Today, Explained - Abortions before Roe

Episode Date: December 29, 2022

Before Roe v. Wade, Eleanor Oliver was a Jane: a member of a group in Chicago that helped women get safe but illegal abortions. Sean Rameswaram sat down with her on the day Roe was overturned. This episode was edited and fact-checked by Matt Collette, engineered by Efim Shapiro, and produced by Victoria Chamberlin and host Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This summer, when we all got the news that Roe v. Wade had just been overturned by the Supreme Court, my first thought was to call a Jane. Hello? I asked her if she had heard the news. What news? This Jane had fought for women's rights in the 1960s — equal pay, childcare, and the right to choose, the right to have an abortion. She helped women get illegal abortions in Chicago in the late 1960s, early 70s, before Roe v. Wade.

But on that fateful Friday this summer, I was the one who told her Roe v. Wade had been overturned. Women are still going to have abortions. That's not going to change anything. That's not going to change a damn thing. I'm Sean Ramos for My Conversation with a Jane. It's coming up on Today Explained. This NFL season, get in on all the hard-hitting action with FanDuel,

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Sorry. I don't know if you're a shoe on or a shoe off household. That is some kind of bike. Thank you. Oh, that's a beautiful piece of equipment. Thank you. The first thing you need to know about this Jane is that her name bike. Thank you. Oh, that's a beautiful piece of equipment. Thank you. The first thing you need to know about this Jane is that her name isn't actually Jane. It's Eleanor.

I'm Eleanor Oliver. I live in northwest Washington. And what more do you want to know about me? But Eleanor is one of the Janes, this group of women that helped other women get safe, illegal abortions in Chicago in the late 1960s and early 70s before Roe v. Wade. And the Friday this summer, the Supreme Court overturned Roe

almost 50 years later. I showed up at her apartment to talk. We thought we'd bring you that conversation again today as it really helped us wrap our heads around one of the biggest developments of the year. What did you make of it when you heard it? I'm still stewing over it. But, you know,

women are still going to have abortions. That's not going to change anything. That's not going to change a damn thing. Women are still going to have abortions except they won't have the security of knowing that it will be safe, that it'll be medically safe, socially safe, you know, that the person providing the abortion won't take advantage of them in other ways, which was one of the major things years ago.

I asked Eleanor to tell me about years ago. Well, my husband was doing graduate work at the University of Chicago, and I was looking for something to do. It was 1968, and a lot of stuff was going on. There were anti-war demonstrations on college campuses and in cities from Los Angeles to Washington. NBC News has learned the National Space Agency has decided the next Apollo flight will go to the moon. It'll not land, but a crew of three men inside their spacecraft will circle the moon about 60 miles from it and then return to the Earth.

That power means dignity. It means we're going to walk side by side with you or through you. We're gonna be with dignity and integrity. We don't want any more than you have and we're not gonna accept any less than you have. That's my thought. I have some very sad news for all of you and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis. Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice between fellow human beings. He died in the cause of that effort. Ladies and gentlemen, we've kept the air on because we've heard an alarming report that

Robert Kennedy was shot in that ballroom at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. We had a consciousness raising group, a group of women, and one of the things we got really hung up on was abortion. And we went from consciousness raising to helping other women find safe, legal, illegal, actually, affordable abortions. Safe and affordable in contrast to the status quo. Most of the young women of childbearing age have no idea what it was like to be pressured into having sex and then getting pregnant and then having no way of dealing with the pregnancy. I asked Eleanor how these women got abortions back in the day, before Roe v. Wade? Well, you pick out the people you know

that you think might have connections that are kind of a little bit savvy, that know people that maybe you wouldn't possibly know because you were just a college kid, and you just ask. You say, do you know any place where I can have an abortion, where I can get an abortion? I need an abortion.

You would probably go to somebody's apartment or a motel, and it certainly wouldn't be in the chicest part of town. Unless you were paying for the chicest part of town, then you would go to a nice doctor's office. And even then, I mean, he might have a white coat on, and he might have an MD shield on his door. He might have the wall hung with degrees from medical schools. But you weren't going to check up to see whether he really was an MD or not. You wanted that abortion. And he would give it to you right there in the office. As Eleanor tells it, this was kind of the best case scenario.

You could go to the mob and try and get an abortion. They might put you in touch with a shady doctor. They might put you in touch with a good doctor. The experience would vary greatly based on how much money you had in your pocket. And if you wanted the Cadillac abortion, the price was steep. Anywhere between $500 and $1,000 in 1968. Some of them were being sold a bill of goods. Many of them spent a lot of money on pills that were supposed to cause a spontaneous abortion, but probably didn't. And some of them were being left to bleed to death.

And this is where she and her friends thought they could make a difference. We were basically white, middle-class, college-educated women. And we were objecting to the Vietnam War, and we were going on marches and one thing and another and then we sort of got together on women's issues. And there were a lot of women's issues. Equal pay for equal work, child care, and you know, there's still the same issues. They wanted to up their involvement.

Instead of just talking and protesting, let's do something. Let's start providing women with illegal abortions. This was Chicago. You could do anything in Chicago as long as you weren't making outrageous amounts of money and you weren't hurting anybody. And the police left you alone because they had girlfriends that got pregnant. They had wives who already had three children and didn't want any more. They had mouths to feed. Do you start advertising it?

How do you do that? We actually have a brochure, and I have a copy of the brochure. Do you have it? Yeah, you want to see it? Can I see it? Yeah, sure. Let's see it. Yeah, it's when you go to my bedroom,

there's a picture on the opposite wall of the Jane poster that we marched under for the Women's March on Washington. And just bring the whole picture in, because I've got it taped on the back.

Thank you. Oh, there it is. All right. This is the brochure. This is how dumb we are. We would run these off. This was run off on a resistance press. The guy had a printing press set up in the basement of an old house on the campus of the University of Chicago. And he was down there all day long running stuff. We must have printed millions of these things. Okay, let's see. What's the title there? Abortion. A Woman's

Decision, A Woman's Right. And there's the whole philosophy. A lot of prose. Yeah. And here... Not a lot of graphics, just the text. It's just an 8.5 by 11 inch piece of paper folded into four sides.

And here it is. Chicago Women's Liberation Union. And there's their address, the Abortion Counseling Service. That was the official name, Abortion Counseling Service. But everyone came to know them by another. There were no cell phones in those days. There were just landlines. So we were meeting in my house and I said, Well, you can use our phone, but, you know, I don't want to have our personal calls get mixed up with the service calls. So why don't we say, Call this number and ask for Jane. And I didn't know anybody named Jane.

And I thought nobody was named Jane anymore. 643-3-8-4-4. Who picked up the phone? Usually I did. It was you? Well, if my husband was home alone, he would pick it up because he was home all day working on his dissertation. You're saying that was your phone number?

That was my phone number. That was our phone number, yeah. That was in our apartment. For all you folks in Chicago, 5700 block of Kimbark Street. So you handed out, it sounds like, tons of these things in Chicago. Whenever we had a speak-out on a woman's issue, we brought along a whole stack of them.

We had stacks of these in the dormitories. There were several rather liberal churches. So we had a little stack of them in the narthex of the church. And so was your phone ringing all day or how often did you get calls? We got a lot of calls. Well, not at first. It took a while for things to get picked up. And if you pick it up and they ask for Len or Eleanor, well, we knew it was a personal call. Or if they said, I'd like to speak with Jane, please. I'll take your name and number and I'll have her call you or I'll have one of her contacts call you. And then we would write those down on three by five cards. We would have a meeting. We would pass out these three-by-five cards, and I would take

people that I thought I could counsel or people that were nearby or people that I could meet with or could relate to. One of them was a policewoman from Chicago. I took a lot of the middle-aged women because I was one of the older counselors, and I was married, and a lot of the counselors were graduate students and undergraduate students. Everybody took people that they thought they could talk to. Although this person lives in my dorm, or I don't want to do this person because I know her

and I don't think she wants me to know that. That kind of thing. And they had to trust us. We had an abortionist. We knew he was not a real doctor. He was just a nice guy. Mike. Mike was his name. I think he probably learned how to perform abortions either as a medic in the military. There were a lot of people, I guess, that needed abortions or who had girlfriends who needed abortions when they were in the military. I don't know.

I've never been in the military. How many years does this go on for? We left Chicago in 1972, early 1972. And the day we drove out of Chicago was a Saturday, I believe. Seems to me it was a Saturday. Maybe it wasn't they were they were raided and busted so by whom this by the police sorry you mean the police because the abortion counseling service the james were raided and busted because somebody complained and the police they didn't bother them because they we weren't hurting anybody uh-huh we weren't hurting anybody. We weren't hurting anybody. We weren't making loads of money off of people. And they wanted us around because they probably might have needed us too.

You never know. But somebody's sister-in-law was getting an abortion, and they found that immoral or whatever. They took it upon themselves to complain to the police. And with a complaint, the police had to act. So the police raided the place that all this was happening. And my husband and I were driving out Stony Island Avenue to the interstate to come to Washington. And for the longest time, I had the biggest guilt complex about that. Because your friends got arrested. Yeah.

Did they get sent to jail, prison? No, because what happened was they got themselves a very bright, intelligent lawyer who kept delaying and delaying and delaying until finally Roe v. Wade was passed. And then the judge threw the case out. How many abortions do you think you helped women get in the time you guys were active? Well, they have a record of 11,000 abortions. 11,000? 1-1,000.

Was there any organization at the time that helped as many women as you did? We don't know. Because it was illegal. My conversation with Eleanor Oliver, also known as a Jane, continues in a minute on Today Explained. Thank you. The number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter. Aura frames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an Aura frame as a gift, you can personalize it. You can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos. Our colleague Andrew tried an Aura frame for himself. So setup was super simple.

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Yeah. So, Eleanor, you leave Chicago, you come to D.C., and it sounds like within a year, if not less, the Supreme Court decides Roe v. Wade. Tell me where you were that day. What went through your mind? Relief. And I thought, great, everybody can go back to life as it was

before all this started. And of course that didn't last very long. The people here who call themselves pro-choice, their definition of pro-choice is abortion at any time for any reason. By a vote of 7 to 2, the court agreed to

uphold three of four restrictions on abortions in Pennsylvania. We must must not rest and I pledge to you that I will not rest until a human life amendment becomes a part of our Constitution the law known as Senate Bill 8 prohibits abortions after six weeks it also allows people to sue abortion providers and people who help others get them. These lawsuits could win plaintiffs up to $10,000. The impact of today's ruling will be immediate. 13 states have trigger laws that automatically end access to abortion

now that Roe is overturned. I called you this morning and I woke you up, unfortunately. I apologize for that. Well, that's because I didn't go to bed until 6 o'clock. Right. And I gave you the news that the Supreme Court had overturned Roe v. Wade. What went through your head? I think I probably said something like, oh, shoot.

Yeah. Well, we'll just reorganize, you know. At 84, I think I've done my share on this. I think it's my daughters and my granddaughters who have to fight this. And I hope that I have inspired those two succeeding generations that they will go out and do that. After I got off the phone with you this morning, I went down to the Supreme Court and I was taking it all in. There were people out there who were celebrating and there were far more people out there protesting. And the sign that struck a chord that I really kind of focused on when I saw it over and over and over again,

it was young women holding up a sign that said, I will aid and abet abortions. See what I mean? They're out there. It's going to happen. They're already probably looking for their contacts. They're already setting it up. I don't know how I can help, but I would like to talk to those young women. If nothing else, to let them know it can be done.

What would you tell them? I would say, first of all, don't give up because we're out there. There are a lot of people who think like you. You are not alone. Find like-minded women, get together, talk about the issues, and eventually groups will form. We'll get right back to 1968. We'll get back to our consciousness-raising groups. We'll get back to all the issues that women are still fighting equal pay for equal work. And that was an issue back in 1968. They're still fighting child care in the workplace.

There were a lot of people out there, certainly not the majority, but there were people out there celebrating, blowing bubbles, jumping up and down for joy. Until they get pregnant. Until they get unintentionally pregnant. I had people sitting in my living room saying, you know, nice Roman Catholic young women saying, I never thought I would be doing this, but I can't have this child.

What do you think all those people out there celebrating today don't understand about this now bygone constitutional right to have an abortion? Well, they probably, either they never will, they'll always think it's a sin. Now, I shouldn't say it's a sin. I mean, I don't think an abortion is a nice idea. And it would be nice if you didn't have to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. But it happens. Women only hold up half the sky, let's be honest here, because they don't get pregnant by themselves. So men should be a little more aware of what they're asking women to do when they ask for favors, when they ask for a brief moment of comfort.

This becomes a lifelong experience for the woman that gets left behind. And I don't think people think about that until they're a woman and they get left behind. There are people out there who are getting very emotional in this moment, who are scared. And you don't actually seem scared. You seem rather confident to me. Well, I know how things unfolded 50 years ago. And I'm sure, I'm hoping because of the contacts and the means of communication that we now all have, that things won't take 50 years to get established. I'm hoping that the communications network will spring up a lot sooner than it did then because all we had was a landline. A landline.

And you picked up the receiver and you put your finger in the little hole, and you dialed a little number. Everybody has a need, and abortion is a need. It's just a medical procedure, termination of an unplanned pregnancy. Call it an abortion, and if you write it with a capital A, it becomes like a scarlet letter or something. And it certainly shouldn't be. It's much safer than a tonsillectomy. Eleanor Oliver, Washington, D.C. She was once a Jane. There's a documentary about that group on HBO right now.

It's called The Janes. And since we originally ran this episode back in July of this year, a whole other movie has come out about The Janes. That one's called Call Jane. I don't think you can find it wherever you can find your movies, but you can probably find it somewhere. All those big streamers have it, I think. This is Today Explained.

I'm Sean Ramos-Verm. I made today's show with lots of help from Victoria Chamberlain and a little help from Halima Shah. We were edited by Matthew Collette and engineered by Afim Shapiro. Thanks to Janice Gibson for putting me in touch with Eleanor. The rest of the team here at Today Explained includes Avishai Artsy, Hadi Mawagdi, Miles Bryan, Amanda Llewellyn, Laura Bullard, Siona Petros, Paul Robert Mounsey,

and my co-host, Noelle King. We use music by Breakmaster Cylinder and Noam Hassenfeld, and today, the Penguin Cafe Orchestra. Today Explained is on the radio in partnership with WNYC, and we are part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Wishing all of you a happy and healthy transition into 2023. Thank you.