The Story of Jane: The Legendary Underground Feminist Abortion Service - Softcover

Kaplan, Laura

 
9780593471081: The Story of Jane: The Legendary Underground Feminist Abortion Service
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0593471083 ISBN 13: 9780593471081
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

The powerful story of the women who founded and ran the legendary Chicago reproductive rights organization Abortion Counseling Service, otherwise known as Jane, written by one of its members. A compelling testament to a woman's most essential freedom—control over her own body—and to the power of women helping women. • Also the subject of the acclaimed HBO documentary The Janes.

The Story of Jane recounts the evolution of the Abortion Counseling Service, code name Jane, the underground group of heroic women that provided low-cost abortion services in Chicago in the years before the procedure was legalized. Organized in 1969 and active until the opening of the first legal abortion clinics in 1973, Jane initially counseled women and referred them to abortion providers who set prices and conditions. As Jane grew, so did the group's capacity to protect its clients. Eventually, determined to reclaim women's reproductive power in any way they were able, many members of Jane learned to perform abortions themselves.
 
An extraordinary history by one of Jane's members, The Story of Jane is an urgent account of the organization's development, the conflicts within the group, and the impact its work had on both the women it helped and the members themselves.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Laura Kaplan was a member of Jane and founding member of the Emma Goldman Women's Health Center in Chicago. After moving to rural Wisconsin, she attended home births as a lay-midwife and established a shelter-based program for battered women. When she moved to the East Coast, she worked as an advocate for nursing home residents and was the managed care project director for Citizen Action of New York. She is on the board of the National Women's Health Network and has been involved in a variety of community projects.

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Since the publication of The Story of Jane more than twenty years ago, I have often been asked to speak to students. After hearing the story of what we did and how we did it, the students sometimes ask me what kind of activism to pursue. These young people want to know: Should they work to elect sympathetic representatives to state and federal government? Should they organize and get involved in mass protests, like the Women’s Marches? Should they raise money for organizations they support or lobby their legislature? Or, like those of us in Jane, should they figure out ways to provide the services that those in power have denied to women? My response is always the same: it’s not an either/or situation. All methods of confronting injustice are important. The trick is to figure out which ones resonate with the situation we face and match our strengths. Above all, we need to be open to opportunities that present themselves: to say yes. That was how I, a young woman in my early twenties, found my way to Jane. It was sheer luck and openness. The challenge for each of us is to find the path that engages us, that makes us feel alive, and then dive in.

My primary motivation for writing The Story of Jane was that the Abortion Counseling Service, a.k.a. Jane, was an important piece of the history of the women’s movement that was not well known. At the time I started researching the book, there had been little written about Jane. Most of us who were in the group rarely, if ever, talked about it. More than fifteen years had passed since Jane folded and already it was questionable what details any of us still remembered. The more time that passed, the more difficult it would be to reconstruct our history. It was time to tell this story.

I felt that it was critical that someone who was a member of the service, which is how we internally referred to the group, write our story. My fear was that an outsider would paint us as superheroes or Amazon warriors, as extraordinary. This is the opposite of the truth and certainly the wrong message to send to a younger generation. We were ordinary women, housewives, students and young radicals. I hoped, and I continue to hope, that everyone who reads this history will see herself in us and think: that could be me.

And there was another reason I wanted to write this history. Since our story is about how a group of diverse women, many with little or no political experience, and none with any medical skills, came together and pooled their talents to do something extraordinary— a political adventure story— I thought that Jane’s history could serve as an exciting vehicle to explore what community organizing is and how it functions as a tool for change.

Those of us who were in the service learned many important lessons. But perhaps the most important was this: if we believe that something needs to be done, working together, we can find solutions and maybe, in the process, wind up doing things we never dreamed of. This I believe is the metalesson of Jane and one I wanted to share. This lesson applies to any social problem— it’s not specific to abortion. I wanted young people to view our story as a concrete example of what they, too, might accomplish. It was for these reasons I decided to write the book. I wasn’t thinking that I was offering a road map for abortion activism or offering Jane as a model to be replicated.

It is my contention that laws change when large portions of the society violate those laws. This was certainly the case before Roe v. Wade. Prominent people were speaking out. Fifty- three well- known women signed an open letter to Ms. magazine titled “We Have Had Abortions.” The clergy also played a critical role. Not only were the networks of Clergy Consultation Services on Abortion vocal in their support of abortion reform, but they publicly proclaimed that they were helping women obtain illegal abortions. No society can continue to maintain the rule of law when so many of its members are publicly violating it. When Roe v. Wade was decided, we in the service breathed a sigh of relief. But we also suspected that it was not going to be the panacea we hoped for.

While I was working on the book, the abortion landscape shifted dramatically. With the Supreme Court decisions in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services in 1989 and Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992, the Court made clear its intention to limit Roe. Of course, the shift had started in 1976 when Congress first passed the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits federal Medicaid dollars from funding poor women’s abortions. Before Roe, all women were in the same boat: no matter her circumstances, abortion was illegal. The passage of the Hyde Amendment was and continues to be a wedge driven between women. Now, if you are urban and have financial means, abortion is a possibility, but if you are poor or rural, it’s as if Roe never happened.

Grassroots abortion funds organized to help people find and pay for abortions. These funds now exist all over the country. But the funds do much more than that. They provide those seeking abortions with information, support and validation for their decisions. They let people know that they are not alone. Some abortion funds arrange transportation to an abortion provider, a place to stay, help with childcare and help securing hard- to- get second- trimester abortions. In addition, some funds do policy work to fight funding limitations, including Hyde. The National Network of Abortion Funds (one of my favorite organizations) is a membership home for funds around the country.

When Jane began in 1969, long before we had any idea that we would actually be performing abortions ourselves, we raised money for abortions, provided information and described the procedure with as much detail as we could, since none of us had seen one yet. We sussed out illegal providers so we could refer women to the most competent, reliable practitioners. We started out doing, in fact, exactly what present- day abortion funds do.

So it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me when, a few years after my book came out, I met two staff women with the California Access Project, and they told me they had named their computers Big Jane and Little Jane. Big Jane and Little Jane were the names we had given to our two administrative positions: Big Jane scheduled our work days, and Little Jane called back the hundred or more people who contacted us each week seeking abortions. These California women understood the lineage we shared.

In the decades since Roe, the abortion landscape in the United States has continued to harden. Some states have passed draconian measures with ridiculous justifications, whose intent is to make abortions inaccessible to most people who need them and, with the requirements of waiting periods, transvaginal ultrasounds and funerals for aborted fetuses, to punish women who seek abortions. But something else changed in recent decades as well. With the introduction of medical abortions, the technology for performing an abortion is now noninvasive and can be in the hands of women around the world who need it.

About ten years ago I was contacted by a South American woman. Not only had she read my book, but she was part of a national network in her home country, where abortion was illegal (it was legalized there in 2020), that obtained mi soprostol, the drug used for self- abortions, counseled people seeking abortions and provided support. They gave detailed information on how and when to take the pills, what to expect, what to watch out for and when to seek medical help. When I later sat on a conference panel with another woman from this group, she cited Jane as an inspiration.

In 2015, I was fortunate to meet the two women who started the Doula Project here in...

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Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2022
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593471083
ISBN 13 
9780593471081
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
352
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
preigu
mail@preigu.de

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Osnabrück
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