In 1969, abortion was illegal in Illinois. A secret underground operation emerged in Chicago. Officially called the Abortion Counseling Service of Women’s Liberation, it became known as the Jane network, because women seeking abortions were told to call a number and “ask for Jane.” As I watched “The Janes,” an HBO documentary about the service, I was struck by the buoyancy of the story. The film shows a kicky sensibility, even though Jane was under immense stress providing secret abortions to terrified women. There are weed jokes, anti-surveillance shenanigans, and a soundtrack that would be appropriate for a mod spy movie. The Janes manage to evade the police, the Mafia, and the church to facilitate approximately 11,000 clandestine abortions. They emerge from anonymity as the stars in a new genre: “The abortion caper.”
“The Janes” ends with Roe v. Wade being handed down in 1973. Within weeks of the documentary’s release, the Supreme Court had overturned Roe, which makes the film feel even more essential — not just as a road map for modern civil disobedience but as a testament to the kind of complex, unruly abortion storytelling that also now feels at risk. Over the past few weeks, as I waited for the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision to drop, I sought out such stories compulsively, as if the ruling might seize them too. In addition to “The Janes,” I watched the French film “Happening,” about a student seeking an illegal abortion in France in 1963, and “Oh God, a Show About Abortion,” the comedian Alison Leiby’s one-woman show about terminating a pregnancy at Planned Parenthood at age 35.
The suppression of stories about abortion has been a result of the efforts to control it. Abortion bans and anonymization in court are used to silence women seeking abortions. They also moralize about it onscreen. It is striking how often abortion has been obscured in films, presented as a quickly discarded option (as in “Juno”) or averted with a spontaneous miscarriage (“Citizen Ruth”) or deployed to facilitate another character’s arc (“Dirty Dancing”) or completely euphemized (“Knocked Up,” where it is referred to only as “rhymes with smashmorshion.”)
When abortion stories are not stifled by shame, they might be celebrated as a brave act of speaking out — a tradition that has created its own clichés, as accounts of abortion are smoothed into politically palatable forms, in which the patient is fashioned as suitably desperate and her story is disclosed only reluctantly. Women were forced to trade their stories in exchange for their rights. In the documentary, a Jane member recalls women calling the service and listing their reasons for needing an abortion, but she would assure them this was unnecessary: “We would really try to make clear to them — they didn’t need to justify themselves.”
What does an abortion story without justification look like? Abortion is a common procedure (one in four American women will have one, according to the Guttmacher Institute) that has been so flattened into an “issue” that it can feel revelatory to just recast abortion as an experience, one that can unlock unexpected insights into women’s private lives. If “The Janes” makes abortion into a caper, “Happening” turns it into a hero’s journey and “Oh God” renders it as a farce. Together, these works suggest that abortions are worth talking about because women’s lives are interesting in their own right.
“Happening” follows Anne, a student of literature who becomes pregnant and seeks an illegal abortion while studying for final exams. As Anne is sabotaged by her doctors, shunned by her peers and preyed on by men, she watches her life’s potential narrow with each passing week. As she pursues more dangerous methods to end her pregnancy, she is putting herself at risk to save her future as an author. “I’d like a child one day, but not instead of a life,” she tells one useless doctor.
The plot of “Happening” is driven not by Anne’s harrowing victimization but by her flinty resolve. She refuses to leave the doctor’s office when he offers her sympathy, but not assistance. “So help me,” she demands. She endures physical and mental trials, but she outwits her adversaries like a great action figure. She works to compel her community to recognize her humanity through abortion’s veil of criminality and taboo.
Anne finally makes her way to an underground abortionist, but the procedure doesn’t work, so she undergoes another, riskier operation that could kill her or else send her to the hospital, which could be her last stop before prison. She convulses over a dorm bathroom, but it is less like a body-horror scene than a feat in strength. Anne cannily incriminates her when one of her bullies approaches her in the stall and tells her to get a pair of scissors to remove the bloody tissue from her body. The very existence of “Happening” confirms her triumph: It is based on a 2000 memoir by the writer Annie Ernaux.
No such horrors await Alison Leiby in “Oh God, a Show About Abortion,” whose self-described “simple and frictionless” abortion is worth examining mostly because it is a funny story. The 70-minute monologue begins with a startling joke — “My mom texted me, ‘Kill it tonight!’ and I’m like, I already did, that’s why the show exists!” — that feels crafted to immediately disarm the abortion taboo. The show continues to roll through the experience, from Leiby’s awkwardly placed pee in a Courtyard Marriott glass tumbler to the first-trimester procedure that she obtains at a Planned Parenthood facility across the street from an opulent maternity store. (“Who owns that?” she jokes. “Mike Pence?”)
Even before Roe’s reversal, Leiby recognized that she was lucky, and that most women seeking abortion “do not stroll into Planned Parenthood with a Lululemon outfit and then take an Uber home.” Near the end of the piece, when her mother tells her that she was forced to go to the Mafia for an illegal abortion in the 1960s, Leiby hesitates to share her own experience. “I didn’t want to come off as bragging, like,My doctor did it.” she jokes.
Leiby doesn’t dwell on her privileges, and her story gains strength from that choice. Her decision to end her pregnancy is still met by patriarchal condescensions, shame, and general indignation. But she resists the urge to feel sad about her decision to end her pregnancy. She also refuses to apologize for her legal right to do so safely and legally. “I thought I’d spend the next few days or months staring out the window like I’m in a depression medication commercial,” she says. Instead, she walks out of the clinic feeling “a little underwhelmed.”
I attended Leiby’s show this month in New York while visibly pregnant. My expanding body is now a source of rote congratulations from strangers. However, my own feelings about my pregnancy were tumultuous and it was refreshing to step into an environment in which the condition wasn’t immediately culturally accepted.
Much of Leiby’s story concerns her choice not to raise children — there is an interlude about perineal tearing — and though her abortion is far easier to secure than Annie Ernaux’s, the stakes have not been lowered. Leiby wants to pursue her career and to avoid the “painful and exhausting and scary” aspects of parenting, but she also just wants to be recognized as a full adult human on her own terms, not as a problem that only a baby can fix.
“The Janes,” too, is a story about women claiming their potential, though the members of the Jane network fulfill theirs not by receiving abortions but by providing them. When they discover that their abortionist, “Mike,” is not a doctor but just a guy who learned how to perform a dilation and curettage (a procedure known as a D and C), they refuse to shutter the service. They instead decide to perform abortions for themselves, often at no cost, and no Mikes required. They learn to take responsibility for their lives and those of others. In turn, they are driven to “share that sense of personal power with women,” as one member puts it. “We wanted every woman who contacted us to be the hero of her own story.”
These abortion stories are only a fraction of the story. They mostly feature white women, and they arrive at a moment when abortion storytelling is being diluted even further. Even if the patient doesn’t disclose her abortion, digital surveillance could still be used to track her location and use Google searches to find her. (These tools have been used in criminal cases).
Stories that do emerge will often be shaped to resist political pressure. Last fall, Representative Cori, a Democrat from Missouri spoke out for the first times about being raped at a Missouri church camp at 17 and having an abortive abortion at 18. “It felt like something was pressing down on me,” she said about the demands on her testimony, adding: “Whatever I say, it has to produce.”
Dobbs is a story of women considering abortion. The court’s imagined modern pregnant woman can achieve total self-actualization while carrying her pregnancy to term, with the help of anti-discrimination laws, state-mandated parental leave and health insurance. “Now you have the opportunity to be whatever you want to be,” Lynn Fitch, the Mississippi attorney general, said in an interview about the case. “You have the option in life to really achieve your dream and goals, and you can have those beautiful children as well.”
This woman can have it all, except she cannot have an abortion, and she can’t have a story, either. She is a straw man — useful only after she has been stripped of her subjectivity and drained of all substance.
Source: NY Times
