At first, she just said, “No, I'm not doing this.” The idea of actually using instruments inside a woman's body was outrageous.īut in this instance, according to her, he talked her into it. She told me that it was his idea that she actually pick up the instruments. He became very close with one of the central people in the group, and she pushed him to allow other women to come and sit during the abortions. Suddenly it's in color and not black and white. When you break through the wall, it's like going through the looking glass.

Lots of women wanted them, but only some of them could afford them.” He said to me, “I thought abortions were like mink coats. And so that earliest group said, “In order to give women power over this experience, we need to take control of this.” So they looked for a practitioner who was willing to work fairly closely with them. The original members of Jane realized very early on that just sending somebody off and saying, “Well, we've sent other women and they all come back alive” was not really the best situation for women. An illegal abortion cost $500, and you could rent a decent one-bedroom apartment in Chicago for maybe $125 a month. Groups all over the country-including Jane, when we started-sussed out the underground abortion network in their area and figured out who were the competent and non-abusive practitioners, and then helped the women raise money because they were expensive. There were women who reported that they'd been demanded sexual favors in exchange for the abortion. In many cases, they weren't very pleasant experiences. When women started talking to each other, they realized that lots and lots of women wanted abortions. This article, told in Kaplan’s words, has been edited for clarity and length.Īll that most of us knew about abortion was that it was rare, and that every once in a while, a woman had an illegal abortion and she died from it. Kaplan spoke to VICE News about her time in Jane as part of VICE News’ new series about the legacies left by veterans of the U.S. In order to understand what this future may look like, VICE News turned to the past-to the stories of the people who’ve had front-row seats to the last half-century’s fight over abortion. And if Roe vanishes, leaving states free to regulate abortion, 26 states are likely to ban the procedure. But Roe may not see its 50th birthday, since the Supreme Court is now deliberating over a case that threatens to topple the landmark ruling. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion nationwide and that led Jane to dissolve. They estimate that they performed more than 11,000 abortions themselves. If you were pregnant and didn’t want to be, you called Jane.īetween 19, before abortion became legal across the United States, the 100-plus women who made up Jane-mothers, housewives, teachers, college dropouts-helped people procure abortions.

The story of jane laura kaplan