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The first few minutes of The Janes, a stunning and urgent new documentary about a group of Chicago women who created an underground abortion network in the days before Roe v. Wade, offer a shocking glimpse into the lengths women would go to terminate a pregnancy.
“I had no other options,” a graying woman says over an eerie silence in the The Janes’ opening moments. “I wanted it over with. I didn’t care how it was done. I was that desperate. An acquaintance said, ‘Here’s a phone number.’ And it was the Mob.”
Her providers spoke in code, asking her if she wanted a “Cadillac, Chevrolet, or a Rolls Royce” — the cheapest option being $500, and the most expensive $1,000. (And while $1,000 is a lot of money today, this was the 1960s, which equates to well over $9,000 today.) After arriving at a nondescript motel in a part of town she’d never visited, she was instructed to go into a bathroom. After the procedure, the “doctors” left, leaving her and another woman who’d just gotten an abortion in the room alone.
“Two young women, out in the middle of nowhere in a motel, bleeding,” she says. “If I had stayed in that room, I’d be dead.” After an hour or so, when the bleeding had stopped enough that they could stand, they both got in cabs and went their separate ways. “And that was it,” she says.
The Janes, directed by Oscar nominee Tia Lessin and Emmy nominee Emma Pildes, tells the story of a group of women who called themselves the Janes —– women who used code names, secret identities, and safe houses to build a whisper network for women seeking safe, affordable, illegal abortions.
In bold defiance of the state government, religious institutions, and sometimes their own families, the Janes provided low-cost abortions to an estimated 11,000 women in the Chicago area until Roe passed in 1973. Not even a police raid of their headquarters in 1972 deterred them from their work.
The Janes is an astonishing, inspiring story about courage, community building, and the danger of limiting reproductive freedom — a danger made all the more pressing with the very real possibility that Roe v. Wade could be overturned this year.
“It was devastating to hear some of these stories,” says Lessin, whose previous documentary work includes the 2008 film Trouble the Water, which chronicled the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina through the eyes of an aspiring rapper. “Countless others can’t tell their stories. They didn’t survive.” But, she says, the sadness of their stories was, to a degree, offset by the spirit and resolve of the women who performed the procedures.
The Janes has about a half dozen of the original abortion providers speaking about their experience, relaying firsthand how they built the network and hid in plain sight for years. “They had a lot of high spirits,” Lessin says. “They were up for the job, just to save women’s lives.”
The Janes’ unfortunate timeliness isn’t entirely due to chance. Pildes and her brother Daniel Arcana, both producers on the film, have a personal connection to the story: His mother, Judith, was one of the Janes, while Pildes’ father, an attorney, is Judith’s husband. (They appear in the film.)
Like so many of us, Pildes and Arcana knew when Hillary Clinton was defeated in 2016 that an assault on abortion rights couldn’t be far behind — and that challenges to Roe v. Wade would soon make their way to the Supreme Court.
Now that day is here, and The Janes is a pressing reminder that people always have sought and will seek ways to terminate a pregnancy, even if doing so is illegal and/or dangerous. With exceptional humanity, candor, grace, and occasional humor, The Janes recounts how a group of mostly middle-class white women organized to create an anonymous phone line to connect all kinds of women — including married women with children — to doctors, before eventually learning to do the procedure themselves.
Now in their 60s and 70s, the women were eager to talk about their experiences, Lessin says. “They felt their stories would be of service.”
Indeed, their stories are illuminating and eye-opening, particularly for the millions of people alive today who never knew of a time when abortion was illegal. The Janes is surprising for a number of reasons, including the way the women did their work, as well as whom they did it for and who helped them.
One of its impressive hallmarks is its intersectionality, an articulated awareness of how race and class were inseparable from the work. One thrilling discovery in The Janes is that one of the best, safest, and most reputable providers was a Black surgeon, T.R.M. Howard, who’d been chased out of Mississippi by the Klu Klux Klan after speaking out against the murder of Emmett Till.
“He was a medical professional with a beautiful clinic, with trained nurses,” Lessin explains. “He was giving medical care and might’ve charged half price for Black women. He really believed in reproductive rights, and I’m proud to tell that connection between civil rights and abortion rights.”
Feminism has often been viewed as the province of cis-gender, affluent white women, often deliberately erasing Black and brown women from movements altogether. Not so in The Janes, which has its mostly white collective of activists speak candidly about race and their own blind spots, and also gives significant time to Marie Leaner, a Black member of the group who was active in several activist circles, including the Black Panthers.
“It was important and a priority to get that right,” says Lessin. “You can’t talk about abortion without racial and economic equality, especially in Chicago, which at the time was incredibly segregated.”
Eventually, the film shows, the Janes’ clientele became significantly Black and POC; the founders used a pay-what-you-can model that frequently charged poor women of color little to nothing. Costs were offset by those who could afford to pay more. So, while some of their ideals and beliefs might have been problematic, the work itself was egalitarian since, as one of the Janes says, they didn’t really have time to debate theory.
“Feminism was racist, no doubt,” Lessin says, “and homophobic. That’s clear. But these women did service in a self-aware way that was unique at the time. They came from the anti-war movement; they understood the civil rights movement and the importance of self-determination and body autonomy.”
It’s a glimpse back in time, sure, but The Janes is a loud, ominous warning bell about what horrors American citizens could face if the right to an abortion is revoked. Those paying attention will get how reproductive rights affect not only people seeking abortions, but also husbands, siblings, sons and daughters, mental-health providers, health-care workers, social workers, and the countless others who’ll be impacted should millions of women lose access to safe, legal abortions.
The Janes isn’t so much a film as it is an alarm. Says Lessin, “This affects everybody.”
The Janes premieres Wednesday, June 8, at 9 p.m. on HBO and will be available to stream on HBO Max.
Malcolm Venable is a Senior Staff Writer at Shondaland. Follow him on Twitter @malcolmvenable.
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