Internet Privacy is Under Siege Along With Abortion Rights
All of which reminds me of the bad old days before Roe v. Wade, when women seldom had the right to choose abortion unless they had a lot of money and other resources.
Those days came back to me as I watched “The Janes,” a new documentary streaming on HBO and HBO Max about Chicago’s old Jane Collective, or “Jane” for short. Volunteers, mostly women, ran the underground service from 1969 to 1973 to help pregnant women in need to obtain abortions, which still were illegal in Illinois, as in most states.
They didn’t have Google location services to worry about back then, although they constantly had to dodge police even as they advertised their services through word-of-mouth and ads in the underground Chicago Seed saying simply, “Pregnant? Don’t want to be? Call Jane,” a name chosen for its easy-to-remember simplicity.
Ironically, as Jane founder Heather Booth says in the documentary, “We always thought the police knew about it.”
She relates a story about one woman who was married to a police officer and brought their pregnant daughter to Jane. “Although I didn’t ask, I had every reason to believe that it was the policeman who directed his wife about where to go,” Booth says. “So we think that it actually was a service that was useful in the society.
“Abortion had not been politicized yet,” she said, referring to how ferociously the issue has become a battle cry for the political right.
Jane ended after one of their apartments was raided by Chicago police in 1972 and seven of its members were arrested and charged with enough abortion counts to send them to prison for as much as 110 years.
Fortunately, the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision was handed down in 1973 and the charges against the Jane women were dropped.
Will those days return? In some ways, they already have as various anti-abortion politicians and activists push for even tougher laws and regulations, including efforts to seek and prosecute abortion providers as we might chase domestic terrorists.
Sanity must prevail if justice is to survive. We urgently want law enforcement to hunt down mass shooters, domestic terrorists and other heinous criminals. But we still need to protect everyone’s reasonable right to privacy, including, I hope, the right of women to have power over their own bodies.
========
(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)
©2022 Clarence Page. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
(c) 2022 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
