PS: What inspired you to get involved with the Jane Collective in Chicago in the early 1970s?
JA: Well, I can't claim "inspiration" so much as need. I thought I was pregnant at a time when it would have been a very bad thing to be, and I got information — as women always did, and still do — from a friend, who said, "Call this number and ask for Jane," and I did. A woman called me back and said her name was Jane, as everybody used that name. And we talked for a real long time, including her advising me, "I think you should get a pregnancy test," which I hadn't. I was just so late, I'd thought, "Oh, I must be pregnant."
As it turned out, to make this long story short, it was indeed a very, very, very late period. I was not pregnant. But when I talked to her again, we just hit it off and started talking politics, about women's lives, about abortion, and about health care in general — childbirth, hospital systems. She let me know the Jane Collective would be taking in some new people to join in the Fall, and I went to this orientation at a church down the block from my apartment. I listened to what they had to say. I asked questions. I listened to the questions the other women who had come were asking, and I thought, "This is a good thing. I'm going to do it."
Image Source: Photos courtesy levelFilm and Judith Arcana