The Jane Collective: How college students started an underground abortion network

the Internet. In the wake of the devastating Supreme Court decision over twnting Row versus Wade, the Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion in the United States, I've been thinking a lot about the Jain Collective and Heather Booths today.

Heather Booth is seventy six years young, and when she was a young student in Chicago, she started the Jain Collective, an underground network that provided some eleven thousand abortions from nineteen sixty nine to nineteen seventy three, at a time when abortion was illegal and most of the United States. I spoke to Heather back in when I was the host of the podcast Stuff Mom Never Told You, and

we're listening to her story this week. I was reminded that when she was young, she was organizing to make changes that must have seemed super far fetched until they weren't. It's a story of hope and promise and I feel like we could all use a little of that right now. And just f y I I was a much greener interviewer and podcast host back in so you know, keep that in mind as you're listening. Hey, this is Bridget

and you're listening to stuff mom ever told you. And today we're continuing our series all about abortion, brtting you stories about a portion that you might not know about. And today's story is the Jain Collective. Now I want you to imagine it's nineteen seventy you're pregnant and you need not to be but row of you Aide is a few years away. An abortion is still illegal now.

Before this landmark nineteen seventy three Supreme Court decision, terminating a pregnancy meant taking a gamble on a back alley abortion provider. Maybe they'd be competent, maybe they wouldn't be. But when you're pregnant and desperate, you don't really have a lot of options. For women living in the sixties and seventies, this was a reality. And then on Chicago South Side, women began organizing an underground network to do

something about it. In nineteen sixty five, Heather Booth was a nineteen year old college student at the University of Chicago. Her friend's sister was pregnant and needed an abortion. Now, Booth had been active in the civil rights movement and connected her friend's sister to a doctor willing to perform an a legal abortion. After that, she started getting more and more calls from women, housewives, students, and the siblings

of police officers. That's when Booth knew she needed to start a network, known officially as the Abortion Counseling Service of Women's Liberation. Heather Booth started an underground network to connect women to abortions, using the code name Jane. As it was still a crime. I remember this ad that said pregnant need help, called Jane, So I called Jane.

Jane ultimately served over ten thousand women before a Row of View Wade made abortion legal in nineteen In the beginning, the network connected pregnant women with doctors, but eventually they realized that many of the people providing abortions weren't doctors at all. That's when the women and Jane started performing

abortions themselves. The women were not doctors, but according to the Chicago Tribune, their skills were attested to by a doctor who risked his license by doing post operative checkups on clients. At this point, the Jane Collective was providing abortions for as many as sixty women a week. Jane's facilities were rated by the police. During the raid, police asked all the women identified the doctor who was performing the abortions, obviously expecting to find a man, but there

was no man. The group was arrested and the media called them the Jane Seven. After being indicted by a grand jury, their case was only dismissed thanks to the Supreme Courts legalization of abortion in nineteen After this quick break, we'll hear from Heather Booth about how Jane got started. Today. I am so so humbled and thrilled to be joined by the legendary Heather Booth. Heather, thank you so much

for being your dying well you are your your a legend. Well, I'm so glad to be talking with the amazing bridget Todd and what a service you're doing for the public providing this information out about some of the stories that are not as well known exactly, that's really what we want to do with this series. Everybody feels like they know a lot about abortion and about you know, reproductive health, but there are so many stories about abortion in choice

that people might not. Oh, you know, the Jane Network was such a critical thing for these women who were living, you know, while before Reviewade was enacted, and you know, people don't even really know about it. Glad to describe of how it came about and and Uh, I appreciate your spreading the word to let people know that if we organize, we can change the world. We have changed the world, and we need to change the world and the story of organizing the Jane Network is one important

example of that. So let's talk about Jane. So when you started Jane, you were just a nineteen year old student at the University of Chicago. So what was your life like before you started Jane? Say a little bit about my life and also a little bit about what women's lives were like in general. H For me, I was brought up in a family UH that was very loving and believe that people should follow the Golden rule. We should treat each other as we wanted to be treated,

and I carried that with me. I became active in

the civil rights movement. In nineteen sixty four, I went to Mississippi with the Freedom Summer Project, and some of you may have heard about it, because that was the time when the civil rights movement was recruiting northern students to come down to Mississippi because in Mississippi, black lives did not matter in nineteen sixty four, and they thought that the attention of northern students might bring additional visibility and potential power to shine a spotlight on what was

going on in Mississippi. And during that summer, the three young men, Andrew Goodman, James Cheney, and Michael Schwerner were killed at the hands of the clan. What people may not know is that while they were looking for the bodies of the three men, they found bodies of other black men whose hands have been bound or feet chopped off, and those murders weren't even investigated once the bodies were

found until years later. But because people organized, there was a voting right back within a year, and Mississippi now is more African American elected officials than any other state in the country. And mentioned that because it was formative for some of the ideas that led to Jane, which is that you have to stand up to unjust authority. If you take action, you can make change, and that sometimes there even are risks, but together we can really

build a better world. I returned back to my campus and a friend of mine had been raped at nice point in her bed in off campus housing. We went with her to Students Help to get a gynecological exam for her, but was told that Students Help didn't cover gynecological exam and she was given a lecture on the promiscuity. Now, because we sat with her, they called it to sit in.

But over time, because people protested and organized, now student health would cover gynecological exams and people would be given careful comforting counseling, and there also is UH support and attention about the crisis of rape on campus. Those changes happen because people organized. We still look much further to go. There's still our attacks on women's health plan parents that is under attack, but we make progress when we organized. And those were some of the lessons that I learned

also from the civil rights movement on the campus. To give a sense of how women retreated broadly, UM, I formed a pulled together a group called the Women Radical Action Program or wrapped w r a c H, and we did studies about UM and supported women to promote

women's positions on campus. It's probably was the first campus women's organization of the new and emerging women's movement in nine and we found that professors gave four times as much attention to men's students as to women's students, called a significant response how often would a teacher actually engage with the students? And because of that and other things,

we found ways to support women on campus. UM. The club founding was discrimination against women's faculty members, as they mostly were kept as adjunct professors and not allowed on a tenure track, and there were other issues that people

need to understand. The emergence of Jane which in the context of lessons from an emerging movement in civil rights, context of UM, changes going on in the society where on the one hand, women were at the universities and entering into public life, and yet we're not treated equally. So there was this emerging women's movement developing, and also in the context of values that many of us shared, believing that there should be a country that treated all

people equally, gave people equal support, and and respect. I love that. So really one of the big hickaways from what you've done with change is that organizing and people power can really change culture and change laws and change lives that you know, oftentimes we feel, at least I feel overwhelmed that oh, just little on me. What can I do to change this? This seems so batter up against so many fights. But actually if you're if you

really work hard and organized, you can change things. Absolutely absolutely to bring us up to Jane to explain how my involvement with that and how that developed against this backdrop, um, a friend of mine told me if the sister was pregnant and was nearly suicidal because she wasn't ready to have a baby and she wanted an abortion, I have never thought about the issue before that, I recall, and I've never had to face the issue myself, but I said, I tried to do what I could do to help again,

sort as part of the golden rule, trying to go one to others. I went to the network of doctors from the Medical Committee for Human Rights, which was the civil rights met go arms, and I found a doctor, Dr TRM. Howard, who had a clinic on sixty three Street in Chicago Friendship Clinic um. I didn't know its history at the time, but he had been a dynamic civil rights leader in Mississippi and came to Chicago when his name appeared on a clan death list. I called

him up. He agreed to do the procedure. Actually, I didn't really think much more about it, but word must have spread because short time later someone else called. It was a coincidence, and then where it must have spread and someone else called. At that point I realized they really was a broader problem that needed to be addressed, and being an organizer, I decided to create a system

and called it Jane. Over time, the women of Jane themselves performed eleven thousand abortions between nineteen and seventy three, when Roe became the law of the land and the experience of Jane both improve the lives of the women who came through who are looking for a way to decide when or whether they could have a child. It changed the lives of the women who were in Jane, letting them know what they could do to improve the lives of women on a broad scale, and it also

provided a basis giving people confidence. I hope now to say we can make change if we organize. So let's say that I'm a woman who calls Jane. Can you walk me through the logistics once I call? What happened? Well, first, there were too UM kind of two or three eras of Jane the Hero's UM. When I first started it, it was a very small service. It just kept growing and growing. When it started, someone would call up and

ask for Jane. And even before they said they were asking for Jane, I knew immediately there was a sort of hesitant pause on the phone, and I just knew immediately what they were probably calling about. UM. They'd say what that They usually said some version that they were pregnant, UM, and we're looking for an abortion for some women. We

do the counseling on the phone. We then trying to arrange a time where they could come in and have a longer conversation and could talk with them and find out what the details were, long they were had been pregnant, what the medical history was a little bit UM, and then we'll just go through the detail of what to expect. UM. They want to know what how long does it take?

Would there be pain? There's side effects? What do you need to do afterwards, how to take care of yourself if there are any uh medical complications, what they need to do, who they call. We go through how much it cost. Initially Jane costs five dollars um, though we negotiated down the price that the number of people came through and then went for two for the price of one. That we got it down to two fifty dollars. Then

even sometimes got three for the price of one. We sometimes I would ask for special arrangement if someone didn't have money and h and then we arranged where people would go, where they would meet, how they would get picked up, Um, that someone should be with them to care of them, um, you know, to be with them as they as they left after the procedure. That was the first stage of Jane, where I was doing the counseling and Dr Howard had explained to me in a

lot of detail what was involved. Dr Howard died natural causes and I found another person to provide the procedures. His name was Mike, and we've basically had the same process, though he had a suburban effort and m the numbers weren't creasing so much as the numbers of people coming through.

I was about to have my first child, and I was very busy and many other things, getting a graduate degree UM, working on other social change issues, and I realized I couldn't handle it all just myself, and so I decided I needed to recruit other people to be involved with this, and I go to meetings and at the end of the meeting would say, if anyone wants to be involved in abortion counseling, please see me. And

I recruited a number of people. We did a training and made sure that everyone understood the process and would provide the high quality of care that we wanted to see for all the women who came through UM. And then with that I turned over the effort to another group of women UM Jodie Parsons and Ruth Circle with the two leagues women who helped coordinate it. At that point, as the numbers increased, more hands were needed. One person

doing the procedures wasn't going to be enough. And then it also turned out that the women that were helping might do the procedures. And then Mike shared that he actually wasn't a license position, and they thought, well, if he could do it, so could they. Now though this was the women doing the procedures, starting to learn how to do the procedures. It was actually probably safer than this medical procedure being done in a hospital or clinic

or other settings. Partly because it was illegal, UH. Everyone wanted it to be as states as possible so that no one would be hard, no one would be UH, they wouldn't be a h an adverse effect. It also was a women's culture who cared about women, and so the priority wasn't the profit making, it was the care for women and for their wishes. They're also UM. It was the only thing that they were doing, and so

there was a lot of attention on it. It's not like you were getting lost in the shuffle of oh, am I doing an app inductivity or am i UH doing a different procedures UM. In fact, at the after

row became the law of the land. That was a study done by University of Illinois program called it Prospectorship, which was about entry into UH positive medical care within Chicago, and they did an analysis of the outcome from JANE and the outcomes from clinic service for abortion and found that the results from Jane were more positive than the results in a clinic setting. Again I think for the

reasons that I just mentioned. So at that point the women started to take on doing procedures themselves, and in the course of that, there was a larger group that was recruited to actually be the service, which is what we called it, what they called it Jane or the service. And as women came in, there was a a front or one apartment, someone's apartment that was designed in a

very cozy, homely support of way. Sometimes they were kids there, and a number of weight of women who would be waiting for their own procedure would gather there and in a supportive environment, and then they would be taken to the apartment where the procedures would be done, and then they were supported and given care while they were recovering from the procedure, and then would be sent off with full information um about what to do if there are

any issues if there often are with any medical procedures, and given health and h told numbers to call and people could be get in touch with them afterwards to make sure that everything worked out okay. So that was

the broad process. There's a book about Jane by Laura Chaplin called Jane because Jane an abortion story there's also a movie about it, and actually I'm now told there's at least two Hollywood made movies that are being made about Jane, as well as a new documentary, and they're more details of it captured in the book Uh that Laura Kaplan wrote about Jane. So, Heather, No, you're a part of this really a robust tradition of Jewish activism.

I actually read some place that at one point you wanted to be a rabbi, but that you heard that women couldn't be rabbis. Do you feel like your background, as you know, part of the robust legacy of Jewish activism and social change work. Did that also impact your work with Jane? It did. It was part of my

moral upbring. I believed, as it's said in the Bible, Justice Justice Special, pursue saying justice twice because it's that important, really leaving uh, that the stories of the prophets should guide us in some ways, that it's the people who

should rise and not just those in wealth and power. Um. There also was a history of struggle of the past over story pants overs coming, and the story of people even going forty years in the desert to us the land of greater promise UH to to escape oppressions, and I believe that that was a tradition that was worth embracing. So that was part of the moral of ringing that I had and have tried to carry that on into the organizing work I've done, and since that time, I've

had to carry it on in so many ways. I started a training center for organizers called Midwest Academy. People encourage your listeners to pursue mid West Academy because it's a it's a place to learn the skills of organizing UM. Their website is www. Newwest Academy dot com UM. I've also ended up running some large scale organizations for advising them. I was strategic advisor for the immigration reform campaign, the Alliance for Citizenship, a round the campaign for financial reform

that won the Dodd Bank film. I was the coordinator around the Marriage Equality campaign UM. I just was the field director and the campaign to stop these UH tax breaks for the millionaires and billionaires. That will mean that there will be an excuse to make cuts in social security, Medicare and Medicaid, and education and other essential human services.

So the struggle continues, and right now people I think especially need to learn this lesson that even when time seemed the most difficult, we can make progress if we organize, and if we organized, we can change the world, and we need to change the world. I could not have put it better myself. These fights are still fights that need to be fought. And we can get complacent and we can get comfortable, but as you said, we need

to be organizing. And I'm so glad that you're in the fight doing this work with us because we need you, Heather, and I'm so glad that we have you well, and I'm so glad that we have you. Uh, spread the words, spread the message. I'm so glad we have those who are listing in. I hope they'll take They probably have

been taking action. We need to continue taking action and unify and give people confidence that we can organize and when we organize, even in times that seem the most difficult, we have changed the world in the past and we can change the world for the future. Let's take a quick break. Well, it's been to listeners, so I know abortion can seem like an issue that we no longer

have to fight for that we did in the seventies. Okay, Hi, it's two Bridget and wow, how wrong I was so right here in the original episode, I started going on and on about how even though Roe was the law of the land, we still needed to be vigilant because of state based attacks on abortion. And now here we are in two and as you know, ro versus weight has been overturned. And even though it is truly devastating, abortion advocates have been preparing for this moment for a

very long time. There are organized networks of abortion funds and bail funds and providers who are ready to assist folks looking for abortions. We're not in a place where scrappy college kids need to invent underground collectives at a whole cloth like Heather did with the Jane Collective back on the seventies. There are people who care and who want to help, who are prepared for this moment. Go

to Abortion Funds dot org and support them. And you know, in this moment, which I know seems so dark and so tough, remember we are the majority. There are more of us than there are of them, and we won't back down. If you're looking for ways to support the show, check out our March store at Tangodi dot com flash Store, Got a story about an interesting thing in tech, or just want to say hi, You can reach us at Hello at tangodi dot com. You can also find transcripts

for today's episode at tangodi dot com. There Are No Girls on the Internet was created by me Bridgeta. It's a production of I Heeart Radio and Unboss Creative edited by Joey pat John Van Strictland as our executive producer. Terry Harrison is our producer and sound engineer. Michael Amatta was our contributing producer. I'm your host, bridget Todd. If you want to help us grow, rate and review us

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