The Jane Collective and Chicago's Underground Abortion Service

On May 3, 1972, Chicago police officers went to an apartment on the South Side. Inside they found women waiting for care and a handful of others who seemed to be running things. The officers were looking for the man they assumed must be in charge, the doctor. There was no doctor. The people performing abortions in that apartment were women with no medical degrees, members of a group that called itself the Abortion Counseling Service of Women's Liberation and that the city's women knew by a single name: Jane. Seven members were arrested and charged. Within a year the charges were gone, and so was the service, for a reason none of them could have planned on in that apartment: the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade.

In short: From the late 1960s until 1973, a Chicago collective known as Jane arranged and then performed thousands of illegal abortions, most of them for women who could not afford to travel or pay high fees. Police arrested seven members in May 1972, but the case faded after Roe in January 1973 and the group disbanded; its story is a lesson in how ordinary people build services when the law fails them.

A phone number and a code name

Jane began, like many movements, with a favour. In 1965 a University of Chicago student named Heather Booth helped a friend's sister find a doctor willing to perform an abortion, which was illegal in Illinois except to save a woman's life. Word spread that Booth knew someone. More calls came. By the late 1960s, a loose network of women had formed around the need, and it took a deliberate shape: a phone number, an answering service, and a name chosen so that a caller could ask for "Jane" without saying anything that would alarm a roommate or a parent.

The early model was referral. Members took messages, called women back, met them, explained the procedure, and connected them with an abortionist the group had found. They tried to make sure the women understood what would happen and had someone with them. That counselling role was radical in its own right. In an era when women were often kept ignorant of their own medical care, Jane explained everything.

Booth herself moved on to other organizing. She later founded the Midwest Academy, a training school for organizers, and spent decades in campaigns for workers and civil rights. Her early role in Jane was the start of a long public life, not its centre. The collective that grew after her was run by dozens of women whose names were mostly unknown outside Chicago.

Discovering there was no doctor

The turning point came when members learned that the main provider they relied on, a man they believed was a physician, was not one. He had learned to perform the procedure but had no medical degree. The discovery could have ended the service. Instead it led to a different conclusion. If he could learn it, so could they.

Members trained with him and then began performing abortions themselves. Control changed everything. The group could lower its fees, sometimes to almost nothing for women who had no money, and it could set its own standards for care. Over the years, the collective is estimated to have helped about 11,000 women end pregnancies, figures drawn largely from the accounts of former members and the historian of the group. The women who came were often poor, often Black or Latina, often referred by social workers or clinic staff who knew of Jane but could not say so officially.

The safety record, by the accounts that survive, was good for an illegal service working in apartments. That is not a reason to romanticize back-room procedures. It is a reason to notice what made the difference: careful screening, plain explanations, follow-up, and a refusal to treat the women as criminals or patients to be processed. The care itself was the politics.

The arrests and the papers that did not survive

The May 1972 raid was the closest Jane came to ruin. Seven members were taken into custody and charged with felonies that, if prosecuted to the end, could have meant prison. The women they had been helping that day were suddenly at risk of exposure too, and the members' first worry, by their own later accounts, was protecting those women's privacy. A service built on secrecy had been opened to the police in an afternoon.

The case did not move fast. Lawyers sought delays, and by early 1973 the legal ground under the prosecution had shifted. On January 22, 1973, the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade, and with it the constitutional basis for Illinois's ban collapsed. The charges against the seven were eventually dropped. Clinics opened. Licensed physicians began providing abortions in the open. Jane, having served its purpose, disbanded in 1973.

For years afterward, most members said little publicly. The fullest history appeared in 1995, when former member Laura Kaplan published The Story of Jane, based on interviews with dozens of women who had been part of the service. A 2022 documentary brought the story to a new generation, released in the same year the Supreme Court overruled Roe.

How the service actually worked

It is worth looking at Jane as an organization rather than a legend, because its structure is the part with lessons for today. The group made decisions collectively but had clear roles: people answering calls, people doing counselling, people driving women to locations they would not know in advance, people performing procedures. Women typically gathered first at one apartment and were then taken to a separate location for the procedure, a two-step arrangement that protected both members and patients. New members learned through a kind of apprenticeship, moving from counselling into more technical roles as they gained experience.

Money was handled carefully. Fees were set on a sliding scale, and women who could pay more effectively subsidized those who could pay nothing. Members were volunteers, many of them students, mothers or workers with other jobs. Tensions arose, as they do in any group, over who held power and who made decisions. Former members have described disagreements about how much the group should grow and how much risk it should take. Those debates did not destroy the service. They were part of running it.

Above all, Jane understood its own position in the law. It did not pretend the law did not exist. Its members knew they could be arrested and organized with that in mind. Their protection was secrecy, careful record-keeping, and the quiet tolerance of some people in the system who believed women dying from botched abortions was the greater wrong.

The other side, and the difference since 2022

Opponents of abortion, then and now, see in Jane not heroism but lawbreaking that ended many lives they consider human. That position deserves to be stated plainly, because many Americans hold it sincerely. From their perspective, the women of Jane substituted their own judgment for the law of Illinois, and their success is not a model but a warning.

The answer is not to dismiss that moral view but to look at what the law in 1972 actually produced. Illinois's ban did not stop abortion. It sorted women by income. Women with money and connections flew to New York, which had legalized abortion in 1970, or found discreet doctors. Women without money found Jane, or someone far more dangerous, or nothing. Hospitals in Chicago, like hospitals elsewhere, saw women arrive with injuries and infections from unsafe abortions. Whatever one's view of the morality of abortion, a law that leaves poor women injured while the wealthy travel is not one that achieves its stated goal evenly.

The present is different from 1972 in a crucial way. Medication abortion, using pills approved by federal regulators decades ago, has changed what it means to end a pregnancy early outside a clinic. That has made modern networks look less like Jane's apartment and more like hotlines, travel funds, and doctors working under state shield laws. It has also made the legal fights different, focused on mail, telehealth and prescriptions rather than on raids. Those differences matter. The organizing lessons carry over anyway.

Lessons for organizers now

The most durable thing Jane built was not a medical technique. It was a structure of trust. Women called because someone they knew had called before and been treated with respect. Social workers referred because they had seen the results. That kind of trust takes years to build and can vanish in a week if a group is careless.

A second lesson is about who gets served first. Jane made a deliberate choice to keep fees low so that poor women could come. Many modern abortion funds and travel networks make the same choice, and they face the same pressures: limited money, burned-out volunteers, legal uncertainty. The women of Jane would recognize those problems.

A third lesson concerns the law. Jane's members took real risks, and some paid with arrests. Today, people helping others get care face a patchwork of state laws, some aggressively enforced. Anyone thinking of helping should understand what the law in their state allows. The safest and most powerful work is often entirely legal: raising money, giving rides across state lines where travel is lawful, offering a couch, answering a phone, and changing laws at the ballot box.

Chicago at the turn of the decade

Jane grew up in a particular place and moment. Chicago in the late 1960s was a city of movements: civil rights campaigns on the South and West Sides, student protest at the universities, and the confrontations around the 1968 Democratic National Convention, when police clashed with antiwar demonstrators in the streets. Many young women who joined those movements found that the men leading them expected women to type, cook and stay quiet. Out of that frustration came the women's liberation movement, and in 1969 activists in the city founded the Chicago Women's Liberation Union, an umbrella for projects on child care, health, work and education. The abortion service was connected to that circle.

The health stakes were visible in the city's own hospitals. Large public hospitals such as Cook County Hospital treated women who arrived with infections, bleeding and other injuries after unsafe abortions, many of them poor women with nowhere else to turn. Doctors who worked in those wards in the years before Roe have described what they saw, and their accounts helped persuade some physicians to support legal reform. The women of Jane knew those stories. Part of their motive was simply to keep women out of those wards.

Illinois law at the time allowed abortion only to save the woman's life, and the state's courts were not inclined to loosen it. Reform was moving elsewhere: Hawaii, Alaska, Washington and New York loosened their laws around 1970, and New York's law, with no residency requirement, drew women from across the country. For a Chicago woman with money, a flight to New York became an option. For a woman cleaning offices on the South Side, it was not. Jane filled that gap, and its members were acutely aware that the gap was defined by class and race.

That awareness shaped the group's sense of itself. Members did not see what they did as charity. They saw it as a refusal to accept a system that sorted women into those who could get safe care and those who could not, and as a demonstration that ordinary people could take responsibility for one another's health when institutions would not.

The long afterlife of a short-lived service

Jane existed for only a few years, but its story kept returning. After Roe, most former members went on with lives that had little to do with abortion, raising families, working, teaching, organizing. For many years they rarely spoke about what they had done, partly from caution and partly because the work had felt private. When they did begin to speak, in interviews and in Kaplan's history, they described the experience less as a crime or a heroic adventure than as a period when they learned what they were capable of.

Each time abortion rights have come under new pressure, the story has drawn fresh attention. That is understandable, but it carries a risk. Jane is sometimes invoked as if it were a plan for the future, a model to copy. Its former members have generally resisted that framing, pointing out that they worked in a different legal world with different tools, and that the goal was always legal, safe, affordable care for everyone, not a permanent underground. Their story is best read as evidence of what people will do when the law fails them, and as an argument for not making them do it.

What you can do

These suggestions are general information; for legal questions about helping someone in your state, contact a legal aid group.

1. Find the people already doing the work. The organizations directory lists nonprofits by cause in every state, including health and legal aid groups; abortion funds and practical support networks often welcome volunteers for driving, fundraising and phone shifts.
2. Learn the history of organizing alongside the history of law. The protest and resistance page gathers coverage of movements past and present, and the reproductive rights page follows current fights over bans and pills.
3. Change the rules where they are written. Find your state legislators on the representatives finder and ask them how they would vote on protections for patients and providers, and on shield laws for doctors who help patients across state lines.
4. Make sure you can vote in the races that decide these laws. The voting page lists registration deadlines, voter ID rules and early voting for every state.

The women of Jane did not wait for permission to care for each other. They also did not stop at caring; many went on to organize for decades. Both halves of their example are still available to anyone who picks up the phone.