How ‘The Janes’ gave 11,000 illegal abortions ahead of Roe v. Wade
nypost.comwoman seeking an illegal abortion. “My first day of learning how to assist was the day I got arrested,” Smith, now 71, told The Post.
But Smith was more concerned about protecting the identities of the women she helped end unwanted pregnancies than facing 110 years in jail on 11 counts of abortion and conspiracy to commit abortion.“We didn’t want the names and telephone numbers of [our clients] to be given to the police,” explained Smith, a Queens native. “So we ripped the cards into pieces and ate all the parts that were relevant.”Smith had joined an underground abortion network called Jane, whose members went by the alias “the Janes.” They covertly terminated more than 11,000 unwanted pregnancies in four years — all while under the threat of retribution from the cops, the mob and the Catholic Church — before getting caught.
Now, 40 years later, their story is being told in the HBO documentary “The Janes,” to be released Wednesday.“These were very principled people that came out of the Civil Rights movement, the anti-[Vietnam] war movement, the student movement,” Tia Lessin, who directed the film with Emma Pildes, told The Post.“They were mothers, grandmothers, aunts and students,” added Lessin, the Oscar-nominated creative behind 2008’s “Trouble the Water,” about Hurricane Katrina. “But they were all united by their belief that women should be able to make this choice.” The duo conducted 11 on-camera interviews with the surviving members of Jane — including Heather Booth, who founded the underground abortion ring in 1968.
In the mid 1960s, a friend had asked Booth, then a University of Chicago undergrad, to help his “nearly suicidal” sister end an unplanned pregnancy.
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