#the janes

[thriftysubversion]

The Janes (2022)

Police arrested seven women who were part of a clandestine network. Using code names, blindfolds and safe houses, they built an underground service for women seeking safe, affordable, illegal abortions calling themselves JANE.

The Janes (2022) ⭐ 7.6 | Documentary

1h 41m

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt16377356/plotsummary?item=po6338120

[the-truth-within-the-lie]

The Truth About Jane

They were heroes, and human. They could be any of us.

“My fear was that an outsider would paint us as superheroes or Amazon warriors, as extraordinary,” writes Laura Kaplan, one of the members of the service known as Jane, in a 2019 preface to “The Story of Jane: The Legendary Underground Feminist Abortion Service,” her exhaustive history of the Chicago feminist group that performed secret, illegal abortions in the late 1960s and early 1970s. “This is the opposite of the truth and certainly the wrong message to send to a younger generation.” 

In the intervening years, Jane members have taken on an unusually active role in shaping the historical understanding of their work, and this is why. Hero worship has a distancing effect: it makes the object seem far away, alien, even semi-divine. It makes the revered people’s lives, their personalities, seem unlike your own. But Jane, Kaplan says, was not some exceptional or otherworldly group. “We were ordinary women,” she insists. “I hope that everyone who reads this history will see herself in us and think: that could be me.”

[certainwoman]

The Janes (2022), dir. Emma Pildes and Tia Lessin

[xjmlm]

Sheila Smith, Martha Scott, Diane Stevens, and Judith Arcana.

The Janes doing heroic work of defying abortion laws

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/the-janes-documentary-abortions-roe-wade-b2101124.html

Members of Jane 1972

[hereslookingatyousquid]

Did anyone else watch The Janes on HBO? It's a documentary about a small group of very young women who ran an underground abortion service to make sure women were at least getting decent care.

I held it together until the end, when the roe decision came down. The women all talk about the joy, the relief. They closed their doors, they went on to be doctors, lawyers, writers, artists, mothers, grandmothers. They lived their lives knowing they didn't have to be responsible for saving women anymore...and then they all just look dead in to the camera with such exhaustion and despair. I lost it and sobbed for a good 20 minutes straight.

10/10. 5 stars. Watch it.

[imagine-all-the-people]

“The Janes” on HBO is pretty incredible. A documentary about the pre-Roe v. Wade era, female activists calling themselves 'Jane' build an underground network for women with unwanted pregnancies and provide low-cost and free illegal abortions to an estimated 11,000 women. The Chicago connection is pretty fascinating.

We will not go back! ✊🏻

[movieposters1]