice, and they don't do it because they tap into some secret part of themselves that is saintly, they do it with the full breadth of their imperfect personhood. And it's happening right now. I feel so inspired by the work that abortion funds are doing right now.

Sarah: I do, yeah, I do too. And I feel like everybody now who goes to screenwriting school is like, all right, you got to do the hero's journey. You got to do old Joseph Campbell, Luke Skywalker, whining on the farm, getting invited to adventure. He grows, he changes. It's a low point. It's a high point. You end up back where you started, Frodo Baggins. And those are good stories. But I think our obsession with that kind of story is the big scale epic narrative that Americans love to tell is also based on our historical obsession with the great man theory of history. 

And this idea that America was invented by five guys, and they thought up equality all by themselves without even any help from the human beings who they legally owned, if you can imagine that. And I think this very patriarchal idea that we can trace is one of the ways that we talk about ourselves as a country and a culture of history is made by a handful of amazing men who are the protagonist of the story and perhaps you too are the protagonist and that means you can be a real dick to everybody because they're smaller and less important than you. 

And really, what I think are so important to tell as a balance to that and as a way to conceptualize what we are and what we can do is these stories of collective action and of groups of people who individually are imperfect, but come together to do, also something imperfect, but something much bigger than themselves.

Moira: Yeah, it took a lot of people. Jane always had a really high turnover. People would be a part of it for a couple months, and they'd be like, this is really intense. I need to take a step back and somebody else would come in. And Jane took a lot out of people who participated in it, which is why it had to be a collective. It couldn't be one person doing this all by themselves. 

Sarah: We need more of this kind of movie at Thanksgiving. Nobody liked Napoleon. 

Moira: It is an epic story, right? 

Sarah: Yeah, there's pot roast involved. I feel so honored to have had you here and where can people find you and what have you done that you're proud of and what do you have coming up that you're excited about to take the Broad City question?

Moira: So I am a columnist at The Guardian. Find me there. I am a freelance writer. I do a lot of writing about gender and politics and women's history all around. I write for Bookforum a lot. I should probably stop saying that until, unless they get sick of me. But I'm often in Bookforum. I wrote about Jane for Bookforum and I love writing there. And you can always find me on Twitter, the bad place. I'm @MoiraDonegan. Much to my chagrin I'm on Twitter about a thousand times a day, so you can always contact me there. 

Sarah: And you do a podcast, too. 

Moira: Oh, that's right. I also have a podcast. It's called In Bed with the Right. We cover conservative understandings of sex and gender. And Sarah was nice enough to come on and talk about Anita Bryant, the homophobic singer from the 70s, who's such a crazy story. 

Sarah: I loved doing that episode with you and I love the work that you do. And I feel your writing to me is such a pleasure because you get into the complicated nature of things. And I feel like that's really, to me, like one of the big purposes of writing is to let life be as complicated as it is and rise. And the complexity of your thought and your work to meet that occasion. And I always feel smarter when I read what you wrote, which is, in this world, in this time and place, most things make us just feel overwhelmed and stupider. So that's a big one. 

Moira: Thank you, Sarah. That means so much coming from you. 

Sarah: Yeah. Thank you so much. This has been perfect. And yeah, let's just keep breaking the law to the greatest extent we feel comfortable with.

And that was our episode. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for being here with us. Thank you to Moira Donegan for being our wonderful guest and for telling me more about the world that we live in. You can find Moira on In Bed with the Right if you want to listen, and you can find Moira's writing at The Guardian, as well as many other places where fine opinions are sold.

Thank you to Carolyn Kendrick for editing and producing this episode. We will see you in two weeks.