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      At Sundance, Two Films Look at Abortion and the Jane Collective

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      In the years leading up to Roe v. Wade, a Chicago group helped thousands of women obtain the procedure safely. A documentary and a feature tell their story.Judith Arcana was 27 and recently separated from her husband when she began driving women surreptitiously for safe — but illegal — abortions. The year was 1970, she was an out-of-work teacher on the South Side of Chicago, and she was spending her days counseling women in need.“I don’t think we were crazy,” said Arcana, now 78. “I don’t think we were stupid. I think that we had found something that was so important, so useful in the lives of women and girls.”“We were radicalized in the arena of women’s bodies,” she said. “We knew that what we were doing was good work in the world. And we knew that it was illegal.”Arcana was part of the Jane Collective, a disparate, rotating group of women who ensured safe abortions for thousands of women in Chicago between 1968 and 1973. Despite the law, women were still getting abortions. But they were often performing them on themselves and winding up in the hospital, or paying the mob with no guarantee of survival.During these years, because of Arcana and other women, if you lived in Chicago and needed help, you could call a number and talk with a woman who would offer a safer alternative. Members of the collective provided counseling and arranged the procedures, which they eventually administered — 11,000 all told during that period. But then in 1972, Arcana and six other members of the group were arrested, each charged with 11 counts of abortion or conspiracy to commit an abortion with a possible 10-year sentence for each charge. Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision issued in 1973, saved them all.Mugshots of members of the Jane Collective who were arrested in 1972. HBONow, close to 50 years later, members of the collective are sharing their stories in a pair of movies at the Sundance Film Festival, which begins Thursday: the HBO documentary “The Janes”; and a fictionalized account titled “Call Jane,” starring Elizabeth Banks and Sigourney Weaver, and looking for distribution.The movies are debuting at a particularly crucial time for abortion rights. The Supreme Court heard arguments in December over the legality of a Mississippi law that bans abortion after 15 weeks; it is expected to issue a decision this summer. Should the court uphold the law, the ruling would be at odds with Roe v. Wade, which declared abortion a constitutional right and forbade states from banning the procedure before fetal viability (23 weeks). The Sundance filmmakers make no secret that they support abortion rights but say they want their work to show the complexity of the subject.In “Call Jane,” Banks plays Joy, a mother and housewife who seeks out an illegal abortion after learning that her pregnancy is life-threatening — her attempt to secure one legally having been denied by an all-male hospital board. The movie’s director, Phyllis Nagy (whose credits include the screenplay for “Carol”), said she wished she could show it to the Supreme Court’s conservative justices. “I would sit there and say, ‘Now, talk to me,’ and it wouldn’t make any difference, probably,” she said. “But artists need to start having the kinds of political conversations with society that aren’t didactic,” she added. “Nothing else has worked.”Elizabeth Banks in “Call Jane,” about a woman trying to terminate a life-threatening pregnancy. Wilson Webb, via Sundance InstituteThe makers of “The Janes” hope those with differing views will allow themselves a look at life before Roe v. Wade. “This is a glimpse at history; I don’t think it’s an advocacy film,” said Tia Lessin, who directed with Emma Pildes, whose father used to be married to Arcana. Arcana’s son, Daniel, and Pildes are producers on the film. Lessin added, “It’s a real life story about what happened and the lengths that women went to to have abortions and to enable other women to have abortions.”“Do I hope that people’s takeaway will be ‘let’s not go back there’? Sure. But I really hope it moves people to engage in conversation. Love the film, hate the film,” she said before Pildes jumped in: “Talk about the issue.”And there is plenty to discuss.The Jane Collective was formed when a college student, Heather Booth, now 76, received a desperate call from a friend looking for an abortion. Booth, active in the civil rights movement, found a doctor willing to help and passed along the information. “I made what I thought was a one-time arrangement,” she said in an interview. Soon another woman called. Then another. Booth found herself negotiating fees and learning the intricacies of the procedure so she could counsel women. After a few years, Booth, by then a mother working on her graduate degree at the University of Chicago, recruited others to fulfill the growing need.“I was working full time. The number of calls were increasing. It was certainly too much for one person,” she added.Marie Leaner, now 80, was raised Roman Catholic and taught to believe that abortion was a sin. At a community center on the West Side of Chicago, she ran a program for teenage mothers. “I just thought it was atrocious that these women didn’t want to carry the babies but they felt this was their punishment for being in love or being sexually involved with someone,” she recalled. “I decided I wanted to do something about it.”She offered up her apartment for the procedures and occasionally held the hands of the women who came through. As one of the few Black women in the group, she said, “I knew that Black and brown people wouldn’t partake of the service if they couldn’t see themselves involved in it.”The State of Abortion in the U.S.Card 1 of 5Abortion at the Supreme Court. More

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      ‘All About My Sisters’ Review: Family Matters

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      Wang Qiong’s debut feature traces the tragic effects of China’s one-child policy on her family.Often in “All About My Sisters,” the Chinese filmmaker Wang Qiong’s documentary portrait of her family, you might forget that what you’re watching is filtered through a camera. Over a period of seven years, Wang filmed her parents, siblings and relatives from within the emotional thicket of their lives, capturing moments of piercing, private intimacy. Her approach yields a film bristling with the kind of familial rancor that usually only emerges behind closed doors.There’s plenty to warrant this bitterness, starting with the fact that Wang’s younger sister, Zhou Jin, was abandoned as a newborn before being retrieved and then given to an uncle to raise. That was in the 1990s, when the combination of China’s one-child policy and a widespread cultural preference for sons had tragic consequences. As we learn over the course of the film’s epic (yet impressively brisk-moving) three-hour arc, Jin’s is one of the many stories of abandoned babies, sex-selective abortions and female infanticide that haunt Wang’s family history.Wang is neither a staid observer nor a formal interviewer, but an active participant in the scenes she captures, often intervening gently from behind her hand-held camera. “Have you ever thought that induced abortion is horrible to baby girls?” she asks her older sister, Wang Li, whose husband is desperate for a male heir. Li’s response is simple but profound: “The world is horrible to us, too. Every move is a risk.”At times, Wang’s candor can be unsettling: I wondered about the ethics of her unflattering portrayal of Jin, who is seen being cruel to her toddler, as if re-enacting her own traumas. In such moments, “All About My Sisters” teeters discomfitingly between the personal and the political, revealing how little separates the two.All About My SistersNot rated. In Mandarin, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 54 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Comedians Turn Their Attention to Abortion

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      Alison Leiby has an hourlong set looking at the experience of an unwanted pregnancy. She’s among a spate of female artists finding humor in the issue.A stand-up show about abortion sounds like a bad idea. The comic Alison Leiby knows that. Just look at her title: “Oh God, an Hour About Abortion.”Leiby doesn’t just anticipate your expectations. She subverts them. As states like Texas pass laws dramatically restricting abortion rights, and the Supreme Court prepares to hear a case in December that could overturn Roe v. Wade, her deftly funny, jarringly understated show doesn’t respond to the news so much as clarify it.Abortion is not new territory in comedy, and there’s a long history of male comics doing against-the-grain bits staking out an abortion-rights position while also poking fun at the idea that a fetus isn’t a person. I saw this done decades ago by George Carlin, and again this month by Bill Burr. Neal Brennan also has a quick joke in his current show, “Unacceptable,” about how liberals show empathy for everyone — but fetuses. Leiby is part of a recent spate of female artists making comedy about reproductive rights that digs into the realities of abortion today more than abstract arguments about it.Leiby, who has been performing her show around New York City (next up: Caveat on Tuesday), employs none of the debating-society smirk of those jokes about the life of the fetus. Without a trace of didacticism, she finds humor in the messy, confusing, sometimes banal experience of an unwanted pregnancy and an abortion. This is comedy about the heartbeat of the mother — and to the extent it engages with the abstract question of life, it’s when Leiby mentions her friends’ first Instagram post of their newborn, which, she says, “I think we can all agree is when life really begins.”Her offhandedness is part of her charm, but it has a purpose. Leiby wants to give us a portrait of abortion not as a crisis or a moral question, but as a common and confusing medical procedure. The broader context of this show, as she reminds the audience, is a culture of silence surrounding women. From sex education to birth control, she explains how much is unspoken, rushed through or hidden from view. Leiby even shocked herself when she called Planned Parenthood, she says, and in asking about an abortion, whispered the word. She mocks the vague ads for birth control and imagines an honest one in which a 37-year-old woman wakes up in a cold sweat screaming next to a mediocre white man, which leads to a scene of him eating Cheetos in a hospital room as she gives birth.Leiby doesn’t move much onstage, and her gestures are limited. Her comedy leans on her nimble writing, which displays a range and density of spiky jokes — puns, metaphors, misdirection. She knows how to set a scene and is alert to the details of nightmares. She is terrified of scary movies and has a ticklishly amusing podcast, “Ruined,” in which a friend, Halle Kiefer, explains the plots of horror films to her. It’s like listening to a play-by-play announcer and color commentator of a game on the radio, except instead of balls or strikes, it’s about beheadings and exorcisms.What comes across on the podcast and in this show is a sensitivity to anxiety and fear mitigated by curiosity. Leiby understands that whether to have a child is a subject fraught with confusion for many, and she acknowledges it, but that’s not her issue. She presents herself as a wry if bumbling protagonist of her own story, describing her attitude toward the prospect of children like this: “I acted like my eggs were Fabergé: feminine but decorative.”In 2004, The New York Times published an article about culture and abortion titled “Television’s Most Persistent Taboo.” That has changed. In a short set on “The Comedy Lineup,” on Netflix, the comic Kate Willett has a sharp joke about how men looking to hook up should care about abortion rights. “I don’t even know if the men that I know understand that sex can make a kid,” she said. “They are super worried that sex can make someone your girlfriend.”In the past year, streaming services have put out two comedies, “Plan B” (directed by Natalie Morales) and “Unpregnant” (directed by Rachel Lee Goldenberg), about girls who go on the road with a friend to get reproductive help. These knockabout buddy films aren’t explicitly about the recent state-level pushes for anti-abortion legislation, but they certainly haunt the action, with closed clinics and ideologues providing key plot points.Like Leiby’s show, these movies present getting an abortion or taking the morning-after pill, often called Plan B, as ordinary decisions made relatively easily, but because of the dictates of a commercial comedy, their plots are full of incident and action, romantic and villainous turns. They make the process of getting an abortion into a high-stakes adventure.Haley Lu Richardson, left, and Barbie Ferreira in “Unpregnant.”Ursula Coyote/HBO MaxVictoria Moroles, left, and Kuhoo Verma in “Plan B.”Brett Roedel/HuluIn observational comedy, Leiby has found a form better suited to what she wants to say. “Oh God” is about details, and by zeroing in on them, it navigates the difficult terrain of making a funny hour about a difficult, polarizing subject. Even so, this isn’t one of those comedy shows interrupted by grave talk or political speeches. It’s one where the response to the person at the clinic asking if she wants “pills or procedure” is: “That’s a real fries or salad.”There’s a power in the relatable details of storytelling. Before Leiby gets the procedure, she’s asked a series of questions: Does she want to know if there’s a heartbeat? Does she want to know if it’s twins? In her telling, these are poignant, even painful moments leavened by quips. To the question about twins, she wonders: “Does it cost more?”Leiby proves that light comedy can be as pointed and meaningful as that which advertises its own weightiness. For while she tells a story about a safe, legal and quick abortion, she doesn’t ignore other more fraught situations, either today or in a potential post-Roe future. She explores this indirectly through her relationship with her mother, which gives her an opportunity to dig into the issue before abortion was legal. Through this historical perspective, she frames the stakes of the next year, when abortion could grow even more prominent in the American discourse.Political stand-up typically lends itself to argumentative point-making, but it can use other tools. In repositioning abortion not as a political battle of ideas but as the real-world choices in the lives of flawed human beings, she brings this charged issue down to earth. More

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      Irma Kalish, TV Writer Who Tackled Social Issues, Dies at 96

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      A female trailblazer in the TV industry, she and her husband took on topics like rape and abortion in writing for sitcoms like “All in the Family” and “Maude.”Irma Kalish, a television writer who tackled abortion, rape and other provocative issues in many of the biggest comedy hits of the 1960s and beyond as she helped usher women into the writer’s room, died on Sept. 3 in Woodland Hills, Calif. She was 96. Her death, at the Motion Picture and Television Fund retirement home, was attributed to complications of pneumonia, her son, Bruce Kalish, a television producer, said.Ms. Kalish’s work in television comedy broke the mold for female writers. What women there were in the industry around midcentury had mostly been expected to write tear-jerking dramas, but beginning in the early 1960s Ms. Kalish made her mark in comedy, notably writing for Norman Lear’s caustic, socially conscious sitcoms “All in the Family” and its spinoff “Maude” in the ’70s.She did much of her writing in partnership with her husband, Austin Kalish. They shared offices at studios around Los Angeles, usually working at facing desks producing alternating drafts of scripts.“When I became a writer, I was one of the very first woman comedy writers and later producers,” Ms. Kalish said in an oral history for the Writers Guild Foundation in 2010. She added, referring to her husband by his nickname, “One producer actually thought that I must not be writing — I must be just doing the typing, and Rocky was doing the writing.”To combat sexism in the industry, she said, “I just became one of the guys.”Ms. Kalish moderated an event sponsored by the Writers Guild in Los Angeles. She made a mark writing for Norman Lear’s topical sitcoms “All in the Family” and “Maude.”  Richard Hartog/Los Angeles Times via GettyWriting for “Maude,” Ms. Kalish and her husband, who died in 2016, worked on the contentious two-part episode “Maude’s Dilemma” (1972), in which the title character, a strong-minded suburban wife and grandmother in her late 40s (played by Bea Arthur), had an abortion. When it was broadcast, Roe v. Wade had just been argued in the United States Supreme Court and would be decided within months, making abortion legal nationwide. Controversy over the episode rose swiftly; dozens of CBS affiliates declined to show it.Mr. and Ms. Kalish earned a “story by” credit, and Susan Harris was credited as the script writer; Mr. Kalish said in an interview in 2012 that he and Ms. Kalish had come up with the idea for the episode.Lynne Joyrich, a professor in the modern culture and media department at Brown University, called the episode a watershed moment for women’s issues onscreen. “Maude’s Dilemma” and episodes like it, she said, demonstrated “the way in which the everyday is also political.”The Kalishs’ takes on social issues also found their way into “All in the Family.” One episode centered on Edith Bunker (Jean Stapleton), the wife of the bigoted Archie Bunker (Carroll O’Connor), weathering a breast cancer scare. Another focused on the couple’s daughter, Gloria (Sally Struthers), as the victim of a rape attempt.The topical scripts “elevated us in the eyes of the business,” Mr. Kalish said in a joint interview with Ms. Kalish for the Archive of American Television conducted in 2012.Mr. and Ms. Kalish were executive producers of another 1970s hit sitcom, “Good Times,” about a Black family in a Chicago housing project, and continued to write for that program and numerous others.Ms. Kalish’s career spanned decades, beginning in the mid-1950s, and included writing credits for more than three dozen shows, many that would make up a pantheon of baby boomers’ favorite sitcoms, among them “The Patty Duke Show,” “I Dream of Jeannie,” “My Favorite Martian,” “F Troop,” “My Three Sons” and “Family Affair.” She also had producing credits on some 16 shows, including “The Facts of Life” and “Valerie.”Ms. Kalish’s work laid a track for other female sitcom writers to follow. As she said to the comedian Amy Poehler in an interview in 2013 for Ms. Poehler’s Web series, “Smart Girls at the Party,” “You are a descendant of mine, so to speak.”Ms. Poehler, beaming, agreed.Irma May Ginsberg was born on Oct. 6, 1924, in Manhattan. Her mother, Lillian (Cutler) Ginsberg, was a homemaker. Her father, Nathan Ginsberg, was a business investor.Irma attended Julia Richman High School on the Upper East Side and went on to Syracuse University, where she studied journalism and graduated in 1945. She married Mr. Kalish, the brother of a childhood friend, in 1948 after corresponding with him while he was stationed in Bangor, Maine, during World War II.After the couple moved to Los Angeles, Mr. Kalish became a comedy writer for radio and television. Ms. Kalish worked as an editor for a pulp magazine called “Western Romance” before leaving to stay home with their two children. Her first writing credit, on the dramatic series “The Millionaire,” came in 1955.She joined the Writers Guild in 1964 and began writing with her husband more consistently. The Writer’s Guild Foundation, in their “The Writer Speaks” video series, called them “one of the more successful sitcom-writer-couples of the 20th century.”Ms. Kalish was active in the Writers Guild of America West chapter and in Women in Film, an advocacy group, serving as its president.The couple’s last television credit was in 1998, for the comedy series “The Famous Jett Jackson,” which was produced by their son, Bruce. They wrote a script dealing with ageism.Along with her son, she is survived by her sister and only sibling, Harriet Alef; two grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. Her daughter, Nancy Biederman, died in 2016. In the interview with the Archive of American Television, Ms. Kalish expressed her desire to be known as her own person, not just Austin Kalish’s wife and writing partner.“Sure, God made man before woman,” she said, “but then you always do a first draft before you make a final masterpiece.” More