Regardless of whether the supreme court fully overturns Roe v Wade later this month, as indicated by the majority draft opinion leaked in May, or merely allows it to be gutted at the state level, the US will continue its years-long march backwards on reproductive rights. Abortion access in the US in 2022 mirrors 1972, the year before the supreme court ensured a woman’s right to an abortion with Roe v Wade, and a time when a sparse patchwork of legalization in a few states forced many women to seek care from dubious illegal providers or dangerous at-home methods.
The Janes, a new HBO documentary on an underground network of abortion providers in Chicago in the years just before legalization, looks to this past as a window into America’s likely post-Roe future – a US without a woman’s right to choose that is less dystopia than memory. The 101-minute film, directed by Tia Lessin and Emma Pildes, traces the personal political evolutions of several members as well as the development of the group from collection of activists who connected women with safe abortion providers – male doctors, or men who claimed to be doctors – to performing the procedure themselves. The group eventually provided over 11,000 abortions, many to poor women who could not afford another option. The same women – poor, rural, people of color, often young – who are left behind now by the extreme measures passed by Republican state legislatures banning abortion as early as six weeks into pregnancy, before most women know they’re pregnant.
