Jane: The Legendary Story of the Underground Abortion Service, 1968-1973

by Judith Arcana (Editor)

Several documents by these fabulous "Jane" women talking about the group's illegal learning how to perform abortions, teaching themselves and others the skill, and ultimately providing abortions (and support) for thousands of women in the Chicago area. Truly impressive work that was equally risky and still relevant to learn about today.

Genres: Nonfiction

60 pages, Paperback

Published August 13, 2019

Reviews

[Kelvin Delgado]

A chunk of women’s rights history in the U.S. that I was not aware of. Bettered my verbiage around the subject of abortion and educated my opinions in ways I hadn’t thought of. Adding The Story of Jane, a longer story by one of the Janes in this compilation, to my want to read.

[Sarah]

A good overview of Jane, though of course written from a very pro-Jane perspective – it's a pro-choice book. However, it was very helpful with my research, informative, with interviews from participants in the speech from Judith Arcana.

Judith Arcana makes a pretty shocking admission – she says that abortion kills a baby. There's definitely going to be an article about that! You don't usually find such a frank admission among pro-choicers.

Anyway, this is worth reading by anyone who's interested in the abortion debate and wants to know about the history of Jane. I would recommend it to people on both sides of the abortion debate who are interested in the history.

Though I do wonder if there were complications among some of the women that Jane never found out about, since often there was not extensive follow-up after the women left if they aborted in the first trimester.

[Calvyn]

Four stars for a book that tells about Jane, a group of women in Chicago who stepped up to make abortions available for five years pre-Roe. Four stars for the insight, the awareness. Four stars even though one of the pages is missing; in its place an earlier page repeats. It's all part of being a pamphlet, a low budget book, created to share information without glitz or glamor. Like Jane.

Theoretically, I started reading this pamphlet-length book two months ago; in fact, I intended to read it, except that a number of HOLDs from the library intervened; I started yesterday and finished it today.

[Julianna]

"There is no justification for obeying immoral laws."

America really overturned Roe v Wade in 2022? Y'all are "cooked" to use my contemporaries parlance.

This is the pamphlet version and I appreciated its condensed and digestible form.

[Sue]

Wonderful and informative piece about the history of abortion services.

[Shae]

The women that made up Jane are some of my personal heroes and I would love to sit down and talk with any of them. One star detraction for the collective publication’s writing which was so appallingly bad in grammar and construction. Arcana’s writing was incredible.