101 min | NR | June 8, 2022 | HBO Documentary Films
In 1968, a network of Chicago women builds an underground service to give other women safe, illegal abortions. They run it out of apartments, route calls through a single answering machine, and dodge the cops and the mob. The state called it a crime. The women called it the job.
The Janes documents the Jane Collective, an underground network that arranges abortions in Chicago in the years before Roe v. Wade. The members are ordinary women. They book the appointments, raise the money, and shuttle clients to apartments scattered across the city. They operate under constant threat of arrest and under the watch of a mob that profits from the same illegal trade. The film is not a history lesson about a vanished era. It is an argument about what happens to women when the law treats their bodies as state property.
Heather Booth founds the operation as a college student and recounts the first referral with the flat calm of someone who never expected it to become a movement. Judith Arcana describes performing the procedures herself once the women stop relying on outside providers, and she narrates the mechanics without flinching. Marie Leaner offers the lodgings and frames her involvement in plain moral terms. Diane Stevens and Eleanor Oliver fill in the texture of the daily work, the fear of the phone ringing and the code names and the cash handoffs. Each woman speaks directly to camera, and the absence of dramatization forces the viewer to sit with the testimony itself.
Tia Lessin and Emma Pildes direct the film as a procedural built from interviews and archival material. They keep the camera still and let the faces carry the weight. The archival photographs of Chicago slums and back-alley aftermaths are cut against the interviews with restraint, so the horror lands without manipulation. The editing tracks the operation like a heist, moving from the answering service to the front apartment to the place where the work happens. The structure mirrors the secrecy the women lived inside, and it pays off when the police raid arrives and the timeline tightens.
The film closes on the arrest of seven members and the legal jeopardy that follows. The directors do not need to spell out the contemporary stakes because the testimony does it for them. The women describe a world where desperation drove people to the mob and to coat hangers, and they describe building an alternative with their own hands. The Janes treats their work as labor rather than martyrdom. That choice is what gives the film its force.