‘Call Jane’: A timely tribute to the sisterhood surrounding clandestine abortion in the US

The film Call Jane was released a year after the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority overturned Roe v. Wade in a decision that set millions of women’s reproductive rights back by half a century. The movie tells the story of the Chicago women’s collective that created a clandestine abortion network to help each other in the 1960s. They went by the name of the Janes.

On the heels of the acclaimed HBO documentary The Janes, this movie by Carol screenwriter Phillis Nagy marks her feature-film debut after a long career in the theater and previous experience as the director of the 2005 made-for-TV movie Mrs. Harris, a thriller about the murder of a well-known doctor starring Annette Bening and Ben Kingsley. Call Jane was praised at the Sundance festival, thanks to the film’s backdrop of 1960s suburban life and the work of its cast, led by actress Elizabeth Banks and, especially, a splendid performance by Sigourney Weaver. Weaver plays the group’s activist leader, a character who was inspired by a real person, Heather Booth, the founder of the Janes.

The film is set in 1968 Chicago, amid the convulsive protests of the Yippies during the Democratic convention, which led to the Trial of the Chicago Seven. In this context, highlighted in the first sequence of the film, a housewife (played by Banks) who is married to a criminal lawyer and is the mother of a teenage daughter experiences a life-threatening pregnancy. Call Jane follows her political awakening in a life-or-death situation.

Call Jane is well done without hiding its current relevance in the context of a historic setback for American women. While the movie recreates a very complex and terrible episode in a somewhat idealized and simplistic way, it also conveys an exciting sisterhood in which women from all walks of life, including a nun, risked their lives to help others. The story provides a concrete and real example of how this abortion network worked before the Supreme Court legalized the right to terminate a pregnancy in 1973 with the Roe v. Wade decision, a conquest won half a century ago and lost in an unimaginable way not long ago.

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