You're Wrong About - The Jane Collective with Moira Donegan

Episode Date: September 4, 2024

"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 tradwifeSupport You're Wrong About:Bonus Episodes on PatreonBuy cute merchWhere else to find us:Sarah's other show: You Are GoodLinks:https://gender.stanford.edu/inbedhttps://www.theguardian.com/profile/moira-doneganhttps://www.bookforum.com/print/3004/lisa-selin-davis-s-confused-history-of-homemakers-25336https://www.teepublic.com/stores/youre-wrong-abouthttps://www.paypal.com/paypalme/yourewrongaboutpodhttps://www.podpage.com/you-are-goodSupport the show

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 Donigan 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 Adrienne 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 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 DNC 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 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 gonna 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 Plus 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. 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 Donigan. Moira, hello. Hi, Sarah. I'm so thrilled to be here. 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. I am thrilled to be here. I've been such a longtime fan of You're Wrong About, I think, like a lot of millennials. It's been really sort of like 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. 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 like 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 kind of living in a period where many unprecedented things have happened in a row. And there's a sense of like, what next? You know, what can't happen at this point and why not imagine robot grandmas and working class guys just you know working in space you know these are also unprecedented times and I feel like something I was really excited about was bringing you bringing you on to talk about some recent unprecedented times and how we can learn from them and just, yeah, do some history together. Yeah, this is one of my favorite moments in history because we are talking about abortion.

Love it. We are talking about abortion during the New Left, its 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 Bruckner Yeah, I heard of the Jane Collective. So Sarah, what do you know about Jane? 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, sort of

feeling interested in the specifics of how precarious abortion and reproductive justice felt in America. So the Jane Collective, well, first of all, 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 sort of 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,

abortions are, first of all, they're 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, really, really common. In fact, there's some evidence that they were a little more common then 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-road 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, really young when Jane was operating. We're talking like the youngest were like 18, 19, so like children, and the oldest were in their like maybe early 40s. 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, colon and abortion service that also came out in 1995. And in that one, they interview a lot of Jane members members and they're all wearing like sunglasses and like weird wigs. And they will sometimes do that thing that like television magazine shows used to do where they would just show the silhouette of somebody who's being interviewed anonymously.

And this like black outline of a person tells you about their experience. And that was cause 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 like still some sense in which they feared the law and that was a legitimate fear. So like to set up Jane and really like show what these women did, I want to like tell you a little bit about what life was like to be for to be a woman and what trying to get abortion was like in the 60s. Like, how do you how much do you know about that? A bit, because I feel like I was very close to my mom growing up. I was an only child and we were like, you know,

I think I really had many of the attributes of a middle aged woman in the nineties. I was very close with her and she was born in 1948. So she was like, you know, in college in the sixties and would talk about it a lot as as boomers famously do, you know, that anyone who who grew up raised by boomers kind of grew up in the shadow of the long sixties, I feel like. You know, 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, you would, and if you, you know, 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.

Well 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 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 like pay off medical school debt. Prices were really, really high. So the Janes

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 like 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 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, you know,

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 is is approved by the FDA in 1960. It doesn't really work that well The pill the pill that the FDA approved in 1960 is not like the pill we have now. There's also just like there's 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 they're diaphragms the pill and diaphragms You need to be married to get in a lot of states. I mean, some states outlaw it entirely, right? So married couples don't have a legally established right to contraception until 1965. Single people don't have the right to contraception until 1972.

So you have a lot of stories of women like buying a fake wedding ring for like five cents at a Woolworth's and then wearing that to a doctor's appointment where they introduce themselves under a fake name as Mrs. So-and-so. As we learned in Goodbye Columbus. We learned so much from Goodbye Columbus.

We really did, yeah. But it is like, I mean, I guess as you're going through this absolutely devastating list of like, legal non existence, I'm just like, why do women want to go back to this? What's going on? What? I think people forget like 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 kind of leaving for the most part leaving this part out.

Right. And it's like no wonder the hippies were so pissed off at society because this was society. Like it's very reasonable to wear a poncho about all this. I hate the smell of patchouli, but I'm like I'm with them. But there's also just like very little sex education. 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. This is like, we need to intervene with sex education to empower these people who are coming to us.

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 and a hand mirror. But like, think about what, what we were starting from. It was revolutionary. They'd never seen it before. Yeah, like you really needed to. Yeah, there is this big black market of abortionists, some doctors, a lot of guys were 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.

Which is simply excessive. Yeah. And they hold all the information. Like the information about women's bodies and the authority to control them is entirely in male hands. Yeah. And you know, 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 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? 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. We all saw dirty dancing. Yeah.

Either way, you don't know and you're doing something illegal. 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-row abortions are A, they were like, 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 a illegal procedure that also was sort of like stigmatized and seemed to reflect on the character of the women who needed them, the women who were for abortions were treated really badly, right? So it was common to like 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. Yeah. 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 a lot of them use 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 like 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.

I don't know. I don't have anything to say to that, except that that all feels so horrible and so close to where we are at this moment. This is the moment when we meet Heather Booth. Have you ever heard of Heather Booth? No. She's still around. She's kind of 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 like a nice suburban Jewish girl who had grown up in New York. And she was always kind of a lefty. Her parents had been liberals.

Her mom had read the Feminine Mystique when it came out in 1963 and had like her slightly older generation feminist awakening. And Heather, who's this like lefty college student, joins the Freedom Summer. What do you know about the Freedom Summer? Was it primarily about like largely white college students going to the South to register black voters? Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. It's the summer of 1964. And 1964, you know, Heather Booze is bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. She was so cute. I've seen the pictures of her from this era. She's got a 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. So like 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 kind of 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 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. You know, those women in your I'm sure you have some in your life where just they seem to have their shit together. Yes. I'm picturing one right now. Yes. Everybody thinks to call Heather and this guy thought to call Heather and she kind of 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 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, you know, branches out this one guy on the west side of Chicago, this black doctor, he doesn't want a ton of white women like hanging around his office. So she like starts to look for other providers. And she finds one guy out in Cicero,

which is like a kind of shady suburb of Chicago at the time. And she's like, pretty sure he has mob ties. But what, you know, 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 asked 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, like 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 like really gnarly antibiotics for a couple of weeks. Like 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 this like one woman clearinghouse. And she has finals coming up. What is this? Is this an old joke that you used to tell like teen lawyer? Yes, all the time now. So happy I remember teen lawyer.

Yeah, because I had this idea for an imaginary TV show that I still want to do someday, where it's like 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. I think that low-key happens to Heather Booth, right?

Heather Booth is like holding the women of Chicago together with both hands. Right. And at the same time, Heather Booth has become active in the nascent second wave radical feminist movement in and around Chicago. Right. So she knows a lot of women who are sort of into this and, you know, she starts branching out the work. She starts like telling a bunch of her friends about what she knows.

She starts like telling some of the women who call her to like call other people, right? Cause 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 and grown. 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. What? And 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 in to literally 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 like 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 like really intense

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

And Sarah, I love Jodie Howard so much. She died in 2010, so she's not with us anymore. Jodie 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 like the local ACLU. And she had 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, 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 she they finally say yes. Which is insane because sort of 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. Right like the other thing that's going on is that Jodie Howard through her work with the ACLU hears that some of the same hospitals that are denying her tubal ligation are in fact performing them on non-consenting black women.

And in the 1960s, when we talk about eugenics, we do tend to picture the 1920s. It's still with us. It never left. It was going on way later than you think. So Jodie Howard gets her tube allegation, 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. Jodie 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 Ro,

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. Jodie Howard had never thought of abortion as a political issue before. She becomes radicalized by this experience, as I think you fucking would, right? Trying to live, yeah. So 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 kind of like, fuck you, I know how important it is. This is like kind of like two different theories of organizing, right? There's one theory of organizing that says that you need to educate people before you can then 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 Jodie Howard very much believed in the latter, right? She's like 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 this woman, her name is Eleanor agrees to let it be

just like her home phone answering machine. So it's just like literally her home phone number. And that is Jane's number. So the message, the outgoing answering machine says like, if you have a message for the Johnsons, I'm sorry, the Olivers is the Olivers. If you have a message for the Olivers 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 like date of last menstrual period, any allergies, their age, how much money they have. And this 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 services women 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 like, 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 kind of 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 like the way abortion funds work now really is like you pay, there's a big pot of money, anybody can pay into it. And then when there is sort of 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. Like they would say, I understand you have a problem saying I want an abortion, I am looking for an abortion. That had 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? So counseling sessions would work to establish that this patient wanted abortion, to educate them as much as possible about what an abortion was and

what was gonna happen. So they would do as much to be like, okay, this is what is gonna be done to you. This is how your body works. But also this is what the day is gonna look like. You're gonna 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 is 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 Jodi 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 Jodi'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. Like 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 like 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 OB-GYNs. So OB-GYNs 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 a kind of more business than they think they should be paying retail for. Jodi 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, he has not, 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 like crazy hard to find out. He is a handsome dumbass. You know, he's kind of like, you can't take advantage of me. And Jodie Howard proceeds to completely take advantage of him. She railroads this guy, she gets him to drop his price. Fantastic. Just by promising a certain amount of business? At least 10 a week. Oh, wow. Okay. And they have to kind of 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 like, 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. Like for instance, we're going to be there. You're going to do it at a place that we tell you to do it. Like 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 is 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 people, 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 sort of like get a little turnaround 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 like always tan. The pictures of him when he was young are like kind of like, oh, you're like a stupid surfer guy. He's like Dr. Kildare. He's serving doctor. Yeah.

Well, he's not serving doctor. Oh, okay. And he's like, he's very informal, but he's very respectful. Like a lot of these black market abortion providers, if 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 gonna do this together. This part's gonna hurt, but it won't hurt a lot.

This is not how medical care works in 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. Like they're being looked in the eye, addressed by name, like spoken to in soothing friendly ways as an equal. And the other thing about Dr. Kaufman is that he's really, really good at his job, not just at putting the patients at ease, but technically, nobody has a problem. He's really, really good at it. He's not creating infections.

He's not creating lacerations. And maybe this is maybe a good moment to talk about what the procedure actually involves for the most part. And there are several different kinds. The one that Jane was performing was called a DNC or dilation or curettage. And what a DNC is, is it's 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's also involved a cervical dilation and they usually don't use a anesthetic for those because it's such a brief procedure and 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 Jodie Howard had persuaded a sympathetic pharmacist to sell them in bulk syringes, anesthetics, antibiotics and something called ergotrait, which is a useful like post-abortion drug that causes contractions of the uterus, which can a useful like 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 like a speculum, or I mean 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 a fetal matter, and it will be a placental matter. And you pull that out through the vagina. And then you go in with a curette, which will be a 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 sort of 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 you're trying to be really, really, if you're doing a good job, you're trying to be really, really gentle. you're doing a good job, you're trying to be really, really gentle. Yeah. Both because 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.

Yeah. I mean, I guess it feels like, yeah, there's so many areas of possible error that could be, you know, either extremely dangerous or just unnecessarily painful. Yeah. Often in the aftermath, like 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 liked to prescribe around a preventative antibiotics. 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 it's another part of Jane's work was establishing a network of OBGYNs, like straight official 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, you know, 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 for, or with Jane at the time was like, yeah, one time I made a joke about how I was gonna become, like pursue this other career as a safecracker and start robbing safes. And Dr. Kaufman perked up and says, oh yeah, I know how career as a safe cracker and start robbing safes and Dr. Kaufman perked up and says, 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. I didn't deduce that. I'm surprised. This is great. 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 kind of 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. It's like my mom used to tell me that when I grew up, I should be an undertaker because it was a recession proof industry.

Like abortions kind of like that. Yeah. I mean, I mean, I'm sure that someone who knows more about economics could argue with that, but certainly I can't. Yeah, I guess it's so, I don't know. There's something very comical to me about like going from being in construction to the thriving black market abortion industry. But like he was good at it. I can't complain. He describes this as a big professional step up for him. Because he kind of

be very gentle. But he describes it as like kind of 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, you know, 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. Can I hold that?

And eventually he says, well, you try it. And Jodi performs her first abortion. Anybody who works in the medical field and people who are doing training for 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 wanna talk about medical credentials here, like medical authority. Like Jodi knew this guy wasn't a doctor, more or less from the jump, right?

The women who are closest to him have sort of put it together, that no medical school gave this guy a piece of paper, you know what I mean? He said some stuff that made it clear he's learned a lot from the game operation. Yeah. And that's kind of a closely guarded secret. So like officially, Jane is non-hierarchical, it's totally horizontally organized, there's no leaders, it's a collection of equals. Unofficially at this point, Jodie 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 Jodie. And Jodie doesn't tell the rest of Jane that this guy's not a doctor. Finally, somebody finds out, is upset, and is like, Jodi, if you don't tell them, I will. So Jodi tells a group of Jane, she's like, listen,

he's not really a doctor. And this is really, 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 leave. And the other half says, well, wait a minute, things are going well.

Like 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. So that mystique of medical authority, the white coat, the name doctor, that gets exploded. So the women who stayed became abortionists. 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. And why do you think that they were able to make that leap where others didn't?

I think Jodie Howard's experience and the force of her charisma kind of can't be understated. You know, we talked about how Heather Booth is like the woman who has her shit together who you call when something is going wrong. Jodi, I can almost like hear myself defending her to her friends, you know, they're like, we're exasperated by her, she's impossible. Like she was very, very, very intense. But I think the force of her confidence instilled a lot in these women, but also like the data acquired from experience, right? 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. So it's stigma got kind of 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. And did the patients know, like what was the sort of what or how much do we know about how all that worked? Some patients had such good experience 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, but you know, 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. Yeah. But then something changes that makes this story a little more complicated from our perspective. Because I want to talk about what happens in 1970. Do you know much about what happens in 1970? No, tell me. 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 like 100 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 like 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. Wow. Of a guy who completely, he changed his vote at the last minute and completely sacrificed his own career.

Oh. Yeah, he was from a really heavily Catholic district. It's kind of an interesting, it's also how the 19th Amendment passed, like 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?

Okay, interesting. 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. And your parents never know what happened. Indeed, a lot of people didn't. So everybody who could afford to,

frankly, like 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. I didn't know that. 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. And 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, right? Right, that's the thing. Like this is the kind of conspiracy theory where you're like, look, historically speaking, you're not wrong. To the Black Panther's credit, they really kind of got rid of this by the end of their prominence,

based largely because black women kind of pushed back, like Angela Davis's writings about this being like, you guys need to cut the shit is like worth reading. I think it's in women's right in class. And this means that black women, especially like poor black women who might be involved in the kind of radical circles that were like feeding people to Jane, that Jane was overlapping with, they 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. You know, the Jane women are like, we are sure that we messed up and said something really insensitive and stupid like more than once, you know, and I'm sure that that happens too. If my own experiences with like white second wave feminists are any indication like 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 and control

your own body this way. Kind of everybody is, like nobody is doing great for Black women. Nobody is treating them like quite the way that they deserve. Yeah, not like now. Thank God we solved that, right? Yeah. But Jane winds up in this uncomfortable situation where they're all white and most of their patients are black.

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? Who are like, you know, 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. For those of us whose dads aren't judges. 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.

Which makes sense because it is, you know, fundamentally a criminal enterprise, right? And that is just something that as a white woman society, historically, you know, and particularly, you know, a college educated middle or upper middle class white woman, you do kind of have the ability to break a lot of laws and be like, Oh, was that illegal? Well, I think you're setting us up kind of perfectly for what happens on May 3rd, 1972, which is when Jane is, it's a typical day. They describe it as like an especially busy day. There's a pot roast in the oven.

Yeah, there's pot roast in the air. 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. 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. Why can't the police ever enter politely, you know? Apparently there was like a boot mark on the door from when they actually kicked it in. But meanwhile, you know, 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. Jesus Christ. So this has happened actually just a couple of weeks

after Jane has lost their leader because Jodie Howard has checked herself into a psych ward. Yeah, I bet it's been a stressful few years. This is an incredibly stressful enterprise. Everybody in Jane talks about it, not just as this like almost like lifetime original movie like a gauzy inspirational story. They talk about it as one of the most difficult things they've ever done. Oh my god. I mean, yeah, I mean, just, you know, from an admin perspective, can you imagine?

It's a tremendous amount of work. Yeah. But it also is putting them into prolonged repeated and very intimate contact with women who are an incredible amount of emotional pain and fear. The way they actually get caught is that Jodie 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, you know, it's too many spinning plates.

Jodie is, I get the impression that it was hard to be Jodie already, you know, and she takes on this kind of enormous tasks. 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. So never tell your in-laws stuff is the moral of that one. Don't tell anybody. This is how abortion criminalization happens. Even now.

It's at 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 like a dirty jail sink. They talk about being locked up with all these sex workers who've been arrested

who are like trying to calm them down and tell them jokes. But then there's also people in there who are like withdrawing from drugs, you know, jail is 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. Right. And meanwhile, the arrest of Jane and the breakup of this abortion ring has been published, publicized all through Chicago.

They're the Chicago four. They have Sarah the sexiest mugshots. They look so good. They look amazing. And they look like very young and glamorous. And they've got like the frizzy 1970 hair. And they look so cool. Yeah, I love the hot women's lib no makeup look just slap on some big sunglasses and talk to the press Yeah, it's the best. It's amazing We got to bring it back. So Jane is now like not really a secret anymore

But this is crazy to me. They keep operating. Oh my god, their demand goes through the roof So Jodie has to check herself out of the psych ward. Oh poor Jodie Well, four of their best abortionists have been locked up right and are out of the game Yeah, so Jodie has to come back. She starts performing abortions like nearly constantly. Oh my god 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 at the supreme, just going to the Supreme Court and Joanne says, look, I'm in a stall. And they run out of 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. LESLIE KENDRICK Now that's some good lawyering. STACEY So that's it for Jane. They throw themselves a party, they call it the Curate Caper, and they pack up shop and they all kind of go their separate ways. This is like a league of their own, although obviously, you know, different in at least one key way. Well, I mean, the league of their own has the kind of like petty fighting. It's like something that I really like about Jane is that

many of them were quite petty people. You talk about 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 like profoundly normal people.

Yeah, it's a story of people in an imperfect time coming up with the best solutions they can thing by thing. And that that's just what people do and will keep doing. I don't know, I guess I would love to know kind of, yeah, what you feel excited about looking around today. It's sort of the way people are responding to our current moment. That might be kind of a tall order, though. 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. Like donate to an abortion fund, volunteer with an abortion fund. If you think this is like 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. Yeah, 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 do it with the full, 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. Yeah, I do too. And I feel like, you know, 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 you 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 like those are good stories. But like that, I think our obsession with that kind of story is kind of 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, you know, America was invented by like 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 this, you know, this, I think this very patriarchal idea that we can trace is

because kind of one of the ways that we talk about ourselves as a country and a culture of, you know, 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, you know, 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, yeah, these stories of collective action and of groups of people who individually are imperfect, but come together to do, you know, also something imperfect, but something much bigger than themselves. 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 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. We need more of this kind of movie at Thanksgiving. Nobody liked Napoleon. So I mean, it is kind of an epic story right? Yeah there's pot roasts 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. 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 Book Forum a lot. I should probably like stop saying that until unless they get sick of me, but I'm often in Book Forum. I wrote about Jane for Book Forum and I love writing there. And you can always find me on Twitter, the bad place. I'm at Moira Donigan. Much to my chagrin, I'm

on Twitter about a thousand times a day. So you can always contact me there. And you do a podcast too. 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.

I loved doing that episode with you, and I love the work that you do, and I feel like, you know, 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 sort of rise in 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, you know, in this this world and this time and place, most things make us just feel overwhelmed and stupider. So that's a big one. Thank you, Sarah. That means so much coming from you.

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 Donigan 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. You