The Story of Jane by Laura Kaplan

Author:Laura Kaplan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2016-12-20T16:00:00+00:00

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* Since 1973 Our Bodies, Ourselves has been published by Simon & Schuster and is available in bookstores.

Chapter 14

For most women, finding a competent abortionist was a matter of luck, money and knowing the right people. It could take weeks or even months of surreptitious asking around. Sometimes, by the time a woman found one she thought wasn’t going to kill her, her pregnancy had advanced past the point where a D & C could be performed. Nan, one of Jane’s members, a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Chicago, had been in exactly that position. Even though her boyfriend was a medical student and asked every doctor he knew, it took so long to find someone competent that Nan had to be induced to miscarry. As soon as Jane began, the service had been contacted by women in that same situation. At first, the only options available to the group required travel out of the country or cost $1,000. Most of the women who called them needing that type of abortion did not have the money to do either. Group members who took those calls listened to the desperation in women’s voices and felt helpless. They knew that women that desperate and frantic would try anything, no matter how dangerous, to do what they felt they had to do.

When “Nathan Detroit” had called Jane late in 1969 and spoken to Lorraine, he’d offered them something other than the D & C procedure he arranged in Detroit. He had access to a compound called Leunbach paste which, when inserted into the uterus of a pregnant woman, induced labor within forty-eight hours. He rattled off a list of the ingredients and explained that the paste worked by separating the placenta from the uterine wall. With the paste he could perform an abortion up to six months of pregnancy. He agreed to come to Chicago to demonstrate this method if Jane had a few willing women.

At the next meeting Lorraine relayed Nathan’s proposal. The group responded positively. It was worth pursuing. They might be able to help women they had previously turned away. It sounded almost magical, a paste that induced a miscarriage. Compared with the $500 that women had to pay for a D & C abortion, Nathan was asking only $100 for each of these.

Miriam had heard about Leunbach paste from one of her early doctor contacts. Over the next few weeks the group looked into it. They found references to the use of the paste in Europe with indications that sloppy preparation or application could be dangerous. Jenny asked Nick; long before his contact with Jane he had used it successfully, but his source had disappeared. Jenny’s doctor friends didn’t know and couldn’t find out anything about it. Since it was neither legal nor approved, regular pharmacological sources didn’t mention it. Whenever the group tried to research abortion, they were frustrated by how little they could find.

Meanwhile, Lorraine collected the names of women who were willing to try the paste.

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