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Something Real: Jane and Me. Memories and
Exhortations of a Feminist Ex-Abortionist
by Linnea Johnson
(Editor's Note: Linnea Johnson was a member of the Abortion Counseling
Service. She is a poet and a playwright.)
"The woman's body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected.
The repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more essential
change to human society than the seizing of the means of production
by workers."
-Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born
Part I
Over
the years, I have become convinced that patriarchal capitalism is
a system women cannot revise any more than we can "reform"
water so that we might breathe it. As long as the law is male, women
must be outlaws. I became an outlaw when I joined "Jane,"
a group of women in Chicago who, between 1969 and 1973, did more
than 11,000 abortions.
Jane,
as the Abortion Counseling Service, a work group of the Chicago
Women's Liberation Union, has come to be called, began in the mid-1960s
when of personal necessity, a couple women friends who lived in
the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago found a couple men, representing
themselves as physicians, who did good, clean abortions. In addition
to referring women to decent abortionists, these women were what
then was called "patient advocates". Patient advocates
can be loosely defined as the unintimidated surrogate accompanying
the "patient" to the "doctor's" office for the
sole purpose of dislodging information relevant to that "patient"
from that "doctor". That a person has a right to information
about oneself did. Not make that information any less difficult
to obtain given "standard medical practice," that stone
wall behind which was kept what (often little) information was extant.
The Service became one of many referral services across the United
States referring women who wanted abortions to a person who could
be trusted with a speculum, a dilator, and a curette. In the United
States' in the 1960s the grounds for obtaining a legally/medically/male-sanctioned
abortion were narrowly defined. Capriciously shifting, and rigorously
mediated. Then as now, few protested the War Against women, that
continuing war of the patriarchy against women, though there are
and had been many, I among them, who had seen and had protested
the United States' oppression of racial minorities, had seen and
had protested US imperialism in Viet Nam.
By 1970
when I joined Jane, which we always called "The Service,"
I had begun to see that men have power though no right, to colonize
women's bodies; that men have power, though no right, to make up
laws which effect women and that what I could do about it this time
was not again protest through lobbying, convincing, begging, litigating,
demonstrating, educating, theorizing, waiting and waiting and waiting
to get male intercession or permission. Instead, this time, what
I could do was to act outside male law, male control, with women
on our behalf. How I expressed this then was by saving that I wanted
to "do something real".
The
history of Jane is not in this essay. My history of me in that group
is. We each tend to remember different things and to remember things
differently: if collectively uninterpreted, all the stories of all
the Janes would form the history/herstory of that group. The purpose
of this essay is to offer a distillate of how I remember things,
to spin my hit of the web, create my portion of what, if and when
taken together, becomes context, becomes a history of Jane, "history"
not being the monolith we are taught to believe it is.
In 1970
I had returned to Chicago where I was born and had grown up, from
Nebraska, where I had taken my undergraduate degree and had also
taken to getting married and pregnant. Two marriages, one miscarriage,
one self-induced quinine abortion and two children later, I was
twenty-three; twenty-three and for some reason convinced I could
do anything. My father used to call me "bullheaded," my
mother used to pray for me. I know I have always believed in conscience
and justice whether expressed in terms of collective action, God,
or lawlessness.
1970
is the year Robin Morgan's anthology, Sisterhood Is Powerful,
came out: its publication doubled the number of feminist books I
knew about. I had begun reading deBeauvoir's Second Sex
in 1967, in self-defense; my first husband had called me a "feminist"
while we were arguing. He'd said, "You know what you are..."
I discovered the word in deBeauvoir and claimed it, feeling better
and more myself than ever I had before.
By
1970 I was substitute-teaching in Chicago's public grade schools
for work; my second husband was working civil service at the downtown
post office. Having fled flimsy middle-income high-rise housing,
we'd found a sunny first floor Northside flat on Gordon Terrace,
a street which had once been on the lakeshore before the park and
the Outer Drive had been set into place on landfill. This apartment
was in a grand old Chicago house filled with woodwork and wainscoting,
a third floor ballroom and several fireplaces. Eventually, this
wonderful apartment, with its front bathroom and huge front bedroom,
was one of the houses the Service often used for doing abortions.
In 1970,
I saw an announcement in The Chicago Tribune
for a National Organization of Women meeting and decided to attend.
At this meeting the organizers talked about staging a cocktail party
for advertising executives at which it would be our mission to convince
these executives that using various female body parts to sell their
products was not acceptable practice. 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. "Strategy"
was confined to trying to determine how to ask someone something
effectively.
To me,
fighting for Women's Rights was not, is not, a matter of asking
or of educating the patriarchs--at parties or anywhere else. Appealing
to members of the same group who maintain the custom of precluding
rights was then, is now, simply a bad idea.
"Something
real" is how I characterized what I wanted to do. I asked a
woman who was standing next to me at the NOW meeting, "Is there
anything real going on in Chicago for women? This cocktail party
stuff is ridiculous. I want to do something real". She chuckled,
as I remember it, and asked for my phone number saying she'd call
me in a week or two. I thought, sure, right, but then she did call
and she invited me to a meeting of women about abortion, "if
you're still interested". I said that if it were to be about
making cocktails while lobbying for abortion rights, I wouldn't
be interested. She said it wasn't like that.
It wasn't
like that.
The
evening in 1970 I attended my first meeting of the Abortion Counseling
Service, fifteen or so white and Semitic women were gathered at
someone's house. I remember sitting on the floor wondering what
exactly was going on. Eventually, I remember it dawning on me; I
remember thinking, "These women are talking about DOING abortions".
I hoped that what I surmised was correct, that, indeed, no one in
this group would ask me to write to congress, to lobby, to
convince anyone of anything, or to wait; maybe I was going to be
able to do something real. Doing abortions with the Service has
always felt that way to me: real. It is the best work I ever did.
Virtually
every woman, heterosexual and lesbian, contemplates the possibility
(or understands the importance) of abortion. At the beginning of
the Service, the Hyde Park women would schedule abortions with the
abortionists one day per week. Always, more women need abortions
than can find ways to have abortions, so, at some point between
1967-l97O, the women and the one (sometimes two) abortionist(s)
began working two days per week. Even at $4OO-5OO per abortion (every
cent of which the man kept) these good, illegal abortions became
the abortions of choice in Chicago.
Eventually
and so that the man who wore a white coat and called himself a doctor
could concentrate on the "medical"/ medicalized/"technical"/"important"
aspects of abortion, and could, therefore, do more abortions per
workday, the women began "assisting". "Assisting"
was, at first, finding and equipping a workspace: then, gradually,
it became that and giving the pre-abortion injection (of the antibiotic)
tetracycline; then it became placing the speculum; then finding,
holding onto (with a tenaculum), and swabbing the cervix (with the
antiseptic Betadyne). Cleaning the blood off the women having abortions
and off the bed on which the abortions were done was an early and
constant part of assisting. When what the "doctor" had
to do was walk into a room in which lay a calm, well-informed woman
who wanted an abortion, what he would do would be to anaesthetize
the cervix (with xylocaine), dilate the cervix/os curette the uterus,
and then walk on to the next similar situation; his time spent per
woman dropped and he was consequently convinced to reduce his charge
to $275 per abortion (every cent of which he himself kept).
Besides
assisting, however, what the women came to learn was that the abortionist
was not a doctor. Without that mystique of
"doctorness" abortion became what it is (and what most
other forms of "medicine"/healing actually are a series
of things to do carefully, most of which the women were already
doing. The simple deduction was profound; if he can do abortions,
we can do abortions.
From
1971,when the women began doing most of the abortions and sometimes
hiring male abortionists to work with them/us, the charge per abortion
became $100, or what the woman determined she could afford. The
average amount paid was about $40 per abortion, with everyone having
an abortion paying something. By the Spring of 1973, when Jane mostly
folded (after the January 1973 Roe v. Wade US Supreme Court decision
and the appearance of the first "legal" abortion clinics
in Chicago), we worked 3 days per week doing 25-30 abortions per
day--about 80 per week.
From
the money we charged for abortions, we deducted our supplies, phone
and laundry bills. When Jane women were doing most of the abortions,
we decided to pay (by the day) the women abortionists (abortionists
who held the instruments--mostly, all of us in Jane thought of ourselves
as abortionists) and the Jane who organized the phone messages onto
3x5 cards.
From
my talk with other former Janes over the years, I know now there
was debate over these pay decisions then, but I don't recall
that. Some women remember bitter arguments over a possible loss
of altruism should any of us pay ourselves for our work; some women
remember arguing about "volunteerism" and not seeming
to value our own work if we didn't pay ourselves; some women argued
about creating an hierarchical pay scale--and how could we avoid
it and who should be paid...
It is
an amazing part of this for me what each Jane remembers, what remains
vivid for each of us. I tend to remember procedure and not Service
politics; I still remember the feel of a speculum in my hand but
I do not remember who liked whom and why, who said what and why.
For some of us, the Service was all-consuming; for others of us
it was, as it was for me, absolutely naturally integrated into my
sense of living a life I believed in. I was comfortable with all
I was doing; was neither wary, suspicious, nor paranoid as others
since have said they were then. I remember telling my parents matter-of-factly
that should I be arrested, I would like them to take care of my
kids I didn't ask their approval or their opinion. They took it
as matter-of-factly as I told them; my kids grew up knowing, this
fact of my life incorporated along with many other facts Others
are still wary of talking about Jane or aspects of how it was for
them in Jane. For me, it is the best work I ever did.
Part II
How
the Service worked was like this: a woman who had found the Jane
phone number would call and get our answering machine. Our message
said, in those days when answering machines were rare:
Hello,
this is Jane from Women's Liberation. Leave your name and number
and speak slowly and clearly. Someone will return your call. If
you do not hear from us in two or three days, call us back.
Women
found our phone number in a variety of ways--from underground/movement
papers and bulletin boards in universities and Laundromats; from
a friend, physician, clergy, or cop. Women got our phone number
from the mother of a friend or from her own mother, oncologist,
co-worker, pusher, social worker, or father. Illegal and legal,
out of state and in, overt and covert sources passed along our phone
number to women.
Remember
that fewer than a hundred or so years ago women had not yet been
culturally organized/trained to go to men for any such thing as
to have an abortion. Before "professionalization" and
"medicalization" (predicated on institutionalized male
power) women's bodies were literally in the hands of other women:
physicians were little more than grave robbers, dentists with an
attitude, barbers with extra straight razors/scalpels, and ghouls.
In
the early 1970s, there were phone numbers other than ours floating
around: phone numbers good for a day or two, a week, maybe a year
or two: phone numbers connecting women to masked quacks in Chicago,
docs on the take in Detroit, guys working themselves through bartending
or medical school or out the back of a van in California, St. Louis,
and Weehawken. Phone numbers connected women to opportunists in
Florida and to fly-by-nighters in Queens, and here and there was
a phone number of a reliable someone working alone or in sync with
conscience. With most of the abortionist-profiteers, women would
find themselves blindfolded, blindsided, picked up on corners, bound
to secrecy or to a kitchen table or motel coffee table. Often, others
would do abortions too quickly and without anesthesia, compassion,
the exchange of names, or so much as a hello, women finding themselves
dumped back at some train station or onto a remote street corner
without follow-up, friends, recourse, or information, and out several
hundred dollars whether the abortion was complete or not, antiseptic
or not, successful or not.
But,
when they found the Jane number, the Service number, our number,
women found something neither entrepreneurial nor impersonal, neither
medicalized nor professionalized. When women found the Jane number,
they found other women working together with, for, because of, and
among women, however ancient and unique that seemed in 1.970, or
now.
Several
times a day, whomever was "Janeing" took messages from
the tape, writing the information onto 3x9 cards she'd then take
to our weekly meetings, the business of which, primarily, was to
disperse the cards among the dozen or twenty women working any given
week. We chose cards idiosyncratically, noting some similarity or
difference in circumstance, neighborhood, ethnicity, or blood factor
between ourselves and the name of the woman on the 3x5 card.
Calling
back the phone numbers of the women on the cards, we'd find out
that some of the women had already gotten an abortion elsewhere,
some had gotten their period, some had given birth, kept it or given
it up, and didn't want or need to speak with us. Some women had
died. Some women were bleeding or had tubes or gauze or rags stuffed
into their uterus; they needed advice, referral to a physician who
wouldn't injure them further or turn them in, or advice on what
they could do for themselves just then. Some phone numbers had been
incorrectly given or received. Some women couldn't talk then but
could they call us back some midnight from untraceable pay phone
to untraceable pay phone. Often, a boyfriend or father called trying
to arrange things for or in spite of the woman whose name, along
with his number, he'd left on the Jane tape. However, most
often, the woman whose name I had on the 3x5 card talked to me herself
and was eager to meet so that I could describe and we could discuss
the abortion she'd called to initiate.
I preferred
to meet with women one to one, though other Service women preferred
to meet with women in groups. I usually invited the woman to my
house evenings after I'd put my kids to bed, suggesting she bring
a friend along, if she'd like. Ordinarily I would have made tea
for us and had some cookies out on a plate: we'd sit around my dining
room table or in the livingroom, maybe in front of a fire, and we'd
talk. On the 3x5 cards, I'd write down what she told me about her
menstrual history, any children, pregnancies, allergies, or difficulties
she had, and information about any medication she took regularly.
I'd
tell the woman what a dilation and curettage (D&C) abortion
was like. The choice to have an abortion was hers until the opening
of the cervix to the uterus, was dilated; after dilation, emptying
the uterus became inevitable. In those days, I saw little mind-changing;
women had their decision firmly made, usually, and were eager to
get on with the abortion. Frequently, they hoped I might do it then
and there; women were unaccustomed to being told anything much about
what was to be done to us--often the womans attitude was,
"don't tell me any(more)thing, just get on with it". But
we insisted that SHE KNOW; that the abortion was something we were
going to be doing together, that this was her decision and
she could, should, and must know all about it.
I would
illustrate what I was saying by showing the woman diagrams/drawings
from the newsprint edition then available of the Boston Women's
Health Collective's Our Bodies, Ourselves;
we had this edition by the cartons full and would give them to interested
women. I would show the woman a plastic version of a metal speculum,
and I would talk to her about how it held open the vaginal walls
allowing us, and her with a mirror if she chose, to see the cervix
and the os. Often, the example-speculurn I had lying around the
house had eyes and mouths painted on them; the kids clacked them
about as toy puppet ducks opening and closing the "beaks"
to make them appear to speak.
The
first time I saw a cervix was the first day I assisted; the woman
on the bed could see, too, using a mirror. I knew the cervix to
be the tapered neck of the uterus which extends down into the upper
vagina, the os at the bottom of it being the opening through which
sperm enters the uterus and which, in full term labor, opens to
about ten centimeters. A pregnant uterus is engorged, purpled, as
it is just before a period.
But
knowing is not the same as seeing. Seeing, I remember thinking how
beautiful the cervix is and how it looks like a glistening pink
doughnut. I felt happy and fascinated. Seeing her cervix, I knew
that this woman was not pregnant; it was instinctual, inherent
knowledge, a body reading the semiotics of a body. A pregnancy test
had been incorrect, which had caused this women to find us. For
the woman on the bed, her believing our reading her as not pregnant
did not have to be an act of faith; it was, instead, a matter of
corporeal epiphany.
Towards
the close of my one-to-one meetings with the women who wanted abortions,
I would write down the date, time, and address of her appointment;
I'd write down my phone number, too, in case she had questions or
problems after her abortion. I said I wouldn't call her unless the
Pap test we'd do prior to the abortion was inconclusive or abnormal.
The
address I'd write down would get her to the "Front," the
apartment at which she (and a friend, if she chose) would wait before
and to which she'd return after the abortion. Another one of the
Service women, another Jane, would drive her and a group of other
women wanting abortions, room the Front to the second apartment,
the "Place," where she would have the abortion. Only Jane
women and women having abortions would be at the Place.
Jane
women would be at the Front to talk with and counsel with the women
wanting abortions, and to keep the bowls full of Triscuit, the apricot
nectar flowing; we always brought food and drink for the women come
for abortions, and for their friends, as we brought nourishment
and treats for any of the rest of us when we got together any other
time. Often, the second group of women waiting for abortions sat
quietly until midmorning when the first careful of women returned.
Women returned happy: things went well; they were relieved; they
were no longer pregnant; they had put their own decision into effect
by finding other competent, caring, and determined women.
Both
the Front and the Place were someone's apartment or house. We would
volunteer our apartments or houses as we could. Our lives were in
evidence in the photos and books on our shelves, the Melmac, teddy
bears, or vibrator overlooked in a dining room or bedroom; the glass
beads in the doorway, Joplin poster on the wall; in the sheets on
our beds on which the abortions were done. The Service used some
of the money collected from doing abortions to pay for the Places'
laundry to be done professionally; I and many of the rest of the
Janes used our best sheets on days our homes were being used as
the Place.
At
the Place we checked the information on the 3x9 cards again with
the women whose information it was. Whenever we were asked if we
were doctors, we said, "NO. We are not doctors. We are abortionists".
None of the women who did those 11,000 abortions had been medically
schooled.
We women
in Jane learned how to do abortions from one another, as peer-apprentices,
though no one called it that. Our home-done abortions had a lower
infection rate (about 2%) than do most hospital surgeries. We killed
no one, a fact which contrasts with what happened when legislators
legalized abortion allowing physicians who had not necessarily ever
been trained to do abortions, to do abortions. Quite simply, women
died from legal abortions because the law granted authority (to
physicians) without regard to proficiency. Similarly, those without
license are not granted legal authority to do abortions, without
regard to proficiency, the test for what is "legal" having
to do with power and who has (granted themselves) the right to wield
it. I have always been amazed at how relatively simple the physical
process of performing abortions is, how readily it is learned; what
keeps most of us away from that realization is that closed guild
which is organized medicine.
Part III
I remember
that the physical procedure to abort the pregnancy began with giving
the pregnant woman an intramuscular injection of tetracycline (in
the buttocks). A week's supply of tetracycline in capsule form (which,
at the time, cost us about a penny apiece) was sent home with each
woman after her abortion, with instructions to take them until they
were gone. We also suggested she would be wise to eat some cultured
milk products, like yogurt or sour cream, while taking an(y) antibiotic,
since tetracycline/antibiotics help(s) prevent/control infection
by indiscriminately destroying both good and bad bacteria In the
body.
When
a woman knew she had (relatively)rare RH negative blood, she would
be given the name of a "sympathetic" physician who would
follow-up her abortion with an injection of RhoGam which is used
to immunize the woman to prevent possibly fatal RH-incompatibility
reactions in future pregnancies.
We secured
the necessary equipment and medications from various pharmacies
and medical supply stores around town. Obtaining the supplies required
no prescription--one merely had to appear to know what she was doing
to purchase specula, sterilizing trays, gloves, tenacula, and the
rest. Tetracycline is a prescription drug but was only slightly
more difficult to purchase.
After
the tetracycline injection, the woman would be asked to lie down
so that we could position a sterilized metal speculum into her vagina
to locate her cervix. We used no draping, no stirrups, no shaving,
no masks, and no doctors. We used precise instruments but neither
medical guise/guys nor props.
We
then used cotton swabs to do a Pap test, taking sloughed cells from
first inside the os, then around the face of the cervix. We placed
the cells, in turn, on a glass slide labeled with her name and the
date, used fixative, and, later, sent that slide along with the
others from the day's work out to a lab which read it and sent back
results which we later relayed to the women whose results they were.
The lab charged us about a dollar per slide for their reading and
report. Later in Jane's existence,. we purchased a microscope; we
were going to learn to read the slides ourselves, but the cops confiscated
the microscope in the May 1972 bust. I don't know that we ever got
the microscope back.
After
the Pap test we would wash the cervix with Betadyne, then inject
xylocaine at 12, 6, 3, & 9 to create a paracervical block, using
a tenaculum to hold the cervix in place, if necessary. Dilation
of the os we accomplished by using either a graduated series of
thin to less thin rods or by using a manual dilator, coaxing the
os gradually to open.
We
assumed that women with normal thigh muscles could hold their legs
as was necessary and, by god, each woman did. We told women: you're
a part of this not an object of this; this is an ensemble production.
Abortion was to be a matter of informed choice; decision-making
is a revolutionary act. And we talked ~ along, giving information,
asking and answering questions, a woman at the pregnant woman's
shoulders holding her hand or maybe wiping her forehead. Those women
who said they didn't want to know what was happening were told why
we thought it important to know, why it is important not to detach
oneself from one's body or to submit to anyone else, even to someone
who is helping, who you have chosen to help, even to us.
The
Jane who was holding most of the instruments would tell the woman
whose abortion it was what was going on, asking her to relax, to
lie as still as possible, and to keep her legs up and apart. We
concentrated on what was going on and often we also talked and laughed
and told jokes to and amongst one another--not because it was "therapeutic"
or because we took abortion, ourselves, or the woman choosing abortion
lightly, but because we were doing important things together as
the people we were, and we loved doing those things and doing them
together.
My
favorite instrument was the sound. It is beautiful, silver , and
pliable, has a rounded tip, and is calibrated. It is moved about
inside the uterus to discern the size, shape, and topography of
the uterus, the location of the pregnancy. When the tip touches
solidity, the sound bends slightly; the hand holding the sound can
feel that: it is a highly responsive instrument.
One
woman who, in confirming the information on the 3x9 card noting
her ten pregnancies, her ten living children, said, indeed, she
was certain she was pregnant because she hadn't had her period in
five months. Her cervix was grey, not the fuschia with engorgement
of a usual 12-16 week pregnancy, and though starchy diets over a
long time often produce such grey tissue, still, pregnant, the uterus
should have at least flushed pink. Though the sound virtually disappeared
into her huge, spongy, and seemingly empty uterus, none of us could
find the pregnancy.
It
did not occur to us to tell her, as her physician had, that a) she
wasn't pregnant--he could find no pregnancy (either), and b) an
eleventh child would make no difference in her life--the physician
had told her to "show him" her pregnancy by having the
child.
Finally,
one of us, with the sound, found a tiny tunnel on the top and to
the back of her uterus, a bubble of the uterus above and behind
the tunnel, in which lay the small, underdeveloped pregnancy, a
pregnancy which we removed, as we removed other pregnancies, with
a curette.
Most
often we aborted pregnancies by dilation and curettage (D&c).
By about 1972, the technique of manual vacuum aspiration was available,
and we used it, too, frequently for women six weeks pregnant or
less, though curettage always completed those abortions. The aspiration
was less uncomfortable but then we felt it was not always entirely
reliable when used alone. For women 6-12 weeks pregnant, we always
did the D&C.
For
women 12-16 weeks pregnant, or beyond, labor was induced, most commonly
by breaking the amniotic sac with forceps. Both laminaria and luenbach
paste, which separate the placenta from the uterine wall, were available
during some of those years, but their presence is clinically detectable
while a broken amniotic sac, drained fluid, and a dilated os can
all be attributed to natural process. The os dilated, the sac broken,
labor induced, the pregnancy comes out.
After
a direct abortion, an abortion in which labor was not induced, but
during which both fetus and placenta were removed, the newly not-pregnant
woman would be returned to the Front where she would meet up with
whatever friend she'd brought along, talk with Jane women, celebrate,
recover a bit, or talk with the other women there for the same reason.
If she had come alone, she would call someone to pick her up. When
she left the Front she'd leave with a packet of tetracycline in
hand and a list of phone numbers for her to call in case she had
a problem or wanted to talk about the abortion. We told her we'd
call her in a few days if her Pap test needed to be followed up
on. We told her (again, as this is part of what we'd talked about
the first time she would have spoken personally with a Jane) if
there was more bleeding after the abortion than during her normal
period, she should lie down, put her feet up and put ice over the
area o~ her ovaries and uterus. If this wouldn't slow down the bleeding,
we said she should go (or we would take her, if she wished) to her
doctor, a doctor, or to a non-Catholic emergency room, where, invariably
she'd be told to lie down, put her feet up and put ice on her "tummy".
If she were filling a Kotex in 15 minutes or less, we told her to
consider that flow hemmorhaging and to go directly to an emergency
room where we'd meet her (if she wished). More frequently than we
took women to doctors or to emergency rooms where we took them was
into our homes, our confidence, and, frequently, into the Service.
Indeed, if a woman expressed interest in joining us, someone would
call her up, as someone had called me up, and invite her to one
of our meetings.
Eventually,
the Service rented two apartments, one on the North Side which we
used solely for women who did not have insurance, green card (government
assisted health care), or circumstance to deliver the fetus in a
hospital, or who did not choose to deliver at her own home and who
had nowhere else to go. The other apartment we rented was on the
South Side and, for a brief while, became our regular Place, at
which point only the Fronts changed each workday.
It
was at the South Side apartment that seven of us were busted on
the May day in 1972 that J. Edgar Hoover finally died. Neither the
Chicago Police nor the Outfit/Mafia had previously bothered us though
each knew of our work: we were clean, damn good, and made too little
money to interest them.
From
all accounts, what happened to cause the bust was that the police,
who reputedly knew and had known about us and who had photos of
us at various political demonstrations and at our various residences
over time, had been hounded by a Catholic sister-in-law of a woman
who had chosen to have an abortion. The cops had put her off, apparently,
but she was persistent and outraged that abortions could
be going on at all and further outraged at the cops' reaction, or
lack thereof, to her complaint.
The
cops took everyone around that day, scooping up people first at
the Place, then, at the Front--friends, boyfriends, mothers--there
must have been a couple dozen people busted in mid-afternoon who
didn't get tossed into jail until midnight. Seven Service women
were charged with "battery" and the like. All charges
were subsequently dropped ostensibly because the law was changed
(Roe v. Wade, 1973) although the law never changed enough to "allow"
non-physicians to do abortions.
The
arrest was one of several points during the history of the Service
when women dropped out. For instance, when the male abortionists
were "found out" many of the women in the Service said.
something like "They're not doctors!" and while some of
us had a look of panic, horror, or terror on our faces, others,
like me, smiled broadly saying it. Just after the bust I remember
a discussion in which some women asked if we should continue doing
abortions. I was impatient with talk like that. The arrests changed
nothing for me; our doing abortions was (still) both right and illegal.
When
Jane finally did disband (late 1973), after abortion was effectively
"legalized," we unconsciously made the same error that
the Suffragists had made after Suffrage had been "granted"
in the US: we thought we'd won, changed something, that someone
somewhere was wising up, seeing the light. But what we did was to
remand women back into the realm of male law, male custom, medical
custody. Bad idea then as now.
Those
of us in Jane, in the Women's Movement then and now, had not done,
have yet to do, our homework, either that or we are far too trusting,
or maybe we believe that the system is only in need of revision
and that it will somehow at some time begin to include us (structurally),
work for us. What we must understand is that the system of patriarchal
imperialism is inimical to women: it always has been and it always
will be. We live by the tolerance or privilege or oversight of the
patriarchs.
We
didn't win at Suffrage. We didn't win at Roe v. Wade. There is no
winning. A hundred years of hindsight has us asking how could the
Suffragists have thought that getting the vote in a rigged, white,
male, heterosexual system was a win. We understand that they should
have not organized to become a part of such a system, but, instead,
worked to take apart that system. Why do we not ask the same of
ourselves?
Decisions/laws
hold only as long as they work for or do not work against the decision/law
makers. The acts of "asking permission," of marching,
of lobbying, and demonstrating acknowledge the very power imbalance
women must change.
We
should all know by now that the rights of women are legally unacknowledged
and structurally, fundamentally incompatible with patriarchy. We
are treason and heresy: I think we should, embrace that, consider
it kernel, foundation, nucleus, and core to being women.
It
is no wonder that abortion law does not reflect women's needs, rights,
and thought: which laws do? We must notice that other patriarchal
imperialist traditions such as rape, pornography, and the male beating
up on women are patriarchal perks--rites as well as rights of patriarchy;
these are the same rights/rites conquering forces often exert, then
traditionalize, systematize. These "traditions," these
"values" are so deeply incorporated into gender relations
that, for instance, normative heterosexual behavior is virtually
indistinguishable from some outcroppings of violence against women,
like rape and pornography.
Abortion
is part of the power patriarchy holds over women. Abortion is an
issue of hegemony and imperialism: men to other men are explorers;
to men, women are the moon, enigmatic frontier and flow, "virgin"/empty
land to be owned and controlled and into which flags can be rammed.
Men have made women their territory, abortion theirs to control,
mystify, and sell back to women; abortion is not simply a medical
procedure, it is a medicalized procedure, a procedure medicalized,
like childbirth and Pap tests, and for the same reasons--control
and profit.
The
Pap test consists of inserting a' speculum into a vagina, locating
the cervix, then inserting, in turn, two long cotton-tipped swabs
one at a time through the vagina to the cervix. The first swab pets
cells from the os the second, pets cells off the surface of the
cervix. The cells from the swabs are placed onto a glass slide next
to a note regarding their place of origin, then a fixative is sprayed
over the cells and the slide is sent to a lab to be read. The Pap
test is no more difficult to do, little more' invasive or complex,
than flossing a tooth. Indeed, the tissue of the vagina is similar
to the tissue in the mouth, only cleaner. Clearly, the logistics
of doing it oneself takes practice though that difficulty can be
overcome by women doing each others' Pap tests. This is not a "medical
procedure," but a procedure colonized by professionalization.
The
Pap test, abortion, and childbirth are each procedures to perform
carefully and knowledgeably; why they are "medical(ized)"
procedures has to do with issues of control. To misquote and meld
Marx and Engels: "He who is in control of the means of re-production
is in control of an essential form of labor". One has but to
look at the history of labor (of all kinds) under capitalism to
trace the colonization and Pacification of a cheap (free/unpaid,
in this case) work force to see how this operates.
Remember,
too, if you will, the days before "birthing suites" at
the local hospital; remember when women fought for their lovers,
boyfriends and/or husbands to be with them at the birth of their
children? Remember the Physicians' response to those demands? Unequivocal
negative response. Unequivocal that is, until the physicians found
a way to colonize "birthing," incorporate it into their
business arena, and then sell it back to women along with their
other "services". Their answer to our demands was a variety
of ways of saying no--it was 'Unsanitary," "unworkable"--too
many people in the delivery room at ~ time; it was "against
standard medical practice"--until it wasn't any of those things--until
the medical business found a way to sell "birthing" back
to women.
I suggest
we not only demedicalize abortion but that women begin (again) to
do abortions ourselves. Bring back safe, "illegal" abortions
done by women for and because of women. Groups of women can certainly
do our own safe abortions; women have always done our own safe abortions.
The medicalization of health and the colonization of women's bodies
have obscured what can and must be done. Going back again and again
to the patriarchs whose right/rite it is to rape women, beat women,
and to force impregnation and childbirth is not what women want
to continue doing. Women need to practice disobedience (civil..if
you like) to law: we must not obey laws which we did not write and
which are written at our expense and which keep us oppressed and
keep us asking permission.
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