--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This summer, when we all got the news that Roe v. Wade had just been overturned by the Supreme Court, my first thought was to call a Jane. Hello? I asked her if she had heard the news.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: What news?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The news that Roe v. Wade had been overturned.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: This Jane had fought for women's rights in the 1960s. Equal pay, child care, and the right to choose. The right to have an abortion.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The right to have an abortion. She helped women get illegal abortions in Chicago in the late 1960s, early 70s, before Roe v. Wade.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: But on that fateful Friday this summer, I was the one who told her Roe v. Wade had been overturned.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Women are still going to have abortions. That's not going to change anything. That's not going to change a damn thing.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: I'm Sean Ramos for my conversation with the Jane is coming up on Today Explained.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for Today Explained comes from the FIFA World Cup, of all things. The FIFA World Cup 26 is coming to North America next summer. It is the ultimate celebration of sports and culture.
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--:-- Eleanor Oliver: The first thing you need to know about this Jane is that her name isn't actually Jane. It's Eleanor. I'm Eleanor Oliver. I live in northwest Washington.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And what more do you want to know about me?
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: But Eleanor is one of the Janes. This group of women that helped other women get safe, illegal abortions in Chicago in the late 1960s and early 70s before Roe v. Wade.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the Friday this summer, the Supreme Court overturned Roe. Almost 50 years later, I showed up at her apartment to talk.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: We thought we'd bring you that conversation again today as it really helped us wrap our heads around one of the biggest developments of the year.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What did you make of it when you heard it?
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: I'm still stewing over it. But, you know, women are still going to have abortions. That's not going to change anything. That's not going to change a damn thing.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: Women are still going to have abortions, except they won't have the security of knowing that it will be safe, that it'll be medically safe, socially safe, you know, that the person providing the abortion won't take advantage of them in other ways, which was one of the major things years ago.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I asked Eleanor to tell me about years ago.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: Well, my husband was doing graduate work at the University of Chicago, and I was looking for something to do. It was 1968, and a lot of stuff was going on.
--:-- [Audio clip of news report from 1968]
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: NBC News has learned the National Space Agency has decided the next Apollo flight will go to the moon. It'll not land, but a crew of three men inside their spacecraft will circle the moon about 60 miles from it and then return to the Earth.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: Black power means dignity. Means we're going to walk side by side with you or through you. We're going to be with dignity and integrity. We don't want any more than you have, and we're not going to accept any less than you have. That's black power.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: I have some very sad news for all of you, and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice between fellow human beings. He died in the cause of that effort.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: Ladies and gentlemen, we've kept the air on because we've heard an alarming report that Robert Kennedy was shot in that ballroom at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: We had a consciousness-raising group, a group of women, and one of the things we got really hung up on was abortion. And we went from consciousness-raising to helping other women find safe, legal, illegal, actually, affordable abortions. safe and affordable in contrast to the status quo.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I asked Eleanor how these women got abortions back in the day, before Roe v. Wade.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: Well, you pick out the people you know that you think might have connections that are kind of a little bit savvy, that know people that maybe you wouldn't possibly know because you were just a college kid. And you just ask.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: You say, do you know any place where I can have an abortion, where I can get an abortion? I need an abortion.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: You would probably go to somebody's apartment or a motel, and it certainly wouldn't be in the chicest part of town. Unless you were paying for the chicest part of town, then you would go to a nice doctor office
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: And even then I mean he might have a white coat on and he might have an MD shield on his door He might have the wall hung with degrees from medical schools, but you weren't going to check out to see whether he really was an MD or not.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: You wanted that abortion, and he would give it to you right there in the office.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: As Eleanor tells it, this was kind of the best-case scenario.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: You could go to the mob and try and get an abortion. They might put you in touch with a shady doctor. They might put you in touch with a good doctor.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: The experience would vary greatly based on how much money you had in your pocket. And if you wanted the Cadillac abortion, the price was steep. Anywhere between $500 and $1,000 in 1968.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Some of them were being sold a bill of goods. Many of them spent a lot of money on pills that were supposed to cause a spontaneous abortion, but probably didn't.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: And some of them were being left to bleed to death.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And this is where she and her friends thought they could make a difference.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: We were basically white, middle-class, college-educated women. And we were objecting to the Vietnam War, and we were going on marches in one thing and another. and then we sort of got together on women's issues.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And there were a lot of women's issues. Equal pay for equal work, child care. And you know there's still the same issues.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: They wanted to up their involvement. Instead of just talking and protesting, let's do something, let's start providing women with illegal abortions?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This was Chicago. You could do anything in Chicago as long as you weren't making outrageous amounts of money and you weren't hurting anybody.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: And the police left you alone because they had girlfriends that got pregnant. They had wives who already had three children and didn't want any more. They had mouths to feed.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Do you start advertising it? How do you do that?
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: We actually have a brochure and I have a copy of the brochure. Do you have it?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, you want to see it? Can I see it?
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: Yeah. Let's see it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, the... Two pieces of... Oh, there it is.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: All right. This is the brochure. This is how dumb we are. We would run these off. This was run off on a resistance press.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: A guy had a printing press set up in the basement of an old house on the campus of the University of Chicago. And he was down there all day long running stuff.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: We must have printed millions of these things.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Okay, let's see. What's the title there?
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: Abortion, a woman's decision, a woman's right.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And there's the whole philosophy. A lot of prose.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: Yeah. And here... Not a lot of graphics, just the text. It's just an 8 1⁄2 by 11 inch piece of paper folded into four sides.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And here it is, Chicago Women's Liberation Union. And there's their address, the Abortion Counseling Service.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: That was the official name, Abortion Counseling Service. but everyone came to know them by another.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There were no cell phones in those days. There were just landlines.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: So we were meeting in my house, and I said, well, you can use our phone, but, you know, I don't want to have our personal calls get mixed up with the service calls.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So why don't we say, call this number and ask for Jane?
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: And I didn't know anybody named Jane. and I thought nobody was named Jane anymore.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 643-3844.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: Who picked up the phone? Usually I did.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, if my husband was home alone, he would pick it up because he was home all day working on his dissertation.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: You're saying that was your phone number?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That was our phone number, yeah. That was in our apartment.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: for all you folks in Chicago, 5700 block of Kimbark Street.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: So you handed out, it sounds like, tons of these things in Chicago.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Whenever we had a speak out on a woman's issue, we brought along a whole stack of them.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: We had stacks of these in the dormitories.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There were several rather liberal churches, so we had a little stack of them in the narthex of the church.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: And so was your phone ringing all day, or how often did you get calls?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And we got a lot of calls. Not at first.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: It took a while for things to get picked up.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And if you pick it up and they ask for Len or Eleanor, well, we knew it was a personal call.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: Or if they said, I'd like to speak with Jane, please, I'll take your name and number and I'll have her call you or I'll have one of her contacts call you.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then we would write those down on 3x5 cards.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: We would have a meeting. We would pass out these three-by-five cards, and I would take people that I thought I could counsel or people that were nearby or people that I could meet with or could relate to.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: One of them was a policewoman from Chicago.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: I took a lot of the middle-aged women because I was one of the older counselors, and I was married and a lot of the counselors were graduate students and undergraduate students.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Everybody took people that they thought they could talk.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: Although this person lives in my dorm or I don't want to do this person because I know her and I don't think she wants me to know that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That kind of thing.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: And they had to trust us.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We had an abortionist. We knew he was not a real doctor. He was just a nice guy.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: And he Mike Mike was his name I think he probably learned how to perform abortions either as a medic in the military
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There were a lot of people I guess that needed abortions or who had girlfriends who needed abortions when they were in the military
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: I don't know. I've never been in the military.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How many years does this go on for?
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: We left Chicago in 1972 early 1972 and the day we drove out of Chicago was a Saturday I believe seems to me it was a Saturday maybe it wasn't
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They were they were raided and busted so by whom this by the police sorry you mean the police because the abortion counseling service the Janes were raided and busted.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: Because somebody complained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the police, they didn't bother them because we weren't hurting anybody.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: Uh-huh. We weren't hurting anybody. We weren't making loads of money off of people.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And they wanted us around because they probably might have needed us too.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: You never know.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But somebody's sister-in-law was getting an abortion, and they found that immoral or whatever.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: They took it upon themselves. to complain to the police, and with a complaint, the police had to act.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So the police raided the place that all this was happening, and my husband and I were driving out Stony Island Avenue to the interstate to come to Washington.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: And for the longest time, I had the biggest guilt complex about that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Because your friends got arrested.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: Did they get sent to jail, prison?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: No, because what happened was they got themselves a very bright, intelligent lawyer who kept delaying and delaying and delaying until finally Roe v. Wade was passed.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: And then the judge threw the case out.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How many abortions do you think you helped women get in the time you guys were active?
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: Well, they have a record of 11,000 abortions.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 11,000? 1-1,000.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: Was there any organization at the time that helped as many women as you did?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We don't know. Because it was illegal.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: My conversation with Eleanor Oliver, also known as a Jane, continues in a minute on Today Explained.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for today's show comes from Adio.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: Adio Adio is an AI-native customer relationship management system built specifically for the next era of companies.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They say it's extremely powerful, adapts to your unique data structures and scales with any business model.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: According to Adio, Adio takes less than a minute to set up, and within seconds you will have your email and calendars synced.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You'll see all your relationships in a fully-fledged platform, they say, all enriched with that actionable data.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: And they say you can build AI-powered automations and use its research agent to tackle some of your most complex processes to seize so that you can focus on what matters, building your company.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can join industry leaders such as Flatfile, Replicate, Modal, and so much more.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: You can go to attio.com slash todayexplained to get 15% off your first year.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's attio.com slash todayexplained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Stay explained.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The climate, and more. Read, watch, and listen to The Guardian for free at theguardian.com.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah. So Eleanor, you leave Chicago, you come to D.C., and it sounds like within a year, if not less, the Supreme Court decides Roe v. Wade.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: Tell me where you were that day.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What went through your mind?
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: Relief.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I thought, great, everybody can go back to life as it was before all this started.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: And, of course, that didn't last very long.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The people here who call themselves pro-choice, their definition of pro-choice is abortion at any time for any reason.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: By a vote of 7 to 2, the court agreed to uphold three of four restrictions on abortions in Pennsylvania.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We must not rest, and I pledge to you that I will not rest, until a human life amendment becomes a part of our Constitution.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The law known as Senate Bill 8 prohibits abortions after six weeks.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It also allows people to sue abortion providers and people who help others get them.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: These lawsuits could win plaintiffs up to $10,000.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The impact of today's ruling will be immediate.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Thirteen states have trigger laws that automatically end access to abortion now that Roe is overturned.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I called you this morning and I woke you up, unfortunately.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I apologize for that.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: Well, that's because I didn't go to bed until six o'clock.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Right.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I gave you the news that the Supreme Court had overturned Roe v. Wade.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: What went through your head?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think it probably says something like, oh, shoot.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: Yeah. Well, we'll just reorganize, you know.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: At 84, I think I've done my share on this.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think it's my daughters and my granddaughters who have to fight this.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: And I hope that I have inspired those two succeeding generations that they will go out and do that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: After I got off the phone with you this morning I went down to the Supreme Court and I was taking it all in
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There were people out there who were celebrating and there were far more people out there protesting
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: And the sign that struck a chord that I really kind of focused on, when I saw it over and over and over again, it was young women holding up a sign that said, I will aid and abet abortions.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: See what i see what i mean they're out there it's gonna happen they're already probably looking for their contacts they're already setting it up i don't know how i can help but i would like to talk to those young women if nothing else to let them know it can be done
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: what would you tell them
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: i would say first of all don't give up because we're out there
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: There are a lot of people who think like you. You are not alone.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Find like-minded women. Get together. Talk about the issues.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: Eventually groups will form. We'll get right back to 1968. We'll get back to our consciousness-raising groups.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We'll get back to all the issues that women are still fighting equal pay for equal work.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: And that was an issue back in 1968. They're still fighting child care in the workplace.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There were a lot of people out there, certainly not the majority, but there were people out there celebrating, blowing bubbles, jumping up and down for joy.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: Until they get pregnant. Until they get unintentionally pregnant.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I had people sitting in my living room saying, you know, nice Roman Catholic young women saying, I never thought I would be doing this, but I can't have this. I can't have this child.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: What do you think all those people out there celebrating today don't understand about this now bygone constitutional right to have an abortion?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, they probably, either they never will, they'll always think it's a sin.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: Now, I shouldn't say it's a sin. I mean, I don't think an abortion is a nice idea.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it would be nice if you didn't have to terminate an unwanted pregnancy.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: But it happens.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Women only hold up half the sky, let's be honest here, because they don't get pregnant by themselves.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: So men should be a little more aware of what they're asking women to do When they ask for favors, when they ask for a brief moment of comfort, this becomes a lifelong experience for the woman that gets left behind.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I don't think people think about that until they're a woman and they get left behind.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: There are people out there who are getting very emotional in this moment, who are scared.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And you don't actually seem scared. You seem rather confident to me.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: Well, I know how things unfolded 50 years ago and I'm hoping because of the contacts and the means of communication that we now all have that things won't take 50 years to get established.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm hoping that the communications network will spring up a lot sooner than it did then because all we had was a landline.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: A landline. And you picked up the receiver and you put your finger in the little hole and you dialed a little number.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Everybody has a need. An abortion is a need.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: It's just a medical procedure. Termination of an unplanned pregnancy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Call it an abortion and if you write it with a capital A, it becomes like a scarlet letter or something.
--:-- Eleanor Oliver: And it certainly shouldn't be.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's much safer than a tonsillectomy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Eleanor Oliver, Washington, D.C. She was once a Jane.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's a documentary about that group on HBO right now.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's called The Janes.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And since we originally ran this episode back in July of this year, a whole other movie has come out about the Janes.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That one's called Call Jane.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I don't think you can find it wherever you can find your movies, but you can probably find it somewhere.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: All those big streamers have it, I think.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm Sean Ramosver.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I made today's show with lots of help from Victoria Chamberlain and a little help from Halima Shah.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We were edited by Matthew Collette and engineered by Afim Shapiro.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Thanks to Janice Gibson for putting me in touch with Eleanor.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The rest of the team here at Today Explained includes Avishai Artsy, Hadi Mawagdi, Miles Bryan, Amanda Llewellyn, Laura Bullard, Siona Petros, Paul Robert Mounsey, and my co-host Noelle King.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We use music by Breakmaster Cylinder and Noam Hassenfeld, and today, the Penguin Cafe Orchestra.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today Explained is on the radio in partnership with WNYC, and we are part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, wishing all of you a happy and healthy transition into 2023.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Thank you.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Collaborate and create amazing presentations, videos, social posts, flyers, and more.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Meet Adobe Express, the quick and easy app to create on-brand content.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Learn more at adobe.com slash express slash business.
