PROLOGUE
Jane
Martha Scott and Jeanne Galatzer-Levy didn’t set out to become illegal abortion providers.
They were just women who thought other women should have control over whether and when they had a child.
That was a revolutionary idea. For much of the world’s history, girls and women had little access to reliable birth control and few safe or legal choices to address an unintended pregnancy. It was almost as true in the United States in the 1960s as it was in ancient Greece and Rome.
Until 1965, almost half the states still had laws on their books restricting the sale of birth control, and for some years after that, many doctors flat-out refused to provide it to unmarried females because they didn’t believe they should have sex. In addition, for much of the twentieth century, abortion, or intentionally terminating a pregnancy, was illegal in every state unless the life of the woman was in danger. Despite that, hundreds of thousands of women—perhaps as many as a million a year—sought the illegal procedure.
In the 1960s, that began to change. Lawyers began to question why women who were victims of rape or incest, or who faced serious health issues were forced to either continue a pregnancy or endure an illegal abortion. Doctors were troubled by the increasing number of women who arrived at emergency rooms injured by or dying from backroom abortions. Attitudes about premarital sex shifted at the same time that women began to demand rights that had been denied to them. In a gathering wave, women and men, ministers and rabbis, society ladies and feminists began to insist that women be able to control whether and when they bear children.
It was an uphill battle. Medical schools had drummed into generations of doctors that abortion was both illegal and wrong, except in very specific circumstances. The powerful Catholic Church was firm in its opposition to both medical birth control and abortion, even if a woman was raped or her long-term health might suffer from a pregnancy. For everyone involved, this was a deeply personal and moral issue with little middle ground.
In the early 1970s, Scott and Galatzer-Levy (then Galatzer) joined a group of Chicago women who supported women’s reproductive rights and went further than most.
Initially, the group had referred pregnant callers to reliable, though illegal, abortion doctors. But the cost was high—at least $500 a procedure, or $3,600 or more in today’s dollars—and some of the providers were rude or abusive to their patients.
For a time, the group hired its own abortion provider. But he wasn’t a medical doctor, and after some months, he wanted to relocate. Rather than find a replacement, he began to teach a handful of the women volunteers, including Scott, how to perform safe abortions themselves. By modern standards, that was a shocking choice. But it also hearkened back to the thousands of years that women quietly and often secretly helped each other with contraception and abortion.
Pregnant women seeking an abortion in the Chicago area learned about the service from small advertisements, doctors, and friends, who suggested they “call Jane.” One group member would return the messages and others would help women through the process.
Officially, the Chicago women called themselves the Abortion Counseling Service of Women’s Liberation, or “the service” for short. But everyone else called them “Jane.”
For women like Sunny Chapman, who was nineteen, pregnant, and terrified, Jane was a lifesaver. “I would rather die than have a baby,” she said years later. Panicked, she had tried to end the pregnancy by jumping off a friend’s garage roof and taking scalding baths. She made herself sick with quinine but didn’t miscarry.
She was referred to an abortion provider, but his $600 fee was “a fortune—beyond belief,” equal to more than seven months of rent. “I couldn’t imagine getting that much money together,” she said. Finally, Jane was able to help her for what she could afford.
Some volunteers, like Galatzer-Levy, learned to be assistants, prepping women for their abortions.
On appointment day, pregnant women, their friends, their partners, and sometimes their kids would go to an apartment called “the Front” to wait. A Jane driver would pick up the women and take them to another apartment, “the Place,” where the abortions were performed. With Jane members doing the work, the price fell to $100, or about $650 today. But Jane accepted whatever the women could afford to pay.
The calls increased. Married women, single women, teens, and mothers wanted help. Jane members were performing up to thirty abortions a day, three days a week. Thousands of women came through the service.
Then, on May 3, 1972, Chicago homicide detectives knocked on the door.
The police questioned those at the Front and the Place. They seized Jane’s equipment. Everyone in both apartments, children included, was rounded up.
From left, Martha Scott, Jeanne Galatzer-Levy, Abby Parisers, Sheila Smith, and Madeline Schwenk volunteered with Jane and were arrested in 1972.
In one wagon heading to the police station, three Jane members ripped the day’s schedule into tiny pieces. In another, one of the Jane workers pulled about thirty index cards from her purse. She and other Jane members quietly tore off the corners with their clients’ names and contact details. Then, they ate the scraps to protect their clients’ privacy.
Seven Jane women, from Galatzer-Levy, a twenty-one-year-old former student, to Scott, a thirty-year-old mother of four, were arrested and charged with serious crimes. They each faced the possibility of many years in prison.
But there was a small glimmer of hope. A lawsuit called Roe v. Wade, which challenged the Texas law prohibiting abortion, was pending before the all-male U.S. Supreme Court. The court’s ruling—which would become perhaps the most famous legal decision in American history—would determine their fate and that of millions of women across America.
PART I
RESTRICTIONS
Lust defiles the body, debauches the imagination, corrupts the mind, deadens the will, destroys the memory, sears the conscience, hardens the heart, and damns the soul. It unnerves the arm, and steals away the elastic step. It robs the soul of manly virtues, and imprints upon the mind of the youth, visions that throughout life curse the man or woman. Like a panorama, the imagination seems to keep this hated thing before the mind, until it wears its way deeper and deeper, plunging the victim into practices that he loathes.
—Anthony Comstock, writing about obscene publications in Frauds Exposed, 1880
MADAME RESTELL
1800s
More than a century before the women of Jane secretly ran their illegal service, Ann Trow Lohman ran a thriving and very public abortion and birth control business in New York City.
Lohman, a native of England who had immigrated to the United States in 1831, claimed to have learned to become a midwife from her grandmother. In truth, she may not have had any formal training. In the late 1830s, she hung out a shingle, called herself Madame Restell, and began advertising her Preventative Powders ($5 a package, for birth control) and Female Monthly Pills ($1 each, to restore missed menstrual cycles) in the local newspapers.
Customers bought her medicines by mail or came to her offices in New York—and later in Boston and Philadelphia—for a consultation or to arrange a surgical procedure. She also ran a boardinghouse for single women who were pregnant, helping them through the birth and then arranging adoptions for the babies, for a fee.
In her more than thirty years of practice, Madame Restell enjoyed an unusually lucrative business. She dressed in “elegant silks and costly furs,” news accounts noted, and traveled in a carriage with two handsome horses. She and her husband accumulated a fortune that exceeded a million dollars.
She also earned a nickname: “the wickedest woman in New York.”
An illustration of Madame Restell from the National Police Gazette, a tabloid-like publication, in 1847.
In newspaper advertisements, Madame Restell boasted of her “experience and knowledge in the treatment of obstinate cases of female irregularity, stoppage, suppression.” But there were many others doing the same thing, part of a rush of women and men who took advantage of the growing newspaper industry to aggressively hawk solutions for late or missed menstruation beginning in the 1840s.
The services Madame Restell and others offered were as old as civilization. At least since the beginning of recorded human history, women have sought to regulate their childbearing or end pregnancies. The Kahun Papyrus, the oldest medical text known from Egypt, dating back to around 1850 BCE, includes a recipe for crocodile dung and fermented dough to prevent pregnancy. (Exactly how the concoction was used isn’t known.)
The Ebers Papyrus, another Egyptian medical scroll from around 1500 BCE, listed a formula “to cause a woman to stop pregnancy.” The ingredients included unripe fruit of the acacia tree, colocynth (also known as bitter apple), and dates. The mixture was to be moistened with honey to form a compound and inserted into the vagina.
The pills and powders that Madame Restell and others sold in the 1800s were somewhat less exotic but still relied on herbs and plants that were believed to somehow prevent a pregnancy or cause uterine cramping that resulted in miscarriage. (Some of them, unfortunately, were also poisonous and very dangerous.)
The potions often didn’t work, but Madame Restell and her competitors had plenty of customers, and in a time well before formal pregnancy tests, women had a window in which they could address their situation.
PREGNANT PAUSE:
Where Babies Come From
Today, we know that human babies come from a female’s egg (or ovum) and a male’s sperm, which combine to form an embryo that splits and grows. But understanding that basic fact took thousands of years and relatively advanced technology. Early on, humans figured out that sexual intercourse could eventually result in new life. But many theories persisted throughout history about how that happened, virtually all of them formulated by men who had little understanding of women’s bodies. Here’s a short history:
Aeschylus (Greek, around 500 BCE), in keeping with ancient Greek myths in which male gods were the creators, proposed the men provided the seed and women were the field where the seed became a child.
Copyright © 2020 by Karen Blumenthal
