Six years ago, when U.S. Rep. Todd Akin destroyed his chances of being elected to the U.S. Senate by yammering about “legitimate rape” on my TV program, he was actually trying to avoid saying what he really believed. I was pressing Akin, who is anti-abortion to the core, about when abortion should be allowed in his mind. Cases of incest? Cases of rape?
He drove himself into a ditch gibbering about how some rape isn’t really rape, and about how a woman’s body magically refuses to get pregnant from a “legitimate rape” because he didn’t want to come out and say what he believes: that abortion should be 100 percent illegal, no exceptions, and that a woman who becomes pregnant should be forced, by law, to have the baby, no matter the circumstances.
What Akin didn’t want to say a half-dozen years ago has now become Republican orthodoxy. It’s right there in the GOP platform, support for the so-called “Human Life Amendment” that would effectively outlaw abortion by making a fetus a human being under the 14th Amendment.
This is why the GOP is mostly ignoring or disputing sexual assault and perjury charges against Trump Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh – because they want his deciding vote on the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade and either outlaw abortion completely or leave it up to the states to outlaw. And even if Kavanaugh withdraws or is defeated because he sexually assaulted a woman in high school and lied repeatedly, under oath, to Congress during his initial confirmation hearings to the D.C. Federal Appeals Court over a decade ago, rest assured that Trump and the GOP will replace him with another right-wing ideologue determined to take away a woman’s ability to get a safe, legal abortion.
When that happens, you can expect versions of the Jane Collective to sprout across the country, running an underground system of transportation, clinics, housing, and counseling, and illegally allowing women to have abortions. If you’ve never heard of the Jane Collective, you will, and maybe sooner than you think.
Several of my University of Chicago classmates were involved with Jane in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. That was before the 1973 Roe decision, when abortion was illegal throughout the United States. The Jane Collective, officially known as the Abortion Counseling Service of Women’s Liberation, was started by University of Chicago graduate student named Heather Booth in 1969, after she helped a friend’s sister obtain an abortion.
Shocked by both the expense and the medical risk, Booth started what became a nationwide underground movement, centered in Chicago, that helped transport women to Chicago, provided them counseling and a place to stay at sympathizer’s apartments, and rented a large apartment that became an abortion clinic. Patients were charged $100 (around $700 in today’s money). If women could afford the fee, they were either given care and abortions for free, or were given interest-free loans by the collective.
Besides the medical risks women faced, the members of the Jane Collective faced potential manslaughter charges. And yet, they persisted. The underground movement spread, first in the Midwest and then around the country, by word of mouth. One of Jane’s apartments was raided by Chicago police in 1972. As the cops struggled to haul off seven members of the collective, they and other staffers tore the names and addresses of women off the index cards on which records were kept, and swallowed them to keep police from arresting and charges any of their patients. By the time the case was set to come to trial in 1973, the Supreme Court had ruled in Roe v. Wade, and the charges were dismissed.
Fast forward almost a half-century. Religious fundamentalists and extremist politicians funded by millions in anti-abortion dark money, are poised to have a 5-4 conservative Supreme Court majority that will outlaw abortion the first chance it gets. If, as expected, the ruling takes the form of letting states decide, then it’s a safe bet that abortion will be completely illegal in at least 34 states within a year.
Two things will happen. First, a Jane-like movement will spring up to provide transportation for women to travel to states like California, New York, and Illinois, where abortion will (probably) remain legal. And second, within those Gilead-like states with no abortion access, Jane-like undergrounds will develop for women who can’t travel those distances, to provide abortions in places like Missouri and Mississippi.
Restrictions on abortion won’t be the end of it in a post-Roe America. To religious extremists who believe that life begins at the moment of conception, female contraception is the same as abortion. That was the essence of the Hobby Lobby case that Missouri GOP Senate candidate Josh Hawley argued – that employers with strong religious beliefs should not have to cover contraception under an employee’s insurance plans. Brett Kavanaugh himself joined that chorus during his confirmation hearings, falsely claiming that a contraceptive pill taken to prevent sperm fertilizing an egg is the same as abortion.
Denying contraception coverage to women, denying their right to control their own bodies, and, conceivably, forcing women to give birth in some states are policies that are tangled together. And when (mostly male) conservative lawmakers and judges decide to take those choices away from women, new versions of the Jane Collective will be the logical result. Injustice, whether reproductive or racial, has always spawned a large, diffuse, and often underground resistance and reaction. This is no different.
Meanwhile, Brett Kavanaugh’s history of judicial extremism, his probable perjury under oath before Congress, and his alleged sexual assault of a woman in the 1980s mean nothing to the GOP lawmakers pushing his nomination. They’ll attack the alleged sexual assault victim, ignore the perjury, and push Kavanaugh (or someone like him) onto the Supreme Court with one end goal in mind.
They want abortion outlawed and contraception restricted. No matter what.
Charles Jaco is a journalist, author, and activist. Follow him on Twitter at @charlesjaco1.
