My goal is to be a great Justice for all Americans.
With a new conservative majority on the Supreme Court,
abortion is once again at the forefront of American politics.
Life yes, abortion no.
My own daughters face more restrictions in most states
than I faced over 30 years ago.
Drawing attention to a little known chapter of American history:
an underground organization that operated outside the law.
Our code name was Jane.
In the 1960s, abortion was largely illegal in the United States.
Hundreds of thousands of pregnant women, unmindful of what may happen
to them, secretly and fearfully seek abortions.
For them, there is a wide gulf between what the law commands
and what they feel they must do.
That was the situation for Sunny Chapman, who was 19 years old
when she realized she was pregnant.
I didn't want to have a baby at all.
So I started looking for a way to not be pregnant.
The options were: get married;
leave the country
for an abortion, which the rich girls did;
go to an unwed mothers home and put your baby up for adoption,
which is what working class girls like myself did;
or have what we called back-alley abortions,
which was a terrifying idea.
There were stories of women using coat hangers, taking lye.
Stories of women jumping off of buildings
to try and damage themselves.
Dangers like these motivated a group of women in Chicago to form the
Abortion Counseling Service
a feminist group, whose mission was to arrange illegal
but safe abortions.
They became known as Jane.
Nobody in the group was named Jane.
So, it was an everywoman name.
But we wanted to have a name because, that way, when we called
somebody back, we could leave a message for them that Jane called
without giving anything away.
Most of the women in Jane were housewives.
They were college students.
And they were running an illegal abortion underground
service and they were risking being arrested and prosecuted and going to
prison for several years or more.
Did I know it was illegal and did I consider that?
Yes, I did, and I thought that this was an
act of civil disobedience.
We put up signs in phone booths, in student centers, in
any number of places.
Well, it's kind of interesting when you're running a clandestine
service that you have to have, make sure your
that the people who want to use it can find.
So, we actually had an ad in the alternate paper.
The ad said something like, pregnant?
Need Help?
Call Jane, and then there was a phone number.
I called Jane.
Then someone called me back.
They gave me an appointment to meet with a woman
who lived in my neighborhood.
The person would go to her counselor's house
and have everything explained,
not just what an abortion was but exactly what
they would experience that day.
That was really important to us, because we knew that people
got scared from the unknown.
Our practice was that we had one apartment that we called
the Front– we were not very creative with names –
which was a front.
And it was the address we gave out.
And then the driver would drive
just the women who were having abortions
to the Place.
And that was where the abortion took place.
It was all part of a system designed to keep their operation,
and the identity of the abortion provider, a secret.
I was blindfolded and helped onto the bed.
He didn't want to do my procedure because I was a little
further along than he liked.
I was in the second trimester by this
time, and he didn't want to do it.
The counselors talked him into doing it.
They held my hand and we got through it.
One provider did most of the procedures.
And then they learned more about him.
It was revealed to the group that our doctor was not, in fact,
a doctor.
People flipped out.
Women in the group, some of them, I heard,
were crying and saying, we're no better than the back-alleys.
We've got to stop doing this.
Lots of people left the group at that point.
They just couldn't cope with that.
But the women who remained made a decision.
And one woman said, well, if he can do it and he's not a doctor,
then we can do it too.
None of us had any medical experience.
None.
Not one person in this group.
And so he said he would train the women on how to provide
the abortions.
As things were changing for the Janes, they were changing in the
rest of the country, as well.
Set bill has passed third reading.
Hawaii's State Senate passed the most permissive abortion law
in this country.
Medical history is being made this week in New York State.
When New York legalized abortion in 1970, women with money,
middle-class women started going to New York.
They could drive or fly there and get legal, safe abortions
by physicians.
Thousands of women went to New York from Illinois.
And Jane started to have many more
low-income women, many, many, many more African-American women
whom they were serving.
Because we had a poorer clientele, it was very important that for it
to be accessible, it had to be cheap.
Once we were doing it ourselves, we charged $100.
We figured it cost us about $50 and we took anything,
including nothing.
By 1972, the women say they were performing as many as a hundred
abortions a week, when one day, there was a knock on the door.
I opened the door.
I saw two of the tallest men I had ever seen in my life.
I simply turned around, walked back down the hall
and announced, These are the police.
You do not have to tell them anything.
So, we locked the door of the room we were in, which wasn't really
going to stop them for very long.
And I think we took all the instruments and everything and
threw them out the window.
This was a high rise, luckily nobody was beneath.
And we were all, kind of, sitting quietly on the bed
when the police kicked in the door.
All seven of us were charged with counts of
abortion and conspiracy to commit abortion.
Each count was worth 10 years.
I think that was the moment in my life that I realized
that actions have consequences.
As they awaited trial, a landmark Supreme Court decision,
Roe v. Wade, made abortion legal across the country.
The Supreme Court today ruled that abortion is completely a private
matter to be decided by mother and doctor in the first
three months of pregnancy.
When I heard Roe v. Wade was decided by the Supreme Court,
I knew that eventually this case would go away.
State's attorneys made a deal with our lawyer
that if we didn't ask for our medical instruments back,
they wouldn't charge us with
practicing medicine without a license.
And that was it.
Done.
It was over.