In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (21 page)

“Mary Doe is present in court,” Margie Hames announced in triumph. In the gravid context, the anonymous plaintiff was Everywoman. The court moved rapidly to hand down a favorable opinion at the end of July, just weeks after the
Roe
decision. As in Texas, the state of Georgia appealed.

Abortion militance in Chicago took a different direction. Perhaps its unique path had to do with the women’s ties to the New Left, which remained stronger in Chicago than in most other places. Perhaps the political convulsions and warlike atmosphere in Mayor Daley’s city were sufficient to induce an extreme form of action. Chicago had witnessed
the crazily fractured 1968 Democratic Convention and the assault in Grant Park with clubs and tear gas (“The Whole World Is Watching”); Bobby Seale bound and gagged in Judge Hoffman’s courtroom during the Chicago Eight conspiracy trial; the fatal shooting of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in a Panther apartment; Weatherwomen in helmets rampaging through the streets.

Radical women in Chicago poured their energy into Jane, an abortion referral service initiated by Heather Booth, who had been a one-woman grapevine for her college classmates. In 1971, after’s Booth’s departure, some of the women took matters into their own hands and secretly began to perform the abortions themselves. Safe, compassionate terminations for a modest fee became their high calling—a model, as they saw it, for women’s empowerment after the revolution.

Leaflets appeared in the Hyde Park neighborhood of the University of Chicago bearing a simple message: “Pregnant? Don’t want to be? Call Jane at 643-3844.” The number rang at the home of one of the activists who volunteered to be “Jane.” As word spread and the volume of calls increased, the service acquired its own phone line and an answering machine, a cumbersome reel-to-reel device that was one of the first on the market. Volunteers, known inside the service as “call-back Janes,” visited the abortion seekers to elicit crucial medical details (most important was “lmp,” the number of weeks since the last menstrual period), then another level of volunteers scheduled an appointment with one of the abortionists on the group’s list.

At first the service relied on “Mike in Cicero,” who was fast, efficient, and willing to lower his price to five hundred dollars as the volume increased. Mike gradually let down his guard with Jody Parsons, his principal Jane contact, an artisan who sold her beaded jewelry and ceramics at street fairs and was a survivor of Hodgkin’s disease. The clandestine abortionist and the hippie artisan struck up a bond. When Mike confessed that he was not in fact a real doctor but merely a trained technician, she cajoled him into teaching her his skills. Jody’s rapid success in learning to maneuver the dilating clamps, curettes, and forceps demystified the forbidden procedures for another half
dozen women in Jane. “If he can do it, then we can do it” became their motto.

Madeline Schwenk, a banker’s daughter who had married at twenty, “six months pregnant with no clue whatsoever about how to get an abortion,” moved from counseling to vacuum aspiration after Harvey Karman, the controversial director of a California clinic, came to Chicago to demonstrate his technique. Madeline was one of the few women in Jane who was active in NOW, and who stayed affiliated with the Chicago chapter during the year she wielded her cannula and curette for the service. “I’d get up in the morning, make breakfast for my three kids, go off to do the abortions, then go home to make dinner,” she reminisces. “Pretty outrageous behavior when you think about it. But exciting.”

Jane’s abortion practitioners and their assistants were able to handle a total of thirty cases a day at affordable fees—under one hundred dollars. A doctor and a pharmacist among the women’s contacts kept them supplied with antibiotics.

Fear of police surveillance in radical circles had its match among clandestine abortionists who relied on a complicated rigmarole of blindfolds and middlemen. Jane straddled both worlds. Abortion seekers gathered every Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday at a “front” apartment, usually the home of a Jane member or a friend, and were escorted by Jane drivers to “the Place,” a rented apartment where the abortions were performed. The fronts and the Place changed on a regular basis. New volunteers, brought into the group as counselors and drivers, went through a probation period before they were told that women in Jane were doing the abortions. The news did not sit well with everyone. Turnover was high, from fear and from burnout, although the service usually maintained its regular complement of thirty members.

Jane lost most of its middle-class clientele after the New York law went into effect. Increasingly it began to service South Side women, poor and black, who did not have the money to travel out of state, and whose health problems, from high blood pressure to obesity, were daunting. Pressure on the providers intensified. Audaciously they added second-trimester abortions by induced miscarriage to their skills.

On May 3, 1972, near the conclusion of a busy work day in an eleventh-floor apartment on South Shore Drive overlooking Lake Michigan, Jane got busted. Seven women, including Madeline Schwenk, were arrested and bailed out the following day. The
Chicago Daily News
blared “Women Seized in Cut-Rate Clinic” in a front-page banner. The
Tribune
buried “Lib Groups Linked to Abortions” on an inside page. Six weeks later the service was back in business. Wisely, the women facing criminal charges selected a defense attorney who was clued in to and optimistic about the national picture. She advised them to hang tight—some interesting developments were taking place in Washington that could help their case. (After the January 1973
Roe
decision, all outstanding charges against the seven were dropped.)

The activists of Jane believe they performed more than ten thousand abortions. It’s a ballpark figure based on the number of procedures they remember doing in a given week. For security reasons they did not keep records.

In contrast to the clandestine Chicago women, the rebellious self-help movement that originated in
Los Angeles was flamboyant, messianic, and not without large doses of exhibitionism and high drama. In two words, it was “very California.” Carol Downer and Lorraine Rothman were to add yet another creative dimension to the abortion struggle.

Carol Downer had no prior political experience when she joined the Los Angeles chapter of NOW, but her reproductive history encompassed six children, two miscarriages, and one illegal abortion. The divorced and remarried thirty-eight-year-old housewife gravitated naturally to Lana Phelan’s abortion committee, where the older activist became her mentor. California’s liberalized law, which had seemed so promising, had produced a mass of red tape and few abortions. One afternoon Downer paid a visit to Harvey Karman’s underground clinic in Santa Monica to see how things worked. Karman showed her a speculum, a common tool in gynecological examinations for peering at the cervical opening to the uterus, and invited her to watch a vacuum aspiration, which Karman performed with a flexible, lightweight plastic
tube, called a cannula, attached to a hand-held syringe. The cervical view and the cannula abortion struck Downer with the force of a mystical revelation, or rather a demystified revelation.

“I was bowled over,” she recalls. “In shock. This wasn’t exactly open-heart surgery. I realized that if women just had some basic information about our bodies, we could take care of ourselves.”

Downer eventually became disaffected from Karman, but she took time to study his nontraumatic technique. Her first Self-Help Clinic was held at Everywoman Bookstore in Venice Beach in April 1971. About thirty women showed up. Climbing onto a desk, Downer nonchalantly pulled down her pants and inserted a speculum in her vagina, inviting the assembly to see what a cervix looked like. When the excitement died down, someone else showed the group Karman’s cannula and syringe.

This was the revelatory moment for Lorraine Rothman, a former public school teacher and a mother of four. “Why go through the humiliation and frustration of trying to persuade the powers that be to legalize abortion?” she remembers thinking. “Why not take back the technology, the tools and the skills?”

Rothman tinkered with the borrowed cannula and syringe at her husband’s science lab at Cal State. “Lorraine was very handy,” Downer recalls with a chuckle, “but it took her a while to get it right.” At the next Self-Help Clinic, Rothman appeared with an improved model. She had taken a mason jar and punched two holes in the rubber stopper. Fitted with two lengths of aquarium tubing and a bypass valve, the jar was tranformed into a miniature aspirator. An operator could pump the syringe with one hand while her other hand guided the cannula in its sweep of the uterine wall. Slower but less invasive than the pump-and-withdraw technique used in Karman’s clinic, Rothman’s contraption, when it was refined a bit further, emptied the unwanted contents of a uterus into the jar in thirty minutes. With sufficient training, a group of self-helpers could rid a woman of her monthly period in a single half hour. By the same means, they could do safe early abortions for each other, if they wished. Rothman took out a patent on her inventive device, naming it the Del-Em, a private acronym for “dirty little machine.” She and Downer named their suction process “menstrual extraction.”
A trip up the coast to observe the brisk procedures of Seattle’s famed abortionist, Dr. Frans Koome, who used metal curettes without anesthetic, convinced the two women that gentle suction performed in a sisterly circle with hand-holding and empathy was equally good or better.

Menstrual extraction and speculum exams became the unofficial highlight of NOW’s 1971 national convention that September. Denied exhibit space among the regular vendors hawking books, T-shirts, and greeting cards, the usual fare at a NOW convention, Downer and Rothman held marathon demonstrations for interested delegates in their hotel room. That fall they took temporary leave of their husbands and children and went on the road with Colleen Wilson, another self-helper, calling themselves the West Coast Sisters. Traveling by Greyhound bus with a huge box of plastic speculums marked “Toys,” the trio met with Women’s Liberation groups in twenty-three cities during a hectic six-week tour.
In Stamford, Connecticut, Lolly Hirsch and her daughter Jeanne became major converts. The Hirsches started a newsletter,
The Monthly Extract: An Irregular Periodical
, and went on the college lecture circuit. Mother Lolly did most of the talking on the lecture dates; daughter Jeanne did the cervical demonstrations.

While the show-and-tell meetings run by the Hirsches and the Los Angeles women usually generated near-mystical excitement, a brisk sale of plastic speculums, and much talk of empowerment, the self-helpers’ promotion of menstrual extraction was controversial even inside the movement. A
mini-summit between the West Coast Sisters and the Jane collective in Chicago turned into a frosty competition as each side turned up its nose at the other’s techniques. The Janes dismissed the Del-Em as too amateurish and slow for their volume service; the West Coast Sisters retorted that Jane with its blindfolds and metal curettes had “bought in to the male model.”

Downer’s self-help clinic in Los Angeles held court every Wednesday evening at the Women’s Center, a one-story building on Crenshaw Boulevard that offered space to various and assorted manifestations of Women’s Liberation: a library and bookstore, weekly consciousness-raising groups, a car repair clinic, and women’s dances. WONAAC
came to the Center to organize a national abortion rights demo in Washington. “We had beanbag pillows and they had straight chairs,” Downer remembers. “That says a lot, doesn’t it? We all felt that change was imminent, but our group didn’t feel it was going to take place through large numbers of women in the streets. We believed that cannulas were better than leaflets for threatening male power.”

Carol Downer and Colleen Wilson were arrested at their clinic on September 20, 1972, and charged, among other counts, with practicing medicine without a license. Wilson pled guilty to one count (fitting a diaphragm) and received a suspended sentence. Downer stood trial and won an acquittal. The announcement of the
Roe
decision was four months away.