In 1971, Winnette Willis was a 23-year-old single mom in Chicago when she became pregnant again. "I was terrified of having another child."
Before the Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade 45 years ago, abortion was illegal in most of the United States, including in Illinois.
Women like Willis who wanted to terminate their pregnancies had limited and often frightening options. She wasn't sure what to do. And then one day, while she was waiting on an L train platform, she saw a sign.
"The sign said, 'Pregnant? Don't Want to Be? Call Jane.' And a phone number," Willis remembers. "So, I called."
"If you really care about something, you have to act on it"
"Jane" was an underground network in Chicago that counseled and helped women who wanted to have abortions. The service was launched in 1965 by Heather Booth, then a 19-year-old student at the University of Chicago. Her friend's sister was pregnant and desperately wanted an abortion. Booth found a doctor who was willing to perform the procedure secretly.
More calls started coming in.
"By the third call, I realized I couldn't manage it on my own," Booth says. "So I set up a system. We called it 'Jane.' "
At first, Jane connected women with doctors. But eventually, the group's members started performing abortions themselves. With time, Jane grew into an all-women network with dozens of members, ranging from students to housewives.
Martha Scott was 28 at the time and a stay-at-home mom with four children under the age of 5. She was motivated to join Jane because she felt women who wanted an abortion deserved to have a safe and inexpensive option. The fact that it was illegal did not deter her.
"I just thought, if you really care about something, you have to act on it," Scott says.
The dangers faced by women seeking abortions in the pre-Roe v. Wade era are well-documented. In 1930, abortion was listed as the official cause of death for almost 2,700 women in the United States, though there were likely many more unrecorded mortalities. After antibiotics were introduced in the 1940s, the number of women dying from illegal abortions dropped dramatically. However, every year, thousands of women continued to be admitted to hospitals nationwide for complications of illegal abortions.