“The Janes”, a documentary that premiered at the Sundance festival last February and recently arrived on HBO Max, is a party gone wrong. The film was intended to be a celebration of 50 years of the constitutionality of abortion in the United States, a kind of inspirational narrative, with hints of a police case and a horror movie, but that ended forever when Roy v. Wade changed the rules in January 1973. But the “forever” after all was just under five decades, in a kind of “Back to the Future 2”, in that part where the future is not as bright as expected.
The Janes who give their name to the feature film signed by Tia Lessin (“Trouble Water”, winner at Sundance and nominated for an Oscar for Best Documentary) and Emma Pildes (producer of documentaries about Jane Fonda or Steven Spielberg) have become famous in Chicago, from the 1960s, mounted on an ad in underground newspapers that simply suggested: “Pregnant? Call Jane. But Jane was not a specific woman, but a group of women (with the help of some men, such as the one who introduces himself only as “Mike”) who helped desperate women to plan and complete the termination of their pregnancies. On the other end of the line was a call recorder where thousands of women explained their situation and asked for help. Forced into hiding, the Janes were at odds with angels and the devil: on the one hand, they were wanted by the police for their criminal activity; on the other hand, they competed with the mafia, until then the last resort for women who wanted to abort, even if the conditions were bad and undignified.
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Source: Observadora
