Review: The Janes

Image courtesy of HBO Max.

Much like Audrey Diwan's recent film "Happening," the documentary "The Janes" is a heartbreaking, powerful and eerily prescient film about the devastating effects of a woman not having the right to make decisions about her own body. While Diwan's film was a drama about a young woman going to great lengths to procure an abortion in early 1960s France, Tia Lessin and Emma Pildes' documentary follows a group of young women in Chicago during the late 1960s who helped desperate women get the procedure.

Although the film follows the tried-and-true talking head style of many documentaries of years past - while sprinkling in stock footage clips from the era in which it takes place - and doesn't break much ground in terms of presentation, the story itself is what keeps one riveted.

It's also disturbingly timely, considering that a radicalized Supreme Court is likely to reverse the 50-year-old Roe v. Wade decision that gave women the right to a legal abortion. The unsettling tales in "The Janes" of women facing grave health risks - and occasionally death - due to "back alley" abortions provide a frighteningly possible road map for the years to come in parts of the United States.

We meet the various women involved in "Jane," from a tenacious leader who founded the group and eventually checked herself into a psychiatric hospital due to stress to the seemingly ordinary women who felt they needed to do something to advance women's rights in the United States and joined the effort - often at their own legal peril - to help women get safe abortions. There's also the male abortionist who the women used - a large (and now obviously older) and surprisingly jolly man who was not an actual doctor, but apparently put the women's minds at ease while performing the procedure.

The film's title refers to the organization founded in Chicago known as "Jane." The group competed with the local mob, which women often had to pay to undergo somewhat dangerous procedures in hotel rooms, to provide the procedure to women looking to terminate their pregnancy. The way it worked was that a woman in need of the procedure would get ahold of a phone number, call and ask for "Jane" and then be delivered to a place - often through switcheroos involving several different vehicles - where they would be cared for.

We are told at the end of the film that the Janes helped to perform about 11,000 safe abortions during their years of operation. It's horrifying to think that such a group might one day have to exist again. "The Janes" is a powerful film that, although it's presented as your typical interview-style documentary, packs a lot of punch into its 100-minute running time. It's also a great testament to the courage of the women who risked a lot to help other women oppressed by a system in which they didn't have bodily autonomy.