For more on a post-Roe world, check out our special edition.

For more on a post-Roe world, check out our special edition.

May 3, 1972. It was a spring day in Chicago and 29-year-old Judith Arcana was behind the wheel. She was driving patients who had sought abortion care from an underground abortion service that operated in Chicago by a group of women known simply as Janes in the late 1960s and early 1970s. If you found yourself pregnant—and you didn’t want to be—you could “call Jane,” and Jane would help you get the care you need. The Janes performed nearly 11,000 abortions during their tenure, without incident. But Arcana was a criminal. A felon. And she recognized it. But she didn’t care.

Providing abortion care to people was a matter of principle.

She had picked up several women from “The Front” (which was where the Janes provided counseling to the pregnant people who used their service) and was driving them to “The Place” (the location where other Janes would perform the procedure)—which was constantly moving to evade law enforcement.

By the end of that day, she and six other Janes would find themselves in prison, ultimately facing 110 years in prison for conspiracy to commit abortion.

That’s 110 years each.

But still she didn’t waiver.

Arcana’s is a tale of bravery and of solidarity. Of refusing to leave her fellow Janes behind, even as her privilege and special circumstances lead her to be the first Jane released from prison in the early morning of May 4, 1972—but only after she asked the other six if it was OK.

Arcana’s is also a tale of lawlessness—of a group of young women who saw a need that needed to be met and decided to come together to meet it, damn the consequences.

I think about the level of commitment to community it must take to undertake a criminal enterprise and to place your individual trust in the whole. Over the last 30 years, the group of women came to be known as the Jane Collective—a name several Janes eschewed, but which nevertheless stuck. The Janes simply called their operation “the service,” short for the Abortion Counseling Service of the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union.

To hear Arcana tell it, the word collective didn’t apply: They were so busy trying to run the service that they did not run or act as a collective. Meaning there was no effort to make the service’s internal political structure suit the idea of collectivity. They were simply a group of young women trying to provide a much needed service to pregnant people in Chicago.

Their disdain for the moniker notwithstanding, the term collective is powerful when applied to this brave group of women. You’re not just a Jane. You’re part of a group—a collective.

I first met Arcana four years ago in Austin, Texas. Yes, Texas: Ground zero for abortion politics. I was moderating a panel at SXSW ironically entitled “What If Roe Were to Go?” I was blown away by her level of commitment to abortion access and was thrilled to be talking to her. I excitedly said to her, “So you were a Jane—.”

“Are a Jane,” she corrected me with a sparkle in her eye.

Even 50 years later, being part of this service—this collective, if I may—means something to her. Once a Jane, always a Jane.

At that same panel, I asked everyone to close their eyes and then I asked who would be willing to break the law if it came to that. A lot of hands shot up. But this was 2018. It was before Brett Kavanaugh. There was still a chance that Roe could be saved.

But Roe v. Wade was not saved. And now I think about what “collective” could mean in 2022.

There is a level of defiance rippling throughout the country among people who are long-time activists and advocates as well as those who have recently been radicalized by six unelected people telling them that they are not considered full and equal citizens in this country.

The frustration is palpable. The pain is real. And many abortion rights........

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