the story of jane the legendary underground abortion service

President Donald Trump’s campaign promise to nominate a judge who would help overturn Roe v. Wade are making their way to the Supreme Court. Georgia and Mississippi’s fetal-heartbeat laws are expected to be enacted soon, and at least 20 cases that could significantly impact the rights established by Roe v. Kentucky, Iowa, and North Dakota have also passed “fetal-heartbeat” laws (all of which are currently blocked by judges). The bill makes no exceptions for rape or incest, and is just one instance in a staggering number of cultural and political shifts sweeping the country. Last week, Ohio’s Republican governor signed a bill into law that would criminalize abortion as soon as a fetal heartbeat can be detected-often as early as six weeks, when many women don’t yet know they are pregnant.

Now, 50 years after Jane was founded, the women who ran that underground organization are speaking out about abortion as the nation pivots backward. The question now was whether they’d be able to continue-and if they’d even need to. The underground abortion network-code-named “Jane”-had been operating for several years undetected, and had helped thousands of women terminate their pregnancies. Unwittingly, the Chicago cops had stumbled upon one of the most audacious, subversive, and secretive feminist organizations in the country-a cinematic bust first reported in newspapers the following day, later immortalized in the 1995 book by Laura Kaplan, The Story of Jane: The Legendary Underground Feminist Abortion Service, and, over the last few months, retold for this story by the women who were there. Instead, they found women in surgical gloves. Acting on a tip, they had expected to find a male doctor operating an illegal abortion clinic. It turned out the police didn’t know exactly who Pildes and the other women were. After searching the apartment and finding it filled with women, the cops demanded: “Where is he? Where’s the doctor?” “You can’t come in!” One of them handcuffed her. “You don’t have a search warrant,” she screamed. “It’s the cops!” someone shouted, as if on cue. Moments later, five Chicago homicide detectives were barging into a living room full of startled, wide-eyed women. One of them grabbed her arm and flashed his badge: “We know who you are and what you’re doing.”ĭown the hall, in the quiet apartment Pildes had just left, Martha Scott, a 30-year-old mother of four, was preparing for a procedure when she heard the doorbell ring. On a crisp May morning in 1972, Judy Pildes-29 years old, wearing cords and a light blue work shirt-stepped into the elevator on the 11th floor of a Chicago high-rise and faced a wall of men in trench coats.

The story of jane the legendary underground abortion service