Kaplan: We had women who wanted abortions go to a gathering place, which we called “The Front,” because it was a front. Jones: Tell me how the process worked after you joined Jane.
And then you were ready to do counseling on your own. You just trusted the doctor, or what your friend told you.Īfter you went through your three counselor-training sessions, then you were assigned a Big Sister, whose counseling sessions you sat in on so you could see how it actually went. Because women back then didn’t have that information. That’s how you entered the group.Ī lot of the counseling was about education on how your body worked. So Alice took me to meet her counselor, who told us that the group was starting a new counselor-training session. The counselor would explain everything to you in advance, and then call you when you had an appointment and tell you where to go, and then keep in touch with you for like two weeks afterwards to make sure you were OK. The way Jane did things was, after you contacted them, then you would be assigned to a counselor, and you would go to that counselor’s home. It was about her: She was the center of the experience. She said that it was about so much more than her abortion.
And she had an abortion with Jane.Īfterward, she came over to my apartment, and she was so excited about the experience that she was almost literally bouncing off the walls. She saw an ad in an underground paper that said something like, “Pregnant? Don’t want to be? Call Jane.” So she did that. Laura Kaplan: Shortly after I moved back to Chicago, my dear friend, Alice, discovered that she was pregnant. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.ĭylon Jones: How did you first get involved with the Jane network? Wade on the chopping block, I called Kaplan to learn more about the history of criminalized abortion in America. But when I was interviewing people in the group - that was 15 years after we folded - people would say to me, ‘Did we really do that?’ Even just 15 years fast forward, it just didn’t even seem real. “I mean, I’m in my 70s now, so I can laugh about this. “Multiple felonies every day that we worked,” Kaplan says now. She chronicled Jane’s work in her 1995 book, The Story of Jane: The Legendary Underground Feminist Abortion Service. One of the women to join Jane was Laura Kaplan, who was 24 years old when she moved to Chicago from New York in 1971 and got involved with the network. Wade ruling in 1973, Jane completed some 11,000 abortions. From the time it was founded to the opening of the first abortion clinics in Chicago following the Roe v. Sign up for the newsletter.Īt its peak, Jane administered an estimated 100 abortions a week. Want to read more stories like this? POLITICO Weekend delivers gripping reads, smart analysis and a bit of high-minded fun every Friday.
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