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Post-Roe help

I attended a zoom (recorded link here) over a Post-Roe future and they had a bunch of resources.


"Abortion had been illegal in Illinois since the early 19th century, and few doctors were willing to defy the law. Some women tried to self-induce abortions using objects or chemicals, which often led to infection and sometimes death. Others turned to Chicago’s organized crime syndicate, but its services were expensive and often unsafe.


Beginning in the late 1960s, signs hung up around the city and advertisements in underground newspapers offered a vague alternative: “Pregnant? Don’t want to be? Call Jane.”


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"In 1963, 280 deaths were recorded in the U.S. from induced abortions, and in 1965, they dropped to 235, according to Pew Research, which indicated that the numbers fell to single digits or zero every year after Roe v. Wade was decided.


No women whom Jane served are known to have died from their abortions.


The film points out that Black women and Latinas suffered the most from the criminalization of abortion in Chicago and nationally because they often could not afford to travel abroad or to other states that legalized abortions beginning in 1970. Jane filled the vacuum. While most of the “Janes” were white, middle-class women, most of those they served were low-income Latinas and Black women."


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"Lessin said the group treated women with care and concern leading up to and during their appointments and stayed in contact with them after their procedures, in contrast to many back-alley male doctors, the worst of whom performed abortions while drunk and sometimes sexually assaulted their patients.


Members “were able to set up a much more compassionate setting that was respectful to women,” she said. “They felt compelled to do this even as they understood their own limitations.”


The limitations included performing abortions with no formal medical training. But doing so “gave them a real understanding of what they were capable of at a time when a lot of women were told they weren’t capable of much,” Pildes said.


As the day nears that the Supreme Court might overturn Roe v. Wade, the directors said they hoped viewers would draw inspiration from the former “Janes.”


“You can always mobilize to help one another, you can organize, and ultimately that’s what matters most,” Pildes said."

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