I was spending time in a used bookstore, which is no real surprise for me; I love bookstores of all types, especially used ones. While I was there, I stumbled across a book called The Story of Jane. I did my graduate thesis on abortion narratives, and as such, I’d spent a lot of time researching and digging deep into the context of criminalized abortion. And yet, when I stumbled across this book, it was the first time I'd ever heard about Jane. It was a beautiful moment of serendipity, where you feel time and space have conspired to bring you this special thing. No surprise that, for me, my gift from the universe was a nonfiction book about abortion.
Caveat: I won't pretend I can quote this book perfectly, and I'm not going to try, so what follows is my summary of Jane and how the Jane Network can provide guidance and hope to modern-day womanists plunged back into a struggle many women thought we’d overcome.
In the 1960s women were technically allowed medical abortions if their lives were in danger (sound familiar?). The context here, though, is important. Before this time, pregnancy could still be considered life-threatening if a woman experienced extreme nausea, vomiting, headaches, those sorts of things. So it was easier for some women to go to her doctor—who was probably a man, which is another interesting piece of context I'll save for another day—and convince him that she needed an abortion, and thus get one legally and safely within the medical complex of the time. But medicine continued to improve, these symptoms became more easily treated, and this final avenue of legal abortion was closed off.
Of course, the women who were able to convince a doctor of the seriousness of their symptoms tended to be upper middle-class white women or women capable of calling in big favors. Any woman who’s tried to convince a doctor to believe their symptoms knows that being listened to is too rare, especially if you’re a woman of color, poor, uneducated, and/or a mix of all three. So even though there was this sliver of legal abortion available, it was only available to a select few women to begin with and then even this got shut down in the 60s.
When we think of illegal abortion, what usually comes to mind is the caricature of the criminal abortionist as a scary, sleazy back-alley butcher, dripping in jewels and furs from their ill-gotten gains. We think of the scene from Dirty Dancing when Penny is writhing on the bed, suffering, and it’s unclear whether she’s going to live or die. While those people did exist, they weren’t the only criminal abortionists who were operating. The Jane Network tapped into—and even trained and employed—a separate group of criminal abortionists who were safe, effective, and accessible.
The Jane Network began as an intimate conversation, as so many feminist movements do. A woman who’d had a safe abortion connected a friend to the doctor who performed it, and then another. And then what started as a sharing of information in beauty parlors, in dorm rooms, in kitchens and homes—the places women have always gathered—grew into a formal underground network of abortion services. Women began writing on bathroom stalls, “In trouble? Call Jane” with a number underneath.
But what really transformed the Jane Network early on was the discover that the abortionist they’d been using wasn’t a doctor at all. Turns out, he was just some guy. And if this guy could learn to perform safe abortions, then why not them? So they learned and they weren’t just sharing phone numbers and connecting women to safe abortionists anymore. They were training each other and becoming abortionists themselves. And they were no back alley butchers. These women had clean apartments, they washed their hands, their patients thrived. They created underground outpatient facilities that were well-trained and well-run.
For years, the Jane Network operated, providing safe and accessible abortions to any woman who needed it. And then Roe v. Wade happened, and they no longer needed to operate. Now Roe v. Wade is off the books, and I’m not not advocating for a return of the Jane Network. But what is the more universal lesson for us is that women find a way. The Jane Network shows us that a key aspect of reclaiming agency when the powers that be are determined to control us is for women to cultivate our own knowledge and expertise and then share it with one another. We must form our own networks, our own communities, as we always have.
If we in the 21st century can take the lessons of the women who came before us, how much easier it is for us to find a way. We can look back on history and learn what worked and what didn’t. We see who got left behind and we can close those gaps.
We are in a weird place; there’s no doubt about it. But there’s also no doubt that the world has been hostile before, and women found a way to live full and glorious lives.
I don’t want to be dismissive of the very real struggles women face when they are not in control of their own bodies: Women die. Not every woman was able to find the Jane Network or anything even resembling a safe abortion. (After all, Theodore Dreiser titled his novel An American Tragedy because he saw the story—about a woman who is murdered by her boyfriend when she gets pregnant and won’t get an abortion—described in newspapers so often.) The back alley butcher was real. The women murdered by boyfriends or husbands were real. The women who died in childbirth were real. But the Jane network was also real.
When it’s so easy to be overwhelmed with fear and anxiety to the point of paralysis, we can look back and find sparks of hope. And if there's a spark in the past then it can become a fire in the future. Women have always found their own way with their own knowledge and we will continue to do so, except this time we aren’t starting from nothing. We’re starting from the shoulders of the revolutionaries who came before us.
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