The Janes: The secret network that provided thousands of abortions before Roe v Wade

When Dorie Barron was asked whether she wanted a Cadillac, a Chevrolet, or a Rolls Royce, she was not trying to buy a car. She was a woman in 1960s Chicago trying to get an abortion at a time when the procedure was still a crime in Illinois. Barron was on the phone; on the other side of the line was the Mob, one of the purveyors of illegal abortions.

“The Chevy was the cheapest, $500,” Barron explains in The Janes, a new HBO documentary about a network of women who provided safe, affordable, and illegal abortions in Chicago in the 1960s and 1970s. “A Cadillac was something like $750, and if you wanted the Rolls Royce–we’re talking about the 1960s here–that was $1,000. That’s what the Mob charged for an abortion.” (Adjusted for inflation, these amounts would respectively total around $4,000, $6,000, and $9,000 nowadays.)

Barron asked for a Chevrolet. The procedure, as she recounts it, was petrifying, hostile, and dangerous. It took place at a motel. The four people there spoke three sentences to her in total: “Where’s the money?”, “Lie back and do as I tell you”, and “Get in the bathroom.” Barron was left bleeding next to another woman who had also needed and received an abortion. “If I had stayed in that room, I’d be dead,” Barron says in The Janes. She and the other woman got up once they were able to do so and went their separate ways.