Situating Jane: Pre-Roe Abortion Activism and the Meaning of Direct Action

Before theorizing Jane’s politics in detail, it is helpful to bring the organization’s overall character into greater relief, first, by reviewing some contemporaneous organizing taking place around reproductive rights in the U.S. in the late 1960s and early 1970 and second, by considering the dominant forms of “direct action” that are most familiar in American political culture. Jane’s focus — on ensuring that those who needed abortions could get them affordably and safely — distinguished their political program from other pre-Roe abortion rights activism in particular and from mainstream models of direct action in general.

Jane emerged around the same time as major national organizations opposing restrictive abortion laws in the U.S. At its second national convention in 1967, the National Organization for Women (NOW), originally focused on employment and education, added reproductive rights to its platform and called for the repeal of laws restricting abortion and contraception. In early 1969, just as Jane was getting off the ground as a group of three, the First National Conference on Abortion Laws took place in Chicago, the same city in which Jane did its work. NARAL (originally National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, now NARAL Pro-Choice America) was established there as a national organization advocating for the repeal of abortion laws.

In the pre-Roe years, NOW and NARAL pursued somewhat different strategies even as they shared a common goal of repealing abortion laws.Footnote ⁸ NOW took a fairly mainstream approach, focusing on lobbying and court cases. NARAL, on the other hand, engaged in more disruptive forms of protest as part of its effort to bring about legal change. Shortly after their founding, for example, NARAL activists participated in public demonstrations in 11 American cities during the week of Mother’s Day 1969 in the name of “Children by Choice.”Footnote ⁹ NARAL also worked in coalition with more radical grassroots feminist groups and supported “speak out” events in which participants shared their experiences with illegal abortion in order to draw attention to the harms of criminalization.

The NARAL strategy is consistent with “direct action” as it is usually understood. It most often functions as a broad umbrella term that refers to “nonviolent methods of noncooperation, obstruction, or defiance” intended to place “pressure on government or other powerful institutions” to change a law, policy, or practice (Carter Reference Carter2005, 1, 3). Direct action typically describes political activity undertaken by ordinary people or non-elites which occurs outside “official” channels of government (Carter Reference Carter1973; Reference Carter2005; Epstein Reference Epstein1991; Humphrey Reference Humphrey2009; Kauffmann Reference Kauffmann2017; Tarrow Reference Tarrow2012). At a general level, it aims to generate “leverage” for those engaged in the action so that they might ultimately affect the conduct of those with more formal political power. This frequently involves efforts to “awaken public concern” — that is, to attract attention and mobilize other citizens in support of a cause — as part of the goal of persuading or coercing elites (Epstein Reference Epstein1991). Martin Luther King Jr., the political figure most closely associated with direct action in U.S. political culture, articulated this dimension of the practice in his famous 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”: “Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored” (King Reference King and Washington2003, 291). Finally, although the array of protest tactics that can be considered examples of direct action is vast, certain activities are paradigmatic, such as demonstrations, rallies, occupations, sit-ins, mass arrests, and boycotts.

Importantly, direct action in this capacious sense can include action that is legal as well as action that is illegal. The category of “civil disobedience” famously captures action of the second sort, in which practitioners purposely break a law as part of their protest strategy. “Civil disobedience” has been an especially contested term in U.S. political thought since the 1960s (Delmas Reference Delmas2016; Pineda Reference Pineda2021). The most influential scholarly definition, voiced by John Rawls, stipulates that civil disobedience is “a public, nonviolent, conscientious yet political act contrary to law usually done with the aim of bringing about a change in the laws or policies of the government.” His conception also presupposes that the context for such action is a “nearly just society” and that practitioners, although “disobedient,” operate within “the limits of fidelity to law” (Rawls Reference Rawls1971, 382–91). Critics have challenged nearly every aspect of this formulation, although the claim that civil disobedience implies general respect for the legal system and other prevailing institutions has been especially controversial. It is rejected by thinkers who stress the radical, even revolutionary, character of the political projects, including those of MLK and the Civil Rights Movement, that are often presented as models of “civil disobedience” (Celikates Reference Celikates2016a; Reference Celikates2016b; Delmas Reference Delmas2016; Pineda Reference Pineda2021). Still, despite these varied accounts of civil disobedience, liberal and radical-democratic conceptualizations also converge. Both understand purposeful law-breaking as a modality of direct action that is intended to persuade or pressure an audience in order to bring about a change in existing conditions.Footnote ¹⁰ Robin Celikates, a prominent theorist of civil disobedience whose own conceptualization “democratizes” the concept and departs dramatically from Rawls’s, for example, nonetheless conceives of it as an intentionally unlawful, collective act of protest by which citizens “pursue the political aim of changing specific laws, policies or institutions … in ways that can be seen as civil (as opposed to military)” (Reference Celikates2016a, 985).

Both “legal” and “illegal” forms of direct action share something important in common, then: they are intended to draw attention to a wrong in order to bring about a change in existing conditions. As Candice Delmas explains, “Both lawful protest and civil disobedience aim to reform policy or law, but civil disobedients try to achieve their goal by resorting to unlawful action” (Delmas Reference Delmas2016, 681–2). The wide range of practices usually grouped under the heading “direct action” is connected because they all share a similar formal purpose: they aim to persuade or pressure decision-makers to alter some aspect of government.Footnote ¹¹

Jane’s focus on ensuring immediate access to abortion, “under existing conditions,” set the group apart from efforts to use conventional politico-legal channels and from both “legal” and “illegal” forms of direct action. This was true even before the group began providing abortions themselves, when they were focused on offering counseling and facilitating the procedure. An early member of Jane signaled this divergence when she explained why she opted not to attend NARAL’s founding conference. She explained, “Politically we were so far from them that it was a different world. They were content to inch forward and we wanted to do it right now, but it was great that NARAL was happening” (Kaplan Reference Kaplan1995, 22–4). This formulation does not oppose Jane’s strategy to NARAL’s and suggests that there was a role for both approaches to play at that historical juncture. But the difference between them is more than temporal (slow “inching” vs. “right now”); it concerns the understanding of authority itself. While NOW and NARAL understandably appealed to the recognized authority of courts and state legislatures in their efforts to change abortion laws, Jane experimented with assuming authority themselves. Rather than attempting to persuade others to codify the right to abortion in law, these feminist activists instead “took” it.

Jane’s Practice of Anarchic Direct Action

This section analyzes three defining features of Jane’s politics that illuminate the anarchic direct action in which they were engaged. First, Jane’s organizing work was not centrally concerned with influencing other political actors, whether fellow citizens or officials, in pursuit of governmental action. Second, instead of making an appeal outward to push for legal change, they sought to change the situation themselves; a small group of women in Chicago transformed the lived conditions faced by women in Chicago. Third, Jane effectively usurped the right to abortion, establishing practices by which to guarantee it themselves. The first two of these characteristics were evident in Jane’s work from the start, while the third arguably was fully realized only once members began providing abortions themselves.

First, Jane’s activities were not intended to communicate, persuade, or otherwise demonstrate “claims against better-equipped opponents” (Tarrow Reference Tarrow2012). At least some members of the group found the work of NOW and NARAL — which consisted of lobbying, legal cases, and collective protests that pushed for the repeal of abortion laws — to be important and worthwhile. Yet Jane’s activities from the very start were not of this type; their attention was not directed toward legal or governmental authorities, the medical profession, or even public opinion. Indeed, their work was not centrally about claim-making at all, and was instead about directly changing the circumstances faced by pregnant people in their community.Footnote ¹² As one former member explained, “We were not the group that was going to beat on the doors of the state capitol and say, ‘Please boys, won’t you do this for us?’ We never thought that was a stupid thing to do. It would have been a stupid thing for us to do. It wasn’t our style” (Elze Reference Elze1988). This remark suggests that Jane’s members did not necessarily reject more mainstream strategies directed at legal change, but rather saw themselves as engaged in a different “style” of politics, one that did not go “through” government officials or even public opinion.

This dimension of Jane’s activism resonates with the meaning of “direct action” as it is understood in anarchic thought. This framework stresses the literal meaning of the adjective “direct” in two senses. That descriptor is taken to mean, first, that the action in question is relatively unmediated by authorities (De Cleyre Reference De Cleyre1912; Graeber Reference Graeber2009; Hart Reference Hart, Purkis and Bowen1997; Ordonez Reference Ordóñez, Franks, Jun and Williams2018; Sparrow Reference Sparrow1997; Wieck Reference Wieck1962). According to this understanding, those engaged in direct action try to “weigh directly on the problem with which you are confronted … without needing the mediation of politicians or bureaucrats” (Sans Titres Bulletin 1999). Classic examples of this kind of action include blockades, sabotage, squatting, tree-spiking, lockouts, occupations, slowdowns, and the general strike. Jane, as we have seen, distinguished their DIY strategy from lobbying for abortion rights, much like proponents of “direct action” in the anarchic sense differentiate it from more “indirect” methods of pursuing social change. Todd May explains, “For instance, going to a representative of a congressional or parliamentary body and asking to have a law or policy enacted is an indirect action. One is not undertaking the action oneself, but is instead lobbying someone else to have it done” (May Reference May2015, 99). Note that many forms of collective protest activity — often labeled “direct action” according to the more familiar, broad umbrella term — are actually “indirect” according to this measure, since they aim to induce action in other actors, whether the public or politicians. Advocates and practitioners of direct action in the specific sense of unmediated action take varied stances on the value of these more common “indirect” tactics. Yet they converge on the belief that at least “sometimes we can organise together, without relying on the state, to address and solve our problems here and now” (Sparrow Reference Sparrow1997). Jane exemplified this conviction; the group was formed by women who decided to “address and solve” the problem of abortion access themselves, rather than making appeals to those with formal power. A former member of Jane who was among those arrested in 1972 explained the importance of responding directly to a pressing need in one’s own community: “Here are these women. They need abortions. Yes, it’s good to collect petitions and go to the state capitol, but I want to do this right here and now” (Kaplan Reference Kaplan1995, 290).

Jane’s hands-on approach to changing the conditions facing pregnant people in Chicago aligns them with what is usually regarded as “the distinguishing feature of direct action” in the anarchic sense: such action “aims to achieve goals through our own activity rather than through the actions of others.” That is, rather than trying to “get others to achieve our goals for us,” as is the case with many if not most forms of political activity, what makes direct action “direct” is that its practitioners intend to alter the conditions they face, rather than persuade or pressure other actors to do so (Sparrow Reference Sparrow1997). David Graeber’s influential definition of direct action, rooted in his interpretation of the anarchic tradition, also captures this quality: “people acting directly to transform their own immediate situation” (Graeber Reference Graeber2009, 205). Jane achieved such a transformation; through organized collaboration, its members changed the material reality of abortion provision in their city. They were engaged in direct action in this more precise sense: through their counseling, referral, and later abortion provision practices, they brought about “an immediate practical alteration in power relations” (Franks Reference Franks2003, 32).

Jane’s political activity was also “direct” in a second sense specified in anarchic political thought. The “direct” descriptor not only conveys that the action is relatively unmediated but also means that practitioners are working on their own behalf to shape conditions to which they themselves are subject (Beyer-Arnesen Reference Beyer-Arnesen2000; Franks Reference Franks2003; Graeber Reference Graeber2009). From the start, Jane was committed to this kind of reflexive self-activity. As they announced in an early pamphlet: “Only women can bring about their own liberation.” Their organizing expressed this commitment; a group of women in Chicago — without any special political or legal standing or medical expertise — worked together to change the reproductive health environment for women in Chicago. Here, the action is “direct” because it is reflexive; the action aims to benefit those who are carrying it out (Franks Reference Franks2003).

This should be understood in a fairly loose sense. Although a handful of women who received abortion care from the service later joined Jane as members, for the most part, the people doing the counseling, referrals, and abortions were not the same people undergoing the procedures. Indeed, there were significant differences between these two groups of women, especially after New York legalized abortion in 1970. Before then, Jane’s members — who were mostly but not exclusively white and middle-class — were assisting a broad cross-section of Chicago women. Once abortion was legal in New York, however, those who had the means to travel to New York to receive a legal abortion from a doctor usually did. As a result, Jane increasingly served low-income women, many of them women of color — those who were unable to fund a trip to New York (Bart Reference Bart1987, 341; Kaplan Reference Kaplan1995, 108, 175). Of course, this is a familiar pattern; restrictions on reproductive care — both formal and informal — continue to disproportionately harm communities that are already disadvantaged.

Still, despite these inequalities, Jane’s work displays the reflexive quality denoted by “direct” in anarchic thought. The abortion service was built by “women helping women” (Jane Abortion Collective Oral History Collection). Most of Jane’s members did not personally benefit from the abortion care the group facilitated and later provided. Yet as women living in their particular time and place, they were subject to an injustice that they set about to redress for a broad community of which they were a part. The feminist practices of counseling, referral, and medical care that the members created and performed can be seen as modes of self-activity in which “the oppressed temporarily overcome their oppression,” as Benjamin Franks says of anarchic direct action (Franks Reference Franks2003, 27). Organizing to change their own lived conditions — the unavailability of safe and affordable abortions within a criminalizing regime — the Jane activists enacted a political program of “women working together to satisfy their needs” (CWLU c. 1970-71).

Jane, then, was engaged in a specific type of direct action, according to which “direct” means both unmediated and reflexive. Their work was exemplary of “successful” anarchic direct action in this dual sense, because they were able to “bring about a direct rearrangement of the existing conditions of life through the combined efforts of those directly affected” (Beyer-Arnesen Reference Beyer-Arnesen2000). From the time of the group’s formal founding in 1969, both aspects of anarchic direct action were on display. Even in their work as a counseling and referral service, the group focused not on appealing to or pressuring those with formal power and instead on creatively maneuvering so as to protect women’s bodily autonomy.

The third feature of Jane’s dissident political activity, though closely tied to the two already examined, is fully evident only once the activists began providing abortions themselves. At that point, they effectively usurped the right to abortion. Without any external authorization — “no one had given us permission” — Jane’s members, “ordinary people,” claimed for themselves the authority to make abortion available in their city (“Jane” Reference Fried1990, 99).Footnote ¹³ Jane “forged ahead and took what the state did not give them” (“Introduction” 2004, 6). The group seized the right to abortion, with no imprimatur from the government or medical professionals, and they set about guaranteeing this right: “Pregnant? Don’t Want to Be? Call Jane at 643-3844.”Footnote ¹⁴

Former member Laura Kaplan characterized this approach when she described participants in the service as having moved from one model of political engagement to another, shifting from “asking for something to doing it ourselves” (Kaplan Reference Kaplan1995, 292). In the words of Ninia Baehr, the members of Jane began “acting as if they already had power” (Baehr Reference Baehr1990, 30). Effectively usurping the right to abortion that the government refused to ensure, Jane enacted what Bonnie Honig has described in another context as a “transgressive form of agency.” In her reflections on the politics of taking, Honig writes, “The practice of taking rights and privileges rather than waiting for them to be granted by a sovereign power is, I would argue, a quintessentially democratic practice” (Honig Reference Honig2001, 8, 99). The activists in Jane were engaged in just such a practice when they assumed for themselves the authority to provide abortions, despite a politico-legal context that prohibited it.

Linnea Johnson recalls that she was drawn to participate in Jane because the group was doing something other than “asking.” While attending a NOW meeting in Chicago in 1970, Johnson heard about a plan to crash a party of advertising executives to attempt to persuade them that using women’s bodies to sell products was unacceptable. Johnson was not interested in this tactic: “Once again, I would be part of asking something of someone in charge: we ourselves were never those someones, and we were in charge of nothing but asking.” At this same meeting, Johnson, frustrated, asked another woman in attendance, “Is there anything real going on in Chicago for women?” and was pointed toward the Abortion Counseling Service, or Jane. She soon joined, attracted to the idea that instead of “waiting and waiting and waiting to get male intercession or permission,” with this group she could “act outside male law, male control, with women on our behalf” (Johnson Reference Johnson2016).

Taking the right to abortion, as Jane’s members did, is also consistent with the spirit of anarchic direct action. Indeed, for action to be “direct” in the dual sense of unmediated and reflexive — seems to require that “people take power for themselves” (Sparrow Reference Sparrow1997). When Jane usurped the right to abortion, they exhibited a core feature of anarchic direct action in Graeber’s view: the direct actionist “proceeds as she would if the state did not exist” (Graeber Reference Graeber2009, 203).Footnote ¹⁵

Finally, when conceptualizing Jane’s political practice in terms of anarchic direct action, it is worth noting that their activities were not done out in the open. While direct action in the broad and familiar sense addressed in the previous section is typically carried out in public, this obviously was not the case for the abortion service. Jane was engaged in covert direct action. While this may seem paradoxical or even contradictory from the perspective of mainstream accounts of direct action, which presume forms of public demonstration designed to bring about governmental change, Jane’s secrecy is consistent with the aims of direct action in the anarchic tradition. Graeber says of anarchic direct actionists: “whether they are breaking windows in the night or soldering doors shut in worker-occupied factories, they are trying their best to get away with it” Graeber Reference Graeber2009, 205). Jane, too, was determined to “get away with” the provision of abortion in the context of a regime of criminalization. Thus, their political organizing had a conspiratorial quality to it; they were “partners in crime” who maneuvered so as to make their existence known to those who might need the service or be willing to join their efforts, while concealing their activities from authorities (Kaplan Reference Kaplan1995, 108).Footnote ¹⁶

Jane’s secrecy was a function of their context: the criminalization of abortion in a patriarchal society. The group went “underground” within a male supremacist politico-legal regime that denied reproductive autonomy to women and threatened penal consequences for those who defied relevant laws.Footnote ¹⁷ These features of Jane’s direct action — clandestine organizing by ordinary people to “take” what was forbidden by the state — bear some similarities to the Underground Railroad, a parallel noted by at least two former Jane members.Footnote ¹⁸ Notably, the Underground Railroad is also a touchstone for anarchic conceptions of “direct action,” going back to Voltairine de Cleyre’s Reference De Cleyre1912 essay. While the comparison between the two efforts is surely limited, placing Jane and the Underground Railroad alongside one another can bring into view an important commonality and thus help us grasp Jane’s dissidence more clearly. In both cases, activists were concerned with immediately and “directly” claiming a freedom denied by the ruling regime. And oppressive conditions — male supremacist control over women’s bodies in a purportedly liberal-democratic regime and white supremacist control over black people’s lives in a Herrenvolk slave regime, respectively — drove these resisters to adopt a covert and conspiratorial approach. While the contexts (and also the stakes) of these undertakings differ, noticing these key similarities clarifies an important dimension of Jane’s anarchic direct action: their clandestinity was born out of the realities of domination.

As we have seen, Jane’s political organizing around abortion focused not on pushing for legal-political change but instead on ensuring that people who needed abortions could get them. Their self-run abortion service exemplifies a specifically anarchic style of direct action. Their activities were largely unmediated because they did not see change “through” other political actors. They were also reflexive insofar as their direct action was undertaken by women in Chicago, transforming conditions for women in Chicago. Ultimately, they “took” the right to abortion, unauthorized by anyone but themselves. Yet if Jane’s members were practitioners of anarchic direct action, as I have argued, this conceptualization is not complete on its own. To more fully understand the group’s politics requires examining the specific kind of collaborative carework in which they were engaged. The next section reflects on Jane’s activities by drawing on another concept with special ties to the anarchist tradition — mutual aid.

The Abortion Service as Mutual Aid Institution

Mutual aid usually refers to a style of organizing that is decentralized, local, and relatively independent of bureaucratic systems (both governmental and nongovernmental), through which people coordinate with one another to improve “harmful conditions” and alleviate suffering (Beito Reference Beito2000; Spade Reference Spade2020b). The genealogy of mutual aid as an idea and as a practice is complex. Although the specific term “mutual aid” comes to us from anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin’s 1902 book of the same name, which challenged social Darwinism, self-organized communities of support emerged in the U.S. much earlier. A vast network of “mutual relief” and “mutual benefit” societies among free Blacks dates back to the eighteenth century.Footnote ¹⁹ Fraternal organizations among poor workers were established in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and immigrant aid societies were formed in the early twentieth century.Footnote ²⁰ In more recent U.S. history, examples have included the Black Panthers’ survival programs in the 1960s and 70s, which provided health clinics, ambulance service, transportation, and a free breakfast program, as well as mutual aid networks established to support patients and caregivers at the peak of the AIDS crisis. Across these different cases, it is clear that “mutual-aid networks have proliferated mostly in communities that the state has chosen not to help” (Littman et al. Reference Littman, Morris, Hostetter, Boyett, Bender, Holloway, Dunbar and Sarantakos2022; National Humanities Center; Tolentino Reference Tolentino2020).Footnote ²¹

This section interprets the work of Jane as a practice of feminist mutual aid. This reading is meant to complement and deepen the analysis already presented, which analyzes the group as practitioners of anarchic direct action. Here, I focus on two important characteristics of mutual aid organizing to further illuminate Jane’s particular style of political dissidence. The first of these concerns the assumption of collective responsibility to provide care, particularly in the face of an indifferent or hostile government. As Dean Spade explains in Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During this Crisis (And the Next), mutual aid is “a form of political participation in which people take responsibility for caring for one another and changing political conditions, not just through symbolic acts or putting pressure on their representatives in government but by actually building new social relations that are more survivable” (Spade Reference Spade2020a, 136). Second, and relatedly, mutual aid strives to enact relations of solidarity rather than charity when providing care, an aim that is particularly challenging and important in contexts of deep inequality.

Concerning the first aspect of mutual aid, “building new social relations” involves addressing community needs — whether health care, food, transportation, or other necessities — in ways that do not replicate bureaucratic forms. I argue that a similar commitment drove Jane’s activity; the group sought to provide abortion care in ways that defied the frequently alienating, asymmetrical terms of bureaucratic service delivery. Jane demonstrated this effort through their counseling activities, the creation and use of physical space, and their vocabulary.

Before examining the three ways that the group attempted to enact nonhierarchical forms of support, it is important to recognize that Jane was engaged in a kind of care that was corporeal and intimate, and thus different from most other examples of mutual aid provision. Even before members of Jane began performing abortions themselves, they had assisted during the procedure. In this role, they did things like hold the client’s hand, but they also gave shots, inserted speculums, and dilated cervixes (Bart Reference Bart1987, 87; Kaplan Reference Kaplan1995, 78, 136, 146, 168, 199). A former member of Jane recalled the latter: “Sometimes you’d have to start with a small dilator to just try to get inside of the cervix. And then this is sort of a graduated one, it would get a little bit bigger. And then you could fit this in, and then you could dilate it to the point that you could … I haven’t done this in a long time. Make it big enough that you could open up the cervix, so that they could do the abortion” (Lessin and Pildes Reference Lessin and Pildes2022).Footnote ²² Being physically present in the room with someone in a vulnerable position — on their backs, legs spread, genitals exposed — let alone physically touching and even penetrating them — is a relatively unique aspect of Jane’s activity that sets it apart from most, if not all, other mutual aid projects that aim at meeting basic needs.Footnote ²³

Jane’s “counseling” practice, which was understood to be at the core of their mission and predated the members performing abortions themselves, was carried out in person and over the phone, both individually and in groups. Counseling was about more than providing information about the abortion procedure, although that was a key component.Footnote ²⁴ The conversations between Jane members and those seeking abortions were meant to (though we cannot, of course, know whether this was always successful) provide emotional support. A woman who received an abortion from Jane, following an earlier underground abortion, recounted her experience: “It was the total opposite of what I had experienced the first time. Complete opposite. When we talked, they asked, ‘How far along do you think you are?,’ ‘When was your last period?,’ ‘Are you eating okay?,’ ‘Can you afford the hundred dollars?’ They were so detailed in care.” This kind of supportive communication continued throughout the process. The same client described, “When I got there, there must have been at least six or eight of us that were going that day. While other women went in ahead of me, I could hear the conversations, and all I heard was kind words, consideration, concern. I could hear this lovely woman’s voice assuring, constantly, every woman that was in that room” (Lessin and Pildes Reference Lessin and Pildes2022). The caretaking embodied in Jane’s counseling was an expression of their belief that “regular” women, not professionals or experts, were best-suited to supporting other women as they made reproductive decisions.Footnote ²⁵

The physical spaces Jane created were also purposely designed as an alternative to the austerity of mainstream and male-dominated medical settings. The use of apartments to serve as a reception area (“The Front”) and as a space for abortions to be performed (“The Place”) was born of necessity, but Jane’s members also made decisions about those spaces and their use that were intended to make them supportive and welcoming. For example, women who were scheduled to receive abortions were encouraged to bring people along for emotional support; the apartment known as “The Front” was often full of women, men, and children gathered in a living room. The service provided food and drinks, and Jane members chatted with loved ones, providing information and reassurance once women left to receive abortions in “The Place.” One of the volunteers described it as “giving a kind of tea party all day long” (Galatzer-Levy and the CWLU Herstory Committee 2004, 28–9). Once Jane began renting apartments that were used consistently by the group, members decorated them with donated or thrift store items, including feminist artwork on the walls and brightly colored bedspreads on the beds where abortions were performed (Kaplan Reference Kaplan1995, 125). A woman who was one of the only Black members of Jane, who joined the group after accompanying a friend who received an abortion from the service, remarked that she appreciated this informality, “the laid-backness, the closeness of the one-to-one basis, the lack of the sterile scene and white walls” (Kaplan Reference Kaplan1995, 211).

Jane’s counseling practices and the design and use of the physical spaces are examples of caretaking efforts that are consistent with mutual aid principles. Both were intended to foster “new social relations” that were supportive and more horizontal than vertical. A third way the group tried to establish mutuality between members and those seeking abortions was through inventive terminology that challenged the norms of the medical establishment and cast women as active participants in their own abortions. Those who received care from Jane were never referred to as “patients” or “clients.” “Counselees” was the preferred term (Kaplan Reference Kaplan1995, 108). A Jane member recounted, “‘Patient’ is a word the medical establishment uses. It implies a subject-object relation and we always tried to get away from thinking of women who came through the service as objects we were going to do something to …” (Bart Reference Bart1987, 351). The use of “through” in this sentence reflects another purposeful linguistic choice: women seeking abortions came “through” the service, not “to” it; this was “a process, not a place” (Kaplan Reference Kaplan1995, 108). Jane wanted each person who came to them for care, in the words of former member Kaplan, to “understand that in seeking an abortion she was taking control of her life.” This meant she “had to feel in control of her abortion.” Counselors were trained not to inquire why a client wanted or needed an abortion (but to listen and respond compassionately if the client brought it up). This was meant to show respect for the client who was “making an active choice about her life” (Kaplan Reference Kaplan1995, x, 9).

Another former member of Jane explained, “It was one of the things we talked about a lot that we were not doing something TO this woman, we were doing something WITH this woman, and she was as much a part of it, and part of the process as we were” (Surgal et al. Reference Surgal2004, 15). This model of collaborative participation also informed the workings of “The Front,” where members of Jane would sometimes ask clients to help with organizational tasks, such as packing the boxes of aftercare medications: “It was another subtle message that this was a joint venture. We’re not doing something to you, but with you” (Kaplan Reference Kaplan1995, 108). Jane also tried to include the clients as participants in their own care by carefully explaining each step in the abortion procedure as it was happening and seeking their permission and consent throughout, practices that were unusual at the time (Johnson Reference Johnson2016; Kaplan Reference Kaplan1995, 121).

These caretaking practices can be seen as part of a feminist mutual aid project centered on “women helping women,” intended to challenge the reigning norms of mainstream medicine. A former member explained that the abortion service existed in contrast with “regular” medicine and not only the “back alley” (Paula Kamen Collection, File 2). In other words, the way the service offered abortions, consistent with the ethos of mutual aid, was crucially important. The aim of the service was not only to provide abortions but to do so in a manner that was less patriarchal, hierarchical, and austere than the conventional medical establishment.

Jane’s efforts to establish relations of mutuality within the space and culture of the service led some to view the later legalization of abortion with mixed feelings. A former member of the group who went on to work at legal abortion clinics post-Roe observed that “there was something very different about the service” because of “the very important experience women had — that it was done by other women in a situation where they were not objects. They were forced to be accomplices, and because they were forced to join in, they had to take responsibility for what they did. It made them autonomous.” This comment suggests that Jane’s specific practices of feminist caretaking, coupled with the sense of shared risk, shaped an experience that was no longer possible after 1973. She continued with the comparison: “Legalizing abortion allowed women to have a service provided. They gave up their power, the way you always do in a medical situation” (Kaplan Reference Kaplan1995, 285–6).Footnote ²⁶

Jane’s activities, then, were aligned with the first mutual aid principle identified above: throughout its existence, the group undertook cooperative efforts to meet people’s needs by forging new and supportive social relations apart from the state. As part of this endeavor, they tried to create connections of “solidarity not charity.” Pursuing this mutual aid objective was both difficult and important given the unequal race-class context of Jane’s activism.

As noted previously, after the legalization of abortion in New York state in 1970, Jane’s work shifted to serving primarily poor women in Chicago, many of them women of color — those who could not travel to New York for the procedure. Jane’s membership remained largely white and middle-class, although there was considerable heterogeneity in terms of religion, education, profession, and political affiliation.Footnote ²⁷ Thus, there were noticeable race and class asymmetries between those working in the service and those coming to the service. This is hardly surprising and reflects a recurring challenge for abortion provision, even in non-criminalized contexts. Practical access to reproductive healthcare is much more difficult for low-income women and marginalized racial and ethnic groups (Harvey et al. Reference Harvey, Larson and Warren2025). (The dissenting opinion in the 2022 Dobbs case overturning Roe made clear that its effects would be dramatically uneven: “Some women, especially women of means, will find ways around the State’s assertion of power. Others – those without money or childcare or the ability to take time off from work will not be so fortunate” [Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization 2022]). Importantly, Jane provided necessary care to vulnerable people who were most impacted by abortion’s illegality. Yet the dynamics between those providing and those receiving care were complicated by the fact that the former were mostly middle-class white women, and by 1970, the latter were mostly low-income and majority Black.

Jane was often seen as a “white women’s group.” A Black woman, “Lois,” who would eventually join the organization, explained that when she first learned of Jane while accompanying a friend who was being counseled, she was concerned that the members of Jane thought they were “white angels who were going to save everybody.” When accompanying her friend for the abortion, some Black women in the Front approached her, assuming she was a counselor. Lois later confronted a white Jane counselor about how few women of color were in the group, and the white counselor asked if she would like to join. She considered it, especially because of her experience in the Front: “I wanted to be there for women [of color] to see.” Though her friend had a positive experience with Jane, she discouraged Lois from joining, emphasizing the different stakes of participation for a Black woman: “My God, what would happen if you got arrested? Those white women would get out of it, but not you. Girl, you could go to jail. They’d take your kids away.” But after Lois herself received abortion care from Jane, she decided to join: “Thank God for Jane … there were a lot of women out there who needed the same thing I had. I thought, let me be here. Let me help those women” (Kaplan Reference Kaplan1995, 201–13).

This story captures well-known problems with white-led feminist organizing, especially in the context of significant racial and class inequalities. First, as Lois’s friend emphasized, participants in dissident (and in this case, illegal) political activity are not equally exposed to risk when doing so; those who are poor and/or not white have more to lose when they break the law. Grassroots political associations, especially those that attempt to mobilize a diverse constituency to engage in confrontational or oppositional forms of direct action, must continually attempt to mitigate the uneven burdens carried by participants. Second, as Lois signaled when she suggested that Jane’s participants saw themselves as “white angels,” forms of direct action that provide material relief — even when they aspire to be nonhierarchical — are perpetually in danger of lapsing into the unequal benefactor/beneficiary dynamics of charity. In its latter years especially, when Jane delivered care to people who did not share the race and class privilege of most of its members, the danger of saviorism was even more pronounced.

So how did Jane address the challenges of feminist organizing in the context of such long-standing inequalities? What steps did the group take to forge relations of solidarity rather than charity? I have already described how the group sought to reduce the sense of hierarchy between the members of the group and those seeking abortions, via counseling practices, the design and use of the Front apartment spaces, and the language developed to think and talk about Jane’s activities. These were part of an effort to resist the top-down, subject-object dynamics that frequently define bureaucratic welfare provision and the medical industry. Former member Johnson described the project: “We told women: you’re a part of this, not an object of this; this is an ensemble production” (Johnson Reference Johnson2016).

In addition to the methods already described, Jane invented other practices that attempted to position the group’s members and those seeking abortions as co-participants or collaborators in a common project. Their handling of finances was one way they tried to distinguish the group’s work from a charitable endeavor. The group wanted to communicate that they weren’t “some do-gooder project meant to lift up the less fortunate,” but were in fact “working for the liberation of women.” They decided that one important way of conveying this was to ask every woman to pay something for her abortion. Kaplan explains, “They wanted every woman who called them to see herself as an active participant … One way she could participate was by paying for her abortion,” even if not the full cost. Jane’s loan fund ensured that no one would be turned away who needed abortion care, but those who were lent money were expected to repay “so that another woman, as much in need as she, would be able to get an abortion.”Footnote ²⁸ Paying, the members felt, was one way that women “participated” in their abortions. This sense of participation, they believed, was essential to a positive abortion experience, as important as sound medical techniques. Paying something for the procedure expressed the belief that “abortion wasn’t a charity for helpless women: it was an act of responsibility” (Kaplan Reference Kaplan1995, 36, 131).

Jane also challenged conventional benefactor/beneficiary dynamics in their fundraising practices. One of the ways members maintained the loan fund (in addition to requesting a donation from every woman who could afford to pay full price for their abortion) was by soliciting money in meetings of other women’s liberation groups to which members belonged. Jane did not frame this financial support as a typical charitable “donation.” Instead, they cast those who gave money to the fund as co-participants alongside Jane’s members and those who received abortion care. The loan fund form they created and used read as follows: “I, _________, am willing to contribute $___ to the non-interest Abortion Loan Fund. I fully understand that my contribution implicates me along with all the others in the Abortion Counseling Service of Women’s Liberation” (“Anonymous Jane” 1973, part 6; Kaplan Reference Kaplan1995, 36). This document exemplifies how Jane tried to establish a sense of shared responsibility among the different actors involved in the service, resisting the donor/recipient paradigm.

The group may also have resisted the asymmetrical dynamics of philanthropy by fostering reciprocity in the relationships between counselors and counselees. Jane’s members pursued two-way relationships by listening to and learning from the women who came to them for care. They did so in a context of deep inequality and urgent need, where one-way patterns of charitable giving and receiving are much more common. As a rule, counselors did not ask counselees why they were seeking an abortion, but they did invite them to share as much about their lives and their feelings as they wanted. In the process of these conversations, the Janes were not just sharing information; they, too, were learning from the women they talked to. One former member recounted that after her first few counseling experiences, she came to realize “how many people really live on the edge.” Another described learning from one of her counselees that her boyfriend had beaten her; she had never heard anyone speak openly about domestic abuse before (Kaplan Reference Kaplan1995, 192, 193).

Interestingly, one of the factors that may have helped Jane forge relations of solidarity rather than charity (however imperfectly) was the fact that everyone involved in the service was breaking the law. One former member said of the Jane volunteers and the clients, “We were all partners in the crime of demanding the freedom to control our own bodies and our own childbearing” (Bart Reference Bart1987, 352). Another Jane participant recounted, “It was imperative that every woman who came understood that Jane’s safety lay in her hands just as her safety lay in ours. From their first contact with the service, women were told: ‘This makes you complicitous’” (“Jane” Reference Fried1990, 99).

The members of Jane regarded the women who came through the service as “partners in a political activity — partners in crime, to be exact” (Kaplan Reference Kaplan1995, 108). Indeed, the legal risk surrounding the group may have facilitated bonds that would be unlikely to form in a charitable context. In an interview, a former member noted, “For the women coming through, they were putting their trust in somebody who was breaking the law, who they didn’t know from Adam. We were doing something illegal and so were they, and you had to trust” (Lessin and Pildes Reference Lessin and Pildes2022). Most of the women running the service had significant social advantages compared to the women who came through the service. Yet everyone involved with Jane was an outlaw. This fact likely helped foster a sense of solidarity in the midst of hierarchy.

Conclusion: Anarchic Direct Action and Mutual Aid, Then and Now

The abortion service known as Jane enacted a style of feminist politics characterized by anarchic direct action and mutual aid. Their DIY approach — improving access to safe and affordable abortions through their own activities — was “direct” in the dual sense articulated by anarchist thought. Their efforts were unmediated because in seeking to improve reproductive health care in their city, they opted to “do it themselves” rather than going “through” legal or political authorities in pursuit of change. Their work also had a reflexive quality. It was purposely intended as a project of “women helping women,” that is, Jane’s members were organized to address the needs of a community (women in Chicago who might need abortion care) of which they were also a part. Second, the group enacted feminist mutual aid by constructing a community of care and building “new social relations” that aimed to be more supportive and reciprocal than those that typify bureaucratic service programs. Jane also experimented with a range of practices that were designed to foster relations of solidarity, not charity. Conceptualizing Jane’s activity in this way allows us to identify an unusual — but not necessarily singular — form of feminist activism.

This style of dissident political action differs from more familiar, state-centered organizing strategies for reproductive rights in the U.S. Still, the praxis I have theorized in relation to Jane also resembles later feminist projects focused on abortion provision under conditions of criminalization. In particular, there is a remarkable array of feminist organizations active in Latin America, beginning in the 1990s but taking firm hold in the 2000s and continuing up to today, that have practiced forms of activism akin to Jane’s. These groups, such as Fondo Maria and Las Libres in Mexico; Collectiva Feminists de Revuelta and Socorro Rosa in Argentina; Con Amigas y en la Casa in Chile; and Las Comadres in Ecuador, have focused their activities not on lobbying for legislative change but instead on providing abortion medication (misoprostol or misoprostol/mifepristone), sharing information, and offering various forms of layperson “accompaniment” to support self-managed abortions (SMA) (Assis and Erdman 2021; Bercu et al. Reference Bercu, Moseson, McReynold-Perez, Wilkinson Salamea, Grosso, Trpin and Zurbriggen2021; Braine Reference Braine2020; Krauss Reference Krauss2019; Reference Krauss2023; McReynolds-Perez, et al. Reference McReynolds-Perez, Kimport, Bercu, Cisternas, Salamea, Zurbriggen and Moseson2023; Singer Reference Singer2019; Zurbriggen et al. Reference Zurbriggen2018).Footnote ²⁹ While it is only possible to gesture toward the commonalities between these accompaniment groups and Jane here, I hope doing so will clarify an important style of feminist dissidence and open up avenues for further research.

Grassroots feminist organizing in Mexico, Argentina, Chile, and Ecuador in recent decades has emerged from conditions that are both like and unlike those of Jane. A core similarity is that these cases of feminist activism — focused on directly providing abortion care rather than seeking political or legal relief — are all occasioned by criminalization. Although the socio-cultural contexts differ, governmental restriction of abortion access is an impetus for this distinctive kind of feminist organizing, which aims to respond immediately to people’s urgent need for abortion care regardless of legality. But if criminalization links Jane’s DIY ethos to later feminist accompaniment strategies, the means employed by these actors to provide abortions are notably different. Jane’s members (and before that, the providers they worked with) relied on surgical techniques of dilation & curettage (D&C) and occasionally vacuum aspiration, while Latin American feminist organizers are working in the wake of the abortion pill revolution, which has made the provision of abortion care significantly simpler.

Jane’s practice of anarchic direct action is echoed in the work of these Latin American feminist accompaniment networks. As already discussed, “direct” refers to a relatively unmediated form of action, in which participants do not appeal to those with formal power, but organize to address a wrong themselves. Alison Krauss describes this orientation in her study of Fondo MARIA in Mexico City: the practice of accompaniment is “expressive of their first organizing principle: to respond to women’s immediate needs within the limited time frame of the abortion situation” (Krauss Reference Krauss2019, 43). The reflexive dimension of anarchic “direct” action is also evident in the accompaniment movement. As noted in a study of Collectiva Feminista de Revuelta (Argentina), Con Amigas y en La Casa (Chile), and Las Comadres (Ecuador), these groups are invested in a “‘peer to peer’ emotional and physical support” (Bercu et al. Reference Bercu, Moseson, McReynold-Perez, Wilkinson Salamea, Grosso, Trpin and Zurbriggen2021, 134); that is, the feminists participating in these efforts are aiming to address the needs of their own communities. Jane’s anarchic direct action, both unmediated and reflexive, also effectively “usurped” the right to abortion. This, too, is consistent with the efforts of some subsequent feminist activists. Organizing to provide guidance and accompaniment for SMA, Latin American feminist groups believe that “abortion rights are not something requested of or provided by the state, they are taken in practice” (Assis and Erdman Reference Assis and Erdman2022, 2239). This approach exists in direct contrast with more state-centered organizing occurring in the same general times and place, as was also the case with Jane. For example, Las Libres — an expansive network of feminist abortion accompaniment providers based in Guanajuato, Mexico — was engaged in “directly appropriating abortion rights rather than waiting for the state to grant them,” even as other feminist groups in Mexico City were focused on making human rights arguments to pressure the Mexican government to change its laws (Singer Reference Singer2019, 168).Footnote ³⁰

I have shown that Jane was also engaged in mutual aid, insofar as they forged relations of care that defied bureaucratic norms and purposely endeavored to create dynamics of solidarity, not charity. The practice of accompaniment that Latin American feminists developed resembles Jane’s mutual aid practice on both fronts. The model of “supported self-care” that these groups have created is a direct challenge to dominant top-down, professionalized forms of service provision; in feminist groups in Argentina, Chile, and Ecuador, “individuals are centered as the protagonists of their own abortion, accompanied by feminist peers” (Bercu et al. Reference Bercu, Moseson, McReynold-Perez, Wilkinson Salamea, Grosso, Trpin and Zurbriggen2021, 121).Footnote ³¹ This effort to provide peer-to-peer care, horizontal rather than vertical, can be understood as an attempt to build relations of solidarity, not charity. Latin American feminists often “describe their work in terms of understanding their own relatively privileged social position (social class and education) and seeking solutions that work against the privilege and elitism that affect abortion access” (McReynolds-Perez Reference McReynolds-Perez, Kimport, Bercu, Cisternas, Salamea, Zurbriggen and Moseson2023, 75). By attempting to position “women as protagonists in their own care,” the activists foster relations between those accompanying and those undergoing an abortion that are roughly equal rather than hierarchical; it is a way of enacting “care across social distance” (McReynolds-Perez et al. Reference McReynolds-Perez, Kimport, Bercu, Cisternas, Salamea, Zurbriggen and Moseson2023, 79; Zurbriggen et al. Reference Zurbriggen2018, 111).

In the U.S., the Dobbs decision and the ongoing criminalization of abortion by states may be creating conditions conducive to this kind of feminist organizing (Calderón-Villarreal et al. Reference Calderón-Villarreal2023). For some proponents of reproductive freedom, the unique urgency of unwanted pregnancies calls for a response other than lobbying or protesting for legislative change. This insight is reflected in the growth of independent abortion funds and contemporary “underground” abortion facilitation such as the (now mostly defunct) Auntie Network on Reddit (Kitchener Reference Kitchener2022; Taladrid Reference Taladrid2022; Verma Reference Verma2022). Most strikingly, Las Libres, the feminist group founded in Guanajuato, Mexico, in 2000 and referenced above, has expanded its work of abortion pill distribution and accompaniment into the U.S. (Taladrid; Reference Taladrid2022; Verma Reference Verma2022). Las Libres’ members have long understood themselves to be “taking” the right to abortion and finding a way to “guarantee” it apart from the state (Navarro Reference Navarro2022). Their extensive network of abortion pill distribution (established when abortion was illegal throughout Mexico) now reaches the U.S. (Amnesty International 2024; McDonald et al. Reference McDonald2022; Navarro Reference Navarro2022; Nugent Reference Nugent2023). According to Verónica Cruz Sánchez, the group’s founder, as of September 2024, Las Libres had helped establish 200 support networks in the U.S. and assisted 20,000 American women in obtaining abortions (Amnesty International 2024).

These forms of activism take place in a political, legal, and technological landscape that has transformed dramatically since Jane was in operation, even as a return to criminalized abortion is underway in the U.S. The development of medication has provided a “powerful tool” that did not exist prior to the 1980s (Jones and Friedrich-Karnik 2024).Footnote ³² At the same time, however, aggressive new legislative and legal tactics, such as “vigilante abortion laws,” and ongoing lawsuits against the FDA seeking to remove the pill from the U.S. market, threaten access.Footnote ³³ Additionally, state use of technological surveillance makes it “practically impossible for Americans to evade ubiquitous tracking” (Singer and Chen Reference Singer and Chen2022). All of this raises the stakes of underground abortion services dramatically.

Still, Jane remains a powerful provocation for feminists today. The group’s work deserves to be examined and remembered not only as a remarkable example from a feminist past, but as an incitement in the present. What might it mean to undertake inventive and daring forms of political action on behalf of reproductive justice today? How might cooperative practices of anarchic direct action and mutual aid help to improve conditions here and now? Without asking or waiting for the state’s permission, how can we make lives more livable in the wake of Dobbs?