Before Roe v. Wade, the Jane Collective served Chicago women

Rival demonstrations often mark the anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision that decriminalized abortion, but this year’s could be especially heated.

The 44th anniversary of the ruling Sunday follows the presidential inauguration of Donald Trump, a Republican who once was “pro-choice” and now says he is “pro-life” — using the common but loaded labels that separate those who favor a woman’s right to abortion and those who believe the procedure should be prohibited.

In part because Trump will get to fill the Supreme Court seat still vacant after Justice Antonin Scalia’s death in 2016, the emotional heat around access to legal abortion is rising again.

Before the 1973 decision, terminating pregnancies was a monopoly of back-alley abortionists. Some were medically competent, others were butchers, and a desperate woman couldn’t be choosy. In Chicago, as in most parts of the U.S., a woman who wanted to terminate her pregnancy had few safe options — unless she found her way to the Jane Collective, a medical underground that emerged on the city’s South Side.

Officially, it was the Abortion Counseling Service of Women’s Liberation. But the name scarcely conveys how it enabled thousands of women to safely end an unwanted pregnancy in those final years that abortion was illegal.

One of the group’s founders had an abortion during a time when it could be performed only if pregnancy endangered a woman’s life. She barely got doctors and hospital officials to sign off on hers, even though she had cancer. But another aspect of the process troubled her too.

“Through that whole experience, there wasn’t one woman involved. It was men — the doctors, the hospital board — controlling my reproductive rights and condemning me to death,” she told Laura Kaplan, author of “The Story of Jane,” a history of the collective.

In Kaplan’s book, that woman was given the pseudonym “Jenny.” Other members were similarly disguised to protect their subsequent careers. What they had done may have been laudatory to some, but it was illegal. Kaplan, who belonged to the collective, appears in her book as “Kate.”

As for Jenny, the group’s evolution addressed her concerns about entrusting a woman’s health issues almost exclusively to men. The Jane Collective began as a referral service, putting pregnant women in touch with reliable abortionists. By the time it closed, female members of the collective were trained to perform abortions. The women hadn’t been to medical school, but their skills were attested to by a doctor who risked his license by doing post-operative checkups on the clients.

That doctor, a gynecologist, had trained at Cook Country Hospital where poor women often wound up after being operated on by back-alley abortionists. He contrasted that with women whose abortions were performed by Jane’s members.

“From my examinations, these women were not maltreated and had no ill effects,” he told Kaplan. “Their periods had returned; they were in good health; they had no complaints. All that says is that one does not need to be a doctor. You only need good training to do an abortion.”

The Jane Collective’s abortions weren’t the first performed by Chicago women who weren’t doctors. A 1918 Tribune headline read: “U. of C. Professor Says Midwife and Abortionist Are Synonymous.” The accompanying story attributed that definition to Dr. Rudolph Holmes, who also fought to remove ads for abortionists from Chicago newspapers. It also quoted a Northwestern University doctor who said infant mortality rates wouldn’t be reduced “until the general public realizes that child birth today is not a normal function but a pathological one.”

The Jane Collective had a different take on pregnancy: The only non-normal thing about it were laws that denied access to birth control and abortion, thus robbing a woman of choice. It wasn’t until 1965 that the Supreme Court overturned a Connecticut law that made it a crime for a woman to use birth control devices, or to ask a doctor to prescribe them.

“We are for every woman having exactly as many children as she wants, when she wants, if she wants,” Jane’s founders proclaimed. “It’s time that the Bill of Rights applied to women.”

Jane was founded in 1969, in Hyde Park, home to the University of Chicago, and a neighborhood where progressive ideas were welcome. Some came to the group bearing the conviction from the civil rights movement that securing justice sometimes requires defying unjust laws. Others were feminists who were bored by endless meetings, eager for action.

Kaplan referenced her own path to an African-American spiritual. “All I know is that one day my eyes were opened, like in ‘Amazing Grace’: Was blind but now can see,” she wrote.

She and other members — usually about 20 — quickly found that the actual work was less poetic. Rumor had it that some of the Chicago abortionists were tolerated by the cops, purportedly because unwanted pregnancies occur in police families. But there was no guarantee that wouldn’t change.

“You’re going to wind up in jail,” one member’s husband warned. “You’ll be a felon.”

It was also commonly assumed that the mob controlled the abortion market. That posed a problem because the Jane Collective aimed at reducing the cost of the medical procedure, and negotiating with gangsters could be dicey. The going price was $600 — a fortune to clients from poor nearby neighborhoods.

Plucky women, Jane’s members dangled the prospect of volume to abortionists in return for discounts. The bait was taken by a man in Cicero who called himself a doctor. The women quickly learned that many abortionists’ medical titles were self-awarded.

After cutting several deals with abortionists — some were guaranteed 10 cases a week to bring the price down to $500 — Jane’s women realized they were trapped in an unholy alliance: They were do-gooders. The abortionists were rapacious. So a few of the members dreamed of cutting the “doctors” out and doing the procedures themselves.

A West Coast man who had learned to perform abortions befriended the women of Jane. He trained Jenny, who served as his nurse, to do the procedure. She trained other women, and soon the Jane Collective became an abortion provider for as many as 60 women a week.

Then disaster struck: Jane’s facilities were raided by police, who kept asking: “Where’s the doctor?” They couldn’t imagine the women they arrested were performing abortions. The Jane Seven, as they were dubbed, were indicted by a grand jury — but spared a trial only by the Supreme Court’s timely legalization of abortion in 1973.

After the court decision, the women of the Jane Collective pondered what to do with their covertly acquired skills. A female doctor offered them a place in her office. “Could we still do abortions?” they asked. She said yes, but her lawyer said: “Within the law that would be impossible.”

So they went their separate ways. One of the members, a woman of means who lived in a Frank Lloyd Wright house, said that had she not been a part of Jane, she might have “gone to my grave sweeping the floor and vacuuming.”

She hosted a farewell party, attended by the West Coast man who had trained Jenny. He spoke of his time working with the Jane Collective: “There was a movement and I was part of it. I liked that.”

rgrossman@chicagotribune.com