50 years after Jane's feminist abortion service in Chicago

Abstract

This paper aims to retrieve, gather, and analyze documents about the Chicago women's organization, known as "Jane", Who carried out a clandestine abortion service between 1969 and 1973.

We elaborate on the historical reconstruction of the central aspects of the experience to show the strategies that They developed to implement the service, even without having formal instruction in medicine.

We consulted archives with materials produced by the organization and interviews with ex-members of the group, which are available in the Chicago Women's Liberation Union's HerStory documentary archive project. We complement this working procedure with sources with secondary data obtained in popular articles, newspapers, and films, and scientific research produced in the last four decades.

Among the principal conclusions, we highlight the centrality that the fight for free abortion occupied for the Jane organization, and the importance that they gave to the model of care for women based on a feminist praxis. We emphasize that these are demands with notable validity in the current Latin American context.