This review of “The Janes” was first published Jan. 24, 2022, after its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival.
They had names like Heather, Martha, Marie, Jody and Judith. But they called themselves the Janes. And between 1968 and 1973, they performed approximately 11,000 underground abortions in Chicago. Their stories, which they share in Tia Lessin and Emma Pildes’ powerfully forthright documentary, “The Janes,” remain stunning five decades later. (The group also inspired a fictional movie that premiered at Sundance this year titled “Call Jane.”)
They weren’t medical professionals, and their work was flatly illegal. But the alternatives for women who wanted an abortion were to go to the mob and assume they might be sexually assaulted before or after a procedure, or to try to end a pregnancy alone, at home.