Inside ‘The Janes’: How an underground network performed over 11,000 abortions before Roe v Wade
As a Supreme Court verdict that could result in the potential overturning of Roe v Wade is expected soon, HBO has released a documentary about a group of "unlikely outlaws” who, before Roe v Wade, "provided low-cost and free abortions to an estimated 11,000 women.” The New York Post spoke to one of the members of the underground abortion network ‘Jane’, who shared an incident from 1972.
Sheila Smith, who is featured in HBO's 'The Janes,' was a student at the University of Chicago when she was arrested, along with six other women. They were the part of ‘Jane’ and while being inside the police vehicle, the first thing they reportedly did was destroy a pile of index cards that contained the identities of women seeking illegal abortions. Smith, who is now 71, told The Post: “My first day of learning how to assist was the day I got arrested.”
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Smith, who lives in Queens, continued: “We didn’t want the names and telephone numbers of [our clients] to be given to the police. So we ripped the cards into pieces and ate all the parts that were relevant.” At the time, Smith along with several volunteers “risked their personal and professional lives” and helped thousands of women who needed abortions while going against “the state legislature that outlawed abortion, the Catholic Church that condemned it, and the Chicago Mob that was profiting from it,” the description of the film reads.
The documentary is directed by Tia Lessin and Emma Pildes. Lessin said: “These were very principled people that came out of the Civil Rights movement, the anti-[Vietnam] war movement, the student movement. They were mothers, grandmothers, aunts and students. But they were all united by their belief that women should be able to make this choice.”
The documentary reportedly features 11 interviews with the volunteers of 'Jane.' Among them is Heather Booth, who launched the group in 1968 after a friend requested her to help his "nearly suicidal" sister in getting an abortion. The Post reported that Booth "tapped her sources in the medical arm of the Civil Rights Movement and got Dr. T. R. M. Howard, a Civil Rights activist and surgeon, to agree to perform the abortion. Shortly thereafter, Howard was arrested for unlawfully terminating pregnancies, leaving women in need without a reliable and safe recourse.”
As the underground abortion ring was still in its nascent stages, ‘The Janes’ reportedly chose a person named Mike to perform the abortions as none of them had any knowledge about the procedure and nobody with a medical degree was ready to get involved. In the documentary, Mike said: “When I first learned [how to do an abortion], I was helping this surgeon from Detroit. For years, I watched him. I stood behind him, I handed him the tools. And then he said, ‘Come here, you do it.’”
He explained, “When I first met [the Janes], the lady said, ‘We’re going to have customers who have the money [for an abortion]. We’re also going to have customers who don’t have the money… and we’re going to do those for nothing. I said, ‘For nothing? Are you crazy? I’m not goin to do it for nothing!’”
Soon, ‘The Janes’ started having disagreements with Mike and some of them “went on to learn to perform abortions themselves.” The documentary has also reportedly shown that not all religious people were against them, like the Clergy Consultation Service, which included members of the priesthood. Rev Dr Donna Schaper said in the movie, “It’s not a theological argument. I’ve had two abortions and I felt that God was with me, at my side, in all of these choices. It was a God-given decision.”
Then, in 1973, the historic ruling in Roe v. Wade came out, making “unduly restrictive state regulation of abortion” unconstitutional. The court verdict not only “allowed would-be mothers to freely end unplanned pregnancies, it also gave the Janes’ shrewd attorney, Jo-Anne F. Wolfson, to get all charges against them dropped,” The Post added. However, abortion rights are once again in danger, Smith claimed. “I’m really worried about the future.”