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'We'll keep fighting': Jane members who provided illegal abortions outraged at Roe's fall

On May 3, 1972, Chicago police burst into two clandestine locations where the "Jane" collective was assisting women to have then-illegal abortions.

Authorities filed felony charges against seven Jane members but dropped them January 1973 when the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion.

Fifty years later, abortion rights are once again twisting in the wind after justices Friday threw out Roe v. Wade.

"Hearing that the decision had come out broke my heart," said Jeanne Galatzer-Levy, who joined Jane at age 20 and was arrested on charges of performing abortions.

"As much as I knew it was coming, it's hard to believe in the arrogance with which these five self-righteous people feel free to impose their religious views on American women," she said, referring to the justices who reversed Roe. Chief Justice John Roberts joined his five fellow conservatives in overturning Roe but in a concurring opinion wrote that he did not want to eliminate the abortion right.

Abortion was banned across the U.S. in the 1960s with narrow exceptions, but the procedures occurred clandestinely and was unregulated, injuring and killing women. Some took matters into their own hands using Clorox, knitting needles and other dangerous remedies.

Jane began in 1965 when a friend of University of Chicago student Heather Booth asked her to help his pregnant sister who needed an abortion. Booth, a civil rights activist, reached out to a doctor in her network who did the procedure.

"I thought it was a one-time way to help a friend in need," recalled Booth. But the woman she assisted "must have mentioned it to someone else because that someone else called. I made that arrangement, and then someone else called."

The referral service kept expanding. Despite the dangers, Booth said she was inspired by "trying to live by the golden rule and I also realized that sometimes you do need to stand up and take action against illegitimate authority."

In the late 1960s, Booth - who was pregnant, working full time and in grad school - passed on leadership to other women volunteers. By 1973, Jane had served over 11,000 women with no deaths.

With the Supreme Court decision, "I was outraged but I wasn't shocked," Booth said. "I was outraged because it's a violation of the popular will in a small-D democracy. There is overwhelming support for it and it's the moral high ground to support this most intimate freedom of a woman's life about when or whether we have a child.

"I was outraged because women will be harmed, especially women with the least means. The ones with greatest means will be able to go to sanctuary states like Illinois. Others will not have alternatives and lives will be thwarted or ended."

But "I wasn't surprised because there's been a 50-year battle where rules have been designed state by state, law by law, rule by rule to whittle away a fundamental freedom," Booth added.

"This has been made a partisan political issue and now it's been embraced by the (Trump) faction of the Republican Party for partisan reasons."

Through word-of-mouth and discreet advertising like signs saying "Pregnant? Don't Want to Be? Call Jane," the collective developed a clientele that ranged from rich to poor and included police officers.

Janes developed a relationship with patients who were counseled beforehand and told exactly what to expect.

"We were trusting (the client) with who we were and where we lived. And she was trusting us with her life," former Wheaton resident and Jane leader Abby Pariser told the Daily Herald in May.

"It wasn't designed for profit," Booth explained. "It was a very caring community."

The first stop for patients was "The Front," a waiting room and place for clients to check in. Then they were driven to "The Place," where abortions occurred. Both sites were secret and typically in the Hyde Park neighborhood.

At first, the organization used a medical practitioner who eventually trained some Janes to perform the procedures themselves.

Pariser was at The Place when "five big, tall men barged in and started yelling, 'Where's the doctor? Where's the doctor?'" she recalled.

Police were stunned to learn women were conducting abortions but rounded the Janes up, and took them to headquarters where most spent the night in jail.

The relief when Roe became the law of the land was palpable, Janes said.

Now, "abortion is health care and women are being denied access to needed services," said Galatzer-Levy, who joined Jane at age 20. "We'll keep fighting."

'Call Jane': How Chicago and suburban women defied authority to provide abortions in the 1970s

'This is not over': Biden vows abortion fight, assails 'extreme' court ruling

Abortion foes, supporters map next moves after Roe reversal

A 1972 photo of members of the Janes, underground Chicago activists who provided illegal abortions to more than 11,000 women. Courtesy of Martha Scott/HBO
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