ask for jane
The first thing I feel I should say about indie feature Ask for Jane—just released on digital streaming platforms after a theatrical run—is that it almost made me pass out.
In order to tell this story, based on real-life events, of abortion activism in the years before abortion was legal, writer-director Rachel Carey included details of things women used to experience—and used to do—when facing an unplanned pregnancy; these details are harrowing in the extreme.
One character, a high school student, hears that swallowing rat poison will generate a spontaneous abortion, so she tries it. Another young woman sees no escape and no future, so she jumps from a ledge. Many endure unsafe, unsanitary procedures, performed by men who may or may not even be doctors. To cap that off, the men are hostile and utterly disrespectful—and since these abortions are illegal and unregulated, there is no set limit to the fees charged for them.
The combination of physical and emotional violence with the most intimate aspects of women’s bodies, and lives, left me faint. Several times, I had to pause in my viewing and put my head down until the wooziness passed. I was a young child when Roe v. Wade became law. I don’t remember a time when abortion was not a legal medical procedure. This powerful film reminds us all of how savage things really were—and that going back to those times must never be an option.
Even while confronting the horrors brought on by the illegality of abortion, the activists in Ask for Jane display straightforward decency that is both admirable and comforting.
Inspired by the seminal and historically crucial abortion-rights group the Jane Collective, the film is based on female students at the University of Chicago and infused with an open-hearted, can-do Midwestern mentality that adds needed warmth to its painful themes. Even while confronting the horrors brought on by the illegality of abortion, the activists in Ask for Jane display straightforward decency that is both admirable and comforting.
In their senior year at the university in 1968, Janice (Cody Horn) and Rose (Cait Cortelyou, also a producer and co-writer on the project) see a classmate and friend’s life veer toward disaster due to an unplanned pregnancy. They help her secure an abortion; its medical, emotional, and financial aspects are highly fraught, but the woman comes through in reasonable health and can continue with the life she has been building, which passes for a resounding success.
Rose considers all the other women who need such help, almost all of whom don’t have it, and an activist group is born.
As we see in the film, the real women of the Jane Collective—so-named because in their activism, all its members went by the pseudonym “Jane” (as in Jane Doe) to preserve their anonymity—evolved from helping women secure a safe abortion to performing abortions themselves. Though this was a risky endeavor to say the least, safe and just alternatives were simply too scarce. “We are for every woman having exactly as many children as she wants, when she wants, if she wants,” the group stated in a 1969 outreach and education pamphlet. “It’s time that the Bill of Rights applied to women.”
As the film progresses, we see the Collective gaining members—a woman just out of high school (Chloë Levine) forced into a miserable marriage when she becomes pregnant; a married mother of two and former nurse (Sophie von Haselberg), hospitalized with a medical crisis, whose doctors hesitate to perform a necessary surgery because it might jeopardize her fetus; a woman in her twenties (Megan Channell) whose wealthy family wants her to marry her equally “well-connected” rapist. The plot reflects the urgency and turbulence surrounding abortion rights—abortion is legal in New York State, and Roe v. Wade will soon pass, but meanwhile, the women of the Jane Collective are putting their lives at stake for this cause every day.
Viewers will be uncomfortably reminded of the sense of crisis surrounding reproductive rights today.
Viewers will be uncomfortably reminded of the sense of crisis surrounding reproductive rights today. The confirmation of conservative justice Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, despite credible and ongoing accusations against him of sexual assault, casts alarming uncertainty on the security of Roe v. Wade. Insurance coverage of birth control also faces attack.
But one is also reminded of the emergence of many new activist groups—such as the Seattle-based Miss Morning After, which works with pharmacies to help teens access the morning-after pill as an emergency contraceptive measure.
As Ask for Jane illuminates, with activism and diligence, we can work to ensure that “We won’t go back” is more than just a protest slogan. In fact, the film shows us that the issue need not be controversial. In one scene, a woman securing an abortion through the group says of her own circumstances, “I still don’t believe in abortion. This is different.”
“Yes,” responds a Jane member, wearily and accurately. “They all are.”