Ask for Jane (Web Exclusive)
Reviewed by Angela Bonavoglia

Produced by Cait Cortelyou, Josh Folan, Caroline Hirsch; written and directed by Rachel Carey; production design by Maryam Khosravi; cinematography by Caitlin Machak; original music by Two Twenty Two (Tom Nettleship & Daisy Coole); starring Megan Channell, Cait Cortelyou, Lilly Englert, Cody Horn, Chloe Levine, Michael Rabe, Sarah Ramos, Ben Rappaport, Saycon Sengbloh, Sarah Steele, Sophie Von Haselberg, Alison Wright. Color, 108 min., a levelFILM release. Available for rental and purchase on Apple TV, Amazon Prime, Dish/Dish Digital, DirecTV, Google Play/YouTube Movies, Vudu, and InDEMAND (aggregator)—Cox, Optimum, RCN, Spectrum, Xfinity.

While images of women as victims of illegal abortion in the United States have been burned into our collective consciousness (the coat hangers, drugs, poisons, crumbled bloody bodies on the floor), we have no images, no real-life stories, of the women who defied the law—courageously, creatively, systematically, some might say outrageously, even recklessly.  So when actress Cait Cortelyou was shocked to learn about the Jane Collective, she was determined to find someone to turn their story into a film. She joined forces with award-winning writer/director Rachel Carey and the result is Ask for Jane.

Carey’s first feature film as writer and director, Ask for Jane, is an eye-opening, compelling, and prescient narrative indie film that brings us face to face with realities of life for women when ending a pregnancy was criminalized. The film spotlights a renegade group of young women who began their undercover activities as undergraduate students at the University of Chicago in 1969.  Together they launched the Jane Collective.

Women who needed help called a designated phone number that rang in an apartment that served as a “front” and asked for “Jane.”  The Janes, as they were known, counseled women desperate to end unwanted pregnancies, meeting with them and arranging for them to have the procedure.  Not only did the Janes develop a network of abortion providers; in time, these nonmedical young women took the far more radical step of learning to perform the procedure themselves.  The Janes helped upwards of eleven thousand women access abortions in Illinois at a time when, as we are reminded, more than three people in a room discussing abortion constituted conspiracy to commit murder.  

Based on real events drawn from primary sources and the recollections of an original “Jane,” consulting producer Judith Arcana, Ask for Jane opens in a jail cell, then tracks back to how the handful of young white women in that cell landed in that predicament. Driving home the most dire consequences of making abortion illegal, we soon witness a frantic pregnant college girl as she leaves her dorm room, heads for the roof, and jumps to her death.  A bit later, we are in the bedroom of a young pregnant high school girl.  She holds a quarter cup of rat poison that she’s heard will end her pregnancy.  It doesn’t; it ends her life.

In the film, the Collective is the brainchild of an unlikely upstart named Rose, played with earnestness and verve by Cortelyou. This seemingly conservative Midwestern young woman establishes what would officially become the Abortion Counseling Service of Women’s Liberation from her dorm room, early on cutting a woman caller short because, Rose says, “I have to go and graduate.” 

Rose’s partner in crime is Janice, played by Cody Horn, who vividly embodies the cranky impatience for change characteristic of the era’s newly woke feminists.  Fueled by their commitment to saving women from being maimed or dying from illegal abortions or simply from forced childbearing, the two grow the Collective, increasing its reach as well as the risks to their freedom and their lives.  

Amidst the sterling cast of supporting characters are Ada (Alison Wright, The Americans) as Rose’s mom.  Having struggled to raise Rose after her husband died, she wants nothing more than for her daughter to graduate, have a career, and be able to support herself; she is steely in her devastation when Rose announces she’s engaged to be married. 

Sarah Steele (The Good Fight, The Good Wife) plays Donna, a spunky, ornery lesbian “Jane” who, pretty naively, wants to update the sex education program at Lake Forest Catholic High School where she works (the school attended by the girl who died from the rat poison).  Michael Rabe plays Dr. Charlie, a mop-haired, mob-connected, hippie abortionist who is modeled after a real-life guy who was a main player in the Jane Collective (unlike the other more composite or fictional characters).

The film’s 1969 Chicago is a world of beehives and bubble flips, suede vests, earth shoes, cowboy boots, bellbottoms, granny dresses, love beads, and the occasional headband.  Walls are covered with psychedelic art, antiwar posters, and India blankets.  Beads hang down between rooms instead of doors. When Janice installs an answering machine in her apartment (the front for the service)—a clunky green metal box the size of a carry-on suitcase—the women, and we, look on in wonder.

Rose and Janice are shown at a social action meeting focused on issues like ending the Vietnam War and the police state. Those scenes illustrate the second-class status of women even in those groups.  Rose isn’t asked for input but rather to go get coffee.  The self-important male leader—oblivious to the realities the Janes are confronting—declares that the group’s focus must remain on issues that result in “people dying.”

There are passing references to other seminal events of the time, like the riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.  But this film’s subject is private and interior. We see the women in modest living rooms for meetings and counseling, a galley kitchen returning phone calls to women who need abortions, hotel rooms where the abortions take place. These are small rooms holding big secrets. The visuals echo the darkness, the need to contain. In time, word gets around, the scenes get brighter, the rooms get more crowded, cops show up at the door.  The secrets are slipping out, exponentially increasing the legal jeopardy the women are in and the tension in the film.

Ask for Jane depicts related realities of women’s lives back then. When Rose visits a kindly old doctor to get the birth control pill, he refuses to give it to her because she’s not married.  When she asks if he’d give it to her if she were married, he says, “Yes…if you had your husband’s permission.” In fact, it would not be until 1972 that the U.S. Supreme Court would legalize birth control for unmarried people. 

There is a powerful scene in a Catholic hospital room where a very pregnant Joyce (Sophie Von Haselberg) lies in bed, having just been diagnosed with a tumor that two young male doctors refuse to remove because it might jeopardize the pregnancy. Joyce is a nurse and furious; she knows if the tumor is not removed she could die, leaving her existing children motherless.  She speaks, but the doctors refuse to talk to her; they take her husband out into the hall to determine her fate. It’s an exasperating scene, made all the more so if you recognize that even today, in Catholic-owned and -affiliated acute care hospitals (accounting for four of the top ten largest health systems), abortion is never permitted.

As for the Jane Collective itself, crucial internal issues bubble up, like racial politics.  It’s an hour into this film before the first black character appears, a young pregnant woman who needs an abortion, whose father “punched me in the face when he found out.”  Given the scarcity of women of color in this film, it’s unfortunate that this scenario features a violent black man. In fact, violence against young unmarried African-American women with unwanted pregnancies back then often came from the medical establishment, where forced sterilization was the price for emergency care following a botched abortion.

Not until nearly the end of the film does another African-American woman (Saycon Sengbloh) with even a bit of a larger role appear.  As abortion became legal in NY in 1971, close enough for Chicago women of means to travel there, the Collective began to serve more and more low-income women of color. This woman (she’s not given a name) accompanies her friend for an abortion and addresses the elephant in the room: “I don’t mean to be rude,” she says, “but maybe you guys should think about hiring more black women.”  In reality, none are in sight. “We thought about it,” says a sheepish Rose.  “You thought about it?” replies the skeptical woman.

Rose and another Jane explain that they recruit from the women who come to them, and they were reluctant to recruit the women of color who came because they are “really broke,” thereby deciding for those women whether they would want to be involved with the Collective. Rose adds that they also feared that if the black women got arrested, the police would be harder on them, which sounded a bit like a 2019 sensibility tacked onto a 1969 white feminist mindset.  To its credit, however, the film shows the black women patients, when they are arrested along with the Janes, being treated more harshly.  It also presents them as the heroes they were, facing legal jeopardy by refusing to name the women who performed their abortions.

In fact, white women did dominate the Jane Collective, and racial politics around abortion have a long and complex history, with low-income women of color still having the least access.  And it would be another twenty-five years before women of color would be heard as they brilliantly expanded the notion and relevance of “choice” to the lives of low-income women of color with the crucial concept of reproductive justice. Defined by its originator, SisterSong, reproductive justice refers to “the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.”

Another vexing issue emerged on the heels of the film’s biggest shocker:  that Dr. Charlie, the caring, careful, effective if eccentric abortion provider who worked closely with the Jane Collective wasn’t a doctor at all. Janice is at first enraged, but when Charlie apologizes, Rose takes a beat: if he could perform all of these abortions, she thought, why couldn’t they?  She recalls that midwives used to do it. Indeed, they did; that practice ended in the U.S. when the medical profession took over the procedure and turned those midwives into outlaws.

Watching Janice and Rose as newly minted abortionists is unsettling. The film tries to make the procedure accessible, sharing details, providing reassurances from Charlie, who tells the women “It’s not hard if you know what you’re doing.” But those reassurances don’t seem like enough. Was it dangerous for the women who came to the Collective? Indications are that the procedures were sensitively and safely provided, but out of concern for the women’s identities, no records were kept, and no hard facts are forthcoming.

At the same time, it’s important to recognize that in learning the procedure, these newly radicalized young women saw ending their dependence on arrogant and judgmental doctors and pseudo-doctors as an essential element of women’s empowerment.  “Our bodies have always been in men’s hands,” says Janice, returned from performing her first abortion. “This is us doing it for us.” 

While Ask for Jane looks at the distant past when abortion was illegal, we are right now watching state after state trying to ban abortion at twenty weeks, ten weeks, six weeks, altogether.  This year, the U.S. Supreme Court will decide a case that concerns the same restriction an earlier Supreme Court decision found to be unconstitutional. We will see how willing the Court is to reverse precedent and bring us that much closer to outlawing abortion once again.

In response, people around the country are joining forces to provide women who need abortions but have no local provider with room, board, child care, and funds for travel. A few states have passed laws allowing nurse practitioners, physician assistants, and other allied professionals to perform abortions, thereby expanding access.  And today we have something we did not have in the time of the Jane Collective: medication abortion. It has been determined to be safe for early abortions, more than ninety-five percent effective, and able to be prescribed remotely, by nonphysicians, via telemedicine. Yet, legislators are passing laws to impede access, criminalizing the actions of desperate women, many in remote locations, who order the medication themselves online and those who help them.

As we witness the tsunami of efforts to end access to legal abortion, Ask for Jane may tell us as much about the past as it does about what may expected of those of us who believe in a woman’s right to choose in the future. Traveling the road ahead could well require the same kind of grit, risk and collaboration that Rose, Janice and all the members of the Jane Collective showed us. In that way, this film is as prescient as it is historical, an unfortunate but timely inspiration.

Angela Bonavoglia covers women’s issues, especially the intersection of health, politics, and the arts. She is author of Good Catholic Girls: How Women Are Leading the Fight to Change the Church and the classic oral history The Choices We Made: 25 Women and Men Speak Out About Abortion, with a foreword by Gloria Steinem. Visit her here.

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Cineaste, Vol. XLV, No. 2