Roe v Wade (Supreme Court Decision)

Subterms

    Latest story

    88 Shares189 Views

    Using Comedy to Push for Abortion Rights

    by

    Lizz Winstead, the “Daily Show” co-creator, has marshaled her contacts in the standup world to help supporters turn protest into action.“Things are awesome — never better!” joked Lizz Winstead, the comedian, producer and abortion rights activist. “Sleeping well; no diarrhea. Things are awesome.”Things are decidedly not awesome, but comic misdirection might as well be oxygen for Winstead, who has banked her career on satirizing politics and media and calling out hypocrisy, as the co-creator of “The Daily Show” and a host and director on the now-defunct left-wing radio network Air America. For most of the last decade or so, though, she has been singularly, steadfastly focused on one issue, abortion. Her preferred method for delivering her message is the variety show: a little schtick, a little song, a little taboo talk.“Don’t be ashamed of having an abortion,” the comedian Joyelle Nicole Johnson said onstage at “Bro v. Wade,” a benefit show in Brooklyn that Winstead organized recently with her group Abortion Access Front. “Maybe be ashamed of how you got pregnant. I got pregnant the classy way: On the floor. On an Amtrak train. In the handicapped restroom, babeeey!”Joking about abortion is nothing new; George Carlin went there, among many others. But Winstead’s goal is sharper: with righteous fervor and a Rolodex of comic all-stars, she leads a nonprofit that uses unexpected tools — like humor and men — to advocate for abortion as health care and as a fundamental human right.She told her own abortion story on a Comedy Central special in 1992, and in the decades since, has been warning, on stages across the country and in social media campaigns, that reproductive rights were in jeopardy. Long before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last month, Abortion Access Front was preparing. Now, it is mobilizing as never before: On Sunday it will host “Operation Save Abortion,” a livestreamed daylong training session, with more than 60 partners and 25 panelists from local and national care, funding and policy organizations, and secure ways for viewers to plan direct, on-the-ground action. It will be capped off by a set from Johnson, a board member and ride-or-die touring performer, who lately has become accustomed to delivering punch lines to an audience that has spent the day weeping.Joyelle Nicole Johnson, left, with Winstead, is a board member and ride-or-die touring performer for Abortion Access Front. Nina Westervelt for The New York Times“Politicians aren’t going to save us,” Winstead, 60, said. Laughter won’t either. But with her network of grassroots advocates, abortion providers and entertainers, she hopes to change the narrative around abortion, eliminate the shame and give newly fired-up supporters the tools to get involved. “If people have to march one more time, and rage and feel helpless and hopeless, they win,” she said of her anti-abortion opponents. “We need to give people who are, like, ‘What can we do?’ an answer,” she added.That includes the people responsible for 50 percent of a pregnancy — men. On the eve of Father’s Day last month, Abortion Access Front produced a “Dads for Choice” video starring W. Kamau Bell, the comedian, CNN host and commentator, and inviting men to consider who bears the monetary costs of contraception: “Nobody ever got pregnant from a vibrator!”“The more complicated the issues are, the more humor can break things down to their basic points, and clarify things,” Bell said. Especially for topics that have traditionally been deemed uncomfortable, “humor can invite people in.”Why might comedy be an especially effective tool now? “Well, the other stuff hasn’t worked,” said David Cross, who was part of the all-male “Bro v. Wade” lineup. “Look where we find ourselves.”Abortion Access Front performances feature sketch comedy; music; standups like Sarah Silverman, Michelle Buteau, Jenny Yang, Aida Rodriguez and Negin Farsad and notables like the writer Dan Savage and filmmaker Mark Duplass; and on the road, conversations with local abortion providers, to highlight their needs. Even pro-abortion-rights crowds are often edified and galvanized, according to audience surveys collected by a researcher from the University of California, Los Angeles.“To give you the joy and then the information and then give you something to do, that trifecta of an evening is magic,” Winstead said. Beginning in 2016, the showcases toured annually across dozens of cities, including in states hostile to abortion.David Cross performing at “Bro v. Wade.”Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesOne of the group’s messages is that everybody can find a way to contribute; abortion rights supporters need not march in every street protest or continually reach into their overstretched wallets. “If you have 10 minutes a month to give, I can give you something to do that’s meaningful,” Winstead said. “And I don’t want you to feel bad that that’s all you can give. Life is too messed up right now.”At one clinic, in Huntsville, Ala., Abortion Access Front and its volunteers planted hedges out front, to help block anti-abortion protesters. In Detroit, at the request of another clinic, they threw a block party as a gesture of welcome and gratitude to the community.“For a lot of these folks, in the only clinic in their state, they feel really isolated,” said Amy Elizabeth Alterman, an abortion scholar, ethnographer and public health researcher at U.C.L.A. Out of safety concerns or for social reasons, “many abortion providers don’t tell friends and family what they do.”Winstead’s organization, which has a full-time staff of 10 and many volunteers, served as a much-needed balm. “When a band of feminists explodes out of a van, wearing pro-abortion swag and saying, ‘Thank you for what you do. What can we do and how can we celebrate you?’ it’s often very emotional,” Alterman said. “Sometimes providers cry.”Winstead and the group are not trying to reach across the aisle to change anti-abortion evangelists’ minds. Since she became outspoken on the issue, she has personally experienced a backlash. “My parents, when they were alive, got calls constantly saying, your daughter’s a baby murderer,” she said. They were Catholic — “it really scared them.” Her shows were boycotted; old employers were called in efforts at intimidation. She “paid a lot of money,” she said, to erase her personal data from the internet.Now, “there’s no place I can get fired from — come at me, I don’t care,” she said. Fomenting any cultural shift requires real dedication, said Dean Obeidallah, the comic and radio host, who was on the “Bro v. Wade” bill and performed at Winstead’s first abortion-rights benefit a decade ago. “I can tell you from years of doing comedy, and trying to dispel stereotypes about Arab Americans, it’s never a light-bulb moment,” he said. “For people on your side already, you have to make them feel like they’re in the right place. For people who aren’t on the right side, or even have hate, it’s chipping away.”“To give you the joy and then the information and then give you something to do, that trifecta of an evening is magic,” Winstead said of her group’s performances.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesFor those in the Minnesota-born Winstead’s orbit, it’s not surprising that she rose from a politically minded standup to an activist leader. “She’s just one of those — you meet them throughout life — boundless energy, high-strung, talk very quickly, gesticulate wildly, kind of people,” said Cross, a friend for more than 30 years.Johnson, the comic who has been with the organization since it started, said, “I think she’s a non-somniac, like Obama’s a non-somniac, to be able to do all the things she does. Her brain is constantly worrying — since 2016, her hair has turned white.”Even for Abortion Access Front, whose allies long knew that reproductive care and women’s rights were under attack, the weeks since Roe v. Wade was overturned have been, as Winstead said, gut-churningly surreal and destabilizing. “I’ve always felt unsafe in this country,” said Johnson, who is Black, “but now it’s almost a slapstick level of unsafe. It’s chaos.”Winstead said, “This is almost our last shot, because we’re burned out — and that’s by design.”But this moment has also sharpened activists’ focus, and expanded their tent. Since Roe was overturned, “I talk about it every chance — you’re going to hear abortion, abortion, abortion out of Joyelle’s mouth,” Johnson said. “I do it for the women in the audience who are not as liberated as me, those women who cannot tell their closest family members. I hope it liberates some people.” Viva Ruiz, a performer and activist whose group, Thank God For Abortion, is involved in the training session Sunday, said, “Everybody needs to use their way — the more variance there is, the more tactics there are, the more successful we can be.” She added, “The thing is, to just not stop. To keep showing up.”Together, Winstead agreed, “we are more motivated to fight and stay in the fight. And be relentless.” More

    More stories

    • 150 Shares179 Views

      in Theater

      When an Abortion Story Is Told as a Caper, Thriller or Farce

      by

      As Roe falls, new works including a documentary, a feature film and a comedy show disrupt the taboos and clichés around abortion.In 1969, when abortion was illegal in Illinois, an underground operation arose in Chicago. Officially called the Abortion Counseling Service of Women’s Liberation, it became known as the Jane network, because women seeking abortions were told to call a number and “ask for Jane.” As I watched “The Janes,” an HBO documentary about the service, I was struck by the buoyancy of the story. Though the women behind Jane were working under stress to provide secretive abortions to desperate and terrified women, a kicky sensibility pervades the film. There are weed jokes and anti-surveillance shenanigans and a soundtrack fit for a mod spy movie. As the Janes evade the church, the Mafia and the police to facilitate around 11,000 clandestine abortions, they emerge from anonymity as the stars of a new genre: the abortion caper.“The Janes” ends with Roe v. Wade being handed down in 1973. Within weeks of the documentary’s release, the Supreme Court had overturned Roe, which makes the film feel even more essential — not just as a road map for modern civil disobedience but as a testament to the kind of complex, unruly abortion storytelling that also now feels at risk. Over the past few weeks, as I waited for the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision to drop, I sought out such stories compulsively, as if the ruling might seize them too. In addition to “The Janes,” I watched the French film “Happening,” about a student seeking an illegal abortion in France in 1963, and “Oh God, a Show About Abortion,” the comedian Alison Leiby’s one-woman show about terminating a pregnancy at Planned Parenthood at age 35.In “Oh God, a Show About Abortion,” the comedian Alison Leiby talks about terminating a pregnancy at Planned Parenthood at age 35.Desiree Rios for The New York TimesThe effort to control abortion has also had the effect of suppressing the stories we tell about it. Women seeking abortions are silenced by abortion bans, anonymized in court and moralized about onscreen. It is striking how often abortion has been obscured in films, presented as a quickly discarded option (as in “Juno”) or averted with a spontaneous miscarriage (“Citizen Ruth”) or deployed to facilitate another character’s arc (“Dirty Dancing”) or completely euphemized (“Knocked Up,” where it is referred to only as “rhymes with smashmorshion.”)When abortion stories are not stifled by shame, they might be celebrated as a brave act of speaking out — a tradition that has created its own clichés, as accounts of abortion are smoothed into politically palatable forms, in which the patient is fashioned as suitably desperate and her story is disclosed only reluctantly. Women have been made to barter their stories for their rights. In the documentary, a Jane member recalls women calling the service and listing their reasons for needing an abortion, but she would assure them this was unnecessary: “We would really try to make clear to them — they didn’t need to justify themselves.”What does an abortion story look like freed from justification? Abortion is a common procedure (one in four American women will have one, according to the Guttmacher Institute) that has been so flattened into an “issue” that it can feel revelatory to just recast abortion as an experience, one that can unlock unexpected insights into women’s private lives. If “The Janes” makes abortion into a caper, “Happening” turns it into a hero’s journey and “Oh God” renders it as a farce. Together, these works suggest that abortions are worth talking about because women’s lives are interesting in their own right.The French film “Happening” follows a university student’s search for an illegal abortion in the early 1960s.IFC Films, via Associated Press“Happening” follows Anne, a student of literature who becomes pregnant and seeks an illegal abortion while studying for final exams. As Anne is sabotaged by her doctors, shunned by her peers and preyed on by men, she watches her life’s potential narrow with each passing week. And as she pursues increasingly dangerous methods to end the pregnancy, she risks death to fight for her future as a writer. “I’d like a child one day, but not instead of a life,” she tells one useless doctor.The plot of “Happening” is driven not by Anne’s harrowing victimization but by her flinty resolve. When a doctor offers her sympathy instead of assistance, she refuses to leave his office. “So help me,” she demands. Like a great action hero, she endures physical trials while outwitting her adversaries. She works to compel her community to recognize her humanity through abortion’s veil of criminality and taboo.Anne finally makes her way to an underground abortionist, but the procedure doesn’t work, so she undergoes another, riskier operation that could kill her or else send her to the hospital, which could be her last stop before prison. She ends up convulsing over a dorm toilet, but the scene plays less like body-horror than a feat of strength. When one of her bullies comes upon her in the stall, Anne cannily implicates her in the event, instructing her to fetch a pair of scissors and sever the bloody tissue trailing from her body. The very existence of “Happening” confirms her triumph: It is based on a 2000 memoir by the writer Annie Ernaux.No such horrors await Alison Leiby in “Oh God, a Show About Abortion,” whose self-described “simple and frictionless” abortion is worth examining mostly because it is a funny story. The 70-minute monologue begins with a startling joke — “My mom texted me, ‘Kill it tonight!’ and I’m like, I already did, that’s why the show exists!” — that feels crafted to immediately disarm the abortion taboo. Then the show rollicks through the experience itself, from the moment Leiby pees awkwardly into a glass tumbler in a Courtyard by Marriott to the first-trimester procedure she secures in a Planned Parenthood facility located across the street from a glaringly luxe maternity store. (“Who owns that?” she jokes. “Mike Pence?”)Within weeks of the release of “The Janes,” the film feels even more essential to our critic, as a testament to the kind of complex, unruly abortion storytelling that also now feels at risk.HBOEven before Roe’s reversal, Leiby recognized that she was lucky, and that most women seeking abortion “do not stroll into Planned Parenthood with a Lululemon outfit and then take an Uber home.” Near the end of the piece, when her mother tells her that she was forced to go to the Mafia for an illegal abortion in the 1960s, Leiby hesitates to share her own experience. “I didn’t want to come off as bragging, like, A doctor did mine,” she jokes.Leiby does not belabor her own privilege, and her story gains power from that choice. Her abortion decision is still met with plenty of patriarchal condescension and ambient shame. But she resists the pressure to feel sad about ending her pregnancy, and she refuses to apologize for her right to do it safely and legally. “I thought I’d spend the next few days or months staring out the window like I’m in a depression medication commercial,” she says. Instead, she walks out of the clinic feeling “a little underwhelmed.”I attended Leiby’s show this month in New York while visibly pregnant. Though my expanding body now inspires rote congratulations from strangers, my own feelings about my pregnancy have been tumultuous, and it was invigorating to step into an environment where the condition was not immediately culturally affirmed.Much of Leiby’s story concerns her choice not to raise children — there is an interlude about perineal tearing — and though her abortion is far easier to secure than Annie Ernaux’s, the stakes have not been lowered. Leiby wants to pursue her career and to avoid the “painful and exhausting and scary” aspects of parenting, but she also just wants to be recognized as a full adult human on her own terms, not as a problem that only a baby can fix.“The Janes,” too, is a story about women claiming their potential, though the members of the Jane network fulfill theirs not by receiving abortions but by providing them. When they discover that their abortionist, “Mike,” is not a doctor but just a guy who learned how to perform a dilation and curettage (a procedure known as a D and C), they refuse to shutter the service. Instead, they begin to perform abortions themselves, largely for free, no Mikes necessary. They learn to assume responsibility, not just for their own lives but for the lives of others. In turn, they are driven to “share that sense of personal power with women,” as one member puts it. “We wanted every woman who contacted us to be the hero of her own story.”Representative Cori Bush, a Democrat from Missouri, spoke publicly last fall for the first time about being raped at church camp when she was 17 and having an abortion at 18.Jason Andrew for The New York TimesThese abortion stories represent just a slice of the experience (for one thing, they largely feature white women), and they have arrived at a time when abortion storytelling is at risk of being winnowed even further. Even if a patient does not disclose her abortion, digital surveillance threatens to tell the tale for her, through Google searches, menstruation app data and location tracking. (Such tools have already been used in criminal prosecutions).Stories that do emerge will often be shaped to withstand political pressure. Last fall, when Representative Cori Bush, a Democrat from Missouri, spoke publicly for the first time about being raped at church camp when she was 17 and having an abortion at 18, she did it in support of legislation codifying Roe. “It felt like something was pressing down on me,” she said about the demands on her testimony, adding: “Whatever I say, it has to produce.”The decision in Dobbs tells its own story about women considering abortion. The court’s imagined modern pregnant woman can achieve total self-actualization while carrying her pregnancy to term, with the help of anti-discrimination laws, state-mandated parental leave and health insurance. “Now you have the opportunity to be whatever you want to be,” Lynn Fitch, the Mississippi attorney general, said in an interview about the case. “You have the option in life to really achieve your dream and goals, and you can have those beautiful children as well.”This woman can have it all, except she cannot have an abortion, and she can’t have a story, either. She is a straw man — useful only after she has been stripped of her subjectivity and drained of all substance. More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      ‘The Janes’ Review: Taking Matters Into Their Own Hands

      by

      This HBO documentary spotlights the women activists who banded together to form Jane, a clandestine group providing safe abortions in the years before Roe v. Wade.“The Janes” is a straightforward, talking-heads documentary from HBO that provides a brief history of the Jane Collective, a clandestine abortion group working out of Chicago in the late 1960s and early ’70s.Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that protected a women’s right to an abortion, had not yet been handed down, meaning the procedure was illegal in most states, forcing women with unwanted pregnancies to turn to exploitative abortion providers (like the Mafia) or resort to dangerous methods to self-induce an abortion.This situation — and the can-do spirit of the times, cultivated by the civil rights and women’s liberation movements — sparked the members of Jane into action.The documentary, directed by Tia Lessin and Emma Pildes, relies primarily on testimonies from the Jane Collective’s women volunteers, tracing their efforts from the beginning — when the group was merely a referral service — to their final days contending with law enforcement.Ultimately, the Jane Collective provided close to 11,000 abortions by the time Roe v. Wade came into effect, at which point the group ceased its activities. (Though the renewed push for restrictive abortion laws today, and reports of the present Supreme Court’s ruling on a case that could overturn Roe, casts a sense of bleak uncertainty over the film’s otherwise triumphant conclusion.)Cookie-cutter though it is, “The Janes” does have something going for it: its interview subjects, the former Janes, who all speak about their beliefs and shared past with striking clarity. They remind us that their work — their commitment to ensuring the safety and well-being of other women — was not really all that radical, but a measured, intelligent response to the inadequacies of a system that refused to fend for its own.The JanesNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. Watch on HBO platforms. More

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      Performing a Comedy About Abortion, Watching the Supreme Court

      by

      Alison Leiby had just performed her show “Oh God, a Show About Abortion” when she learned of the leaked draft opinion showing that the court could be on the verge of overturning Roe v. Wade.After finishing a preview performance of her hourlong stand-up show about reproductive rights, “Oh God, a Show About Abortion,” the comedian Alison Leiby was finishing dinner Monday night when she checked her phone.She had dozens of messages, all about the breaking news that a leaked draft of a Supreme Court opinion showed that the court appeared to be poised to overturn Roe v. Wade, eliminating the constitutional right to abortion in the United States.“It was just an absolute confrontation with reality, that this is not theoretical anymore,” Leiby, a self-described abortion rights activist perhaps best known for work co-producing “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” said in an interview.As Leiby began to process what this potential decision would mean for the country, she also realized that she needed to quickly start thinking about how it might reshape her show, a 70-minute stand-up set about her own unwanted pregnancy and how it was resolved with a Saturday afternoon trip to Planned Parenthood. So at Tuesday evening’s preview at the Cherry Lane Theater in New York, she addressed the news at the top of the show.“I’m not going to ignore the literal elephant in the room,” Leiby said on Tuesday, thanking the person behind the lone guffaw in the audience for getting her wordplay.From Opinion: A Challenge to Roe v. WadeCommentary by Times Opinion writers and columnists on the Supreme Court’s upcoming decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.Ross Douthat: The leak of a draft Supreme Court decision that would overturn Roe v. Wade is not a surprise, but the strategy behind it is something of a mystery.Roxane Gay: Whoever leaked the draft wanted people to understand the fate awaiting America. So people can prepare. So they can rage.Emily Bazelon: By suggesting in the draft that the progress women have made is a reason to throw out Roe, Justice Samuel Alito has turned feminism against itself.Bret Stephens: Roe v. Wade was an ill-judged decision when it was handed down. But overturning it would do more to replicate its damage than to reverse it.Sway: In the latest episode of her podcast, Kara Swisher talks to an abortion rights advocate about the draft opinion and the future of abortion rights in America..“I’m not changing anything in response to the news, but I understand that your feelings toward it might be different,” Leiby said. “If something is funny, not funny, cathartic — feel that. That is valid. I’m not up here dancing for applause. We’re in this together.”Zoe Verzani, right, spoke to Leiby after the performance at the Cherry Lane Theater.Desiree Rios for The New York TimesThe news that the court could be on the verge of overturning Roe, which would lead to immediate abortion bans in some states and prompt others to move to issue bans and restrictions, comes as theaters and cinemas around New York City and the nation are presenting works about abortion.In Atlanta, performances of “Roe,” a play by Lisa Loomer focused on the plaintiff in the landmark case and the lawyer who argued it in front of the Supreme Court, begin Friday. The same day, the Metrograph Theater in New York will begin a series devoted to films that touch on or explore abortion, including Josef von Sternberg’s 1931 drama “An American Tragedy” and the 1987 romantic comedy “Dirty Dancing.” And this summer, a small nonprofit theater in Chicago will premiere “Roe v US,” a play billed as giving “voice to the women who made the choice.”The same night Leiby’s show opens in the West Village, a play that looks at abortion through a very different lens is scheduled to be held at a theater in Midtown: “Oh Gosnell,” about Kermit Gosnell, a doctor who was convicted of murder in 2013 following botched late-term abortions. The case became a rallying cry for the anti-abortion movement. Phelim McAleer, an Irish-born filmmaker and producer, said that he had seen Leiby’s show billed as an “abortion comedy” and decided to counter it by producing a play about Gosnell that draws its text from a grand jury report and trial transcripts, saying he wanted to give audiences an “alternative viewpoint.”The show has faced difficulties: The theater it originally planned to use backed out, and two of its seven actors walked out shortly before previews were set to begin.Intent on making sure the play goes ahead at its new venue, McAleer — who has made documentaries questioning the opposition to fracking, and said he was working on a film about Hunter Biden — said that he was still processing the Supreme Court news. “It definitely means the Gosnell story is more relevant than ever and plays about abortion are more relevant than ever,” he said.Leiby and McAleer’s two shows could hardly be more dissimilar. One is a comedy about an uneventful abortion procedure that makes a case for broad abortion access and the other is a graphic play about an infamous abortion provider whose clinic was described by prosecutors as a “house of horrors.” But Leiby and McAleer share one similar goal: to talk about, and to get audiences to listen to, a work about abortion.This week there will be a staged reading of “Oh Gosnell,” a play about Kermit Gosnell, a doctor who was convicted of murder in 2013 following botched late-term abortions.Russ Rowland“Oh God, a Show About Abortion,” — which is being presented by the comedian Ilana Glazer and directed by Lila Neugebauer — is scheduled to run through June 4. After seeing an earlier iteration of Leiby’s show, Jason Zinoman wrote in The New York Times that, “Without a trace of didacticism, she finds humor in the messy, confusing, sometimes banal experience of an unwanted pregnancy and an abortion.”The show tells her story: of a 35-year-old comedy writer who learns she is pregnant in a hotel bathroom in St. Louis. She is so confident in her disinterest in having children that in the act, she compares her eggs to those by Fabergé (“feminine but decorative”). At Leiby’s first mention of Planned Parenthood, a group of young, female public health students who were in the audience burst into cheers.One member of the group, Zoe Verzani, 24, who wore a hot-pink Planned Parenthood T-shirt to the show this week, said that she thought Leiby handled the material just right.Understand the State of Roe v. WadeCard 1 of 4What is Roe v. Wade? More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Television

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

      by

      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