‘The Janes’ Directors On How Donald Trump Spurred Their Film Reminding What It Was Like For Women Before Roe V. Wade – Contenders Documentary

deadline.com:

Shortly after Donald Trump became president of the United States in January 2017, he began stacking federal courts with conservative judges.

Realizing what was at stake, the team behind HBO Documentary Films’ abortion documentary The Janes began crafting a story to remind the audience what happened 50 years ago when women didn’t have access to safe and legal abortions. “It felt like the time that we needed to lift this story up,” filmmaker Emma Pildes said during a conversation at Deadline’s Contenders Film: Documentary event.

Pildes co-directed the pic with Tia Lessin. RELATED: The Contenders Documentary – Deadline’s Full Coverage Launched in Chicago in the late 1960s and early ’70s, The Jane Collective, or simply Jane, was an underground network formed to help women obtain safe abortions when the procedure was illegal.

Pildes noted that before Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that legalized abortion, women determined to terminate pregnancies risked jail time and their lives. “There were septic abortion wards for women who did self-imposed or back-alley abortions and were dropped off.