The Janes might just be the most important documentary of the year. Now streaming on HBO and HBO Max, The Janes takes viewers back to Chicago in the 1960s and 70s, when a group of women ran—and were eventually arrested for—an illegal underground abortion network. They used code names, safe houses, and fronts in order to secretly provide the then widely-illegal procedure to hundreds who needed it. As the women, now all middle-aged or older, explain in interviews, they tried to provide their clients the kind of compassionate, comprehensive abortion care they never received themselves. But in the shadow of the looming Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe vs. Wade, The Janes doesn’t feel like an archive of the past—it feels like a playbook for the future.
Photo: Warner Media
