'Jane' - the underground abortion service

Witness History

BBC

History, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.4 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 31 October 2019

⏱️ 11 minutes

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Summary

A group of feminists working under the name “Jane” carried out underground abortions in 1960s Chicago – when abortions were still illegal in most of the US.

Initially they gave abortion counselling and put women who wanted to terminate their pregnancies in touch with doctors who would perform the procedure. But when they discovered that one doctor they had been working with was not medically qualified, the women started to perform the abortions themselves.

Martha Scott was a member of the group – she received an abortion through the service, learned to perform abortions, and was one of the Janes arrested when they were busted by the police. She tells Lucy Burns about her experiences.

Photo courtesy of Martha Scott

Transcript

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0:00.0	Choosing what to watch night after night the flicking through the endless
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0:11.8	telly we share what we've been watching
0:14.0	Cladie Aide.
0:16.0	Load to games, loads of fun, loads of screaming.
0:19.0	Lovely. Off the telly with me Joanna Paige.
0:21.0	And me, Natalie Cassidy, so your evenings can be a little less
0:24.9	searching and a lot more auction listen on BBC sounds.
0:29.2	Hello you're listening to the BBC World Service and now witness history with me Lucy Burns.
0:39.3	Today I'm taking you to Chicago in 1969 where abortion was illegal but a group of
0:45.6	feminist activists started to run an underground abortion network even
0:50.3	performing the operations themselves. The group called themselves Jane.
0:55.2	Martha Scott was one of them.
0:56.7	If you can't be careful, try to be good.
1:00.7	Well, we can't find yourself unexpectedly pregnant in Chicago at the end of the 1960s, you might have seen a small ad in a newspaper, or maybe a business card pinned to a notice board which said,
1:12.0	pregnant, don't want to be called Jane 643 3844 If you'd called the number, the phone would have rung in a private house or a dorm room at the University of Chicago,
1:29.0	and you'd have been in the hands of the abortion counseling service known as Jane.
1:34.9	In 1969, Martha Scott was a 27-year-old mother of four living in a Chicago suburb when another mother
1:42.0	at the playground asked her if she'd be interested
1:44.6	in volunteering as an abortion counselor.
1:47.0	Now abortion is not something I spent a lot of time thinking about but it felt kind of
1:51.0	social working to me but that seemed appropriate and it also seemed illegal.
	...

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