'The Janes' Review: Women Underground - on HBO this evening
‘We were criminals,” says one of the subjects of “The Janes” on HBO. “We were felons.” Her statement isn’t a confession. It certainly isn’t an act of contrition. “The Janes” celebrates—that’s the only word—the ad-hoc alliance of Chicago activists who facilitated or performed an estimated 11,000 abortions in the few years leading up to the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. The documentary by directors Tia Lessin and Emma Pildes—a timely, enthralling if perhaps late-inning addition to the abortion debate—may be intended as a hand-grenade lobbed into the culture wars. But it’s a gripping historical document, regardless of where one stands on the central argument.
Much of the debate over the issue now seems to occur in the abstract, concerned with the sanctity of life and the metaphysics of conception. None of the members of the group that called itself Jane—many of whom are identified even now by first name only—address those points here. Nor, for that matter, do they bother to argue the realities that compelled them to do what they did: Sex was going to happen. Abortions were going to happen. Women were going to die. The group’s objective was keeping women alive. There wasn’t much to be debated as far as they were concerned.
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The echoes of Prohibition America are inescapable: The interviewees argue that much of the “respect” for abortion laws had to do with legality rather than morality, and Illinois legislation, inextricably linked to the Catholic Church, made abortions, as intended, hard to obtain. As “The Janes” vividly recalls, the Chicago mob had stepped into the void, providing unsafe procedures at extortionate rates and thus criminalizing desperate people who believed they had nowhere else to turn. Some abortion doctors were motivated by a sense of mission; self-administered abortions often ended tragically. (One, involving carbolic acid, makes for a particularly harrowing anecdote.) Others were simply in it for the money.
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“The Janes” isn’t quite agitprop, but it may come as something of a shock to younger viewers, specifically younger women, that the kind of sexism recounted was so systemic as recently as the late ’60s. (To contemporaries of the Janes, the response might be “no kidding.”) Women could lose their jobs if they became pregnant—abortion was thus, for many, an economic-survival issue. As one Jane recalls, a classmate at the University of Chicago was raped in her own bed at knifepoint and the college health services department provided nothing beyond a lecture on the victim’s own “promiscuity.” Part of the success of Jane, members recall, reflected the disbelief among male authorities that women would be/could be engaged in such an elaborate, years-long, clandestine operation.
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The Janes even had clergy among their allies—the Clergy Consultation Service, a pandenominational group, came out in support of a woman’s right to choose and made its own referrals for abortions. Jane’s clients, members attest, included the wives, girlfriends and mistresses of policemen and politicians.
More..
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-janes-hbo-documentary-abortion-chicago-tia-lessin-emma-pildes-roe-vs-wade-1973-supreme-court-catholic-church-chicago-organized-crime-clergy-consultation-service-11654636745 (subscription)
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