Two movies currently in production aim to glorify an illegal underground ring that committed thousands of abortions in the years leading up to Roe v. Wade. Deadline Hollywood reports that the films are Ask for Jane, an indie project, and The Story of Jane: The Legendary Underground Feminist Abortion Service, based on a script purchased by Amazon. Previously, Hollywood produced a glut of comedies attempting to get laughs out of the grisly subject of killing preborn babies. Box office flops “Grandma” and “The Obvious Child” were high profile attempts to bring abortion into the mainstream comedy genre. With the latest tandem productions of the “Jane” story, abortion activists appear to be marketing abortion as an act of heroism. As Pro-Life writers noted, the real story is anything but heroic and certainly not “legendary.”
The Jane Collective, a group of abortion activists based in Chicago, acted as an underground referral service for women seeking elective abortion before killing the preborn was legalized in 1973. Between 1969 and 1973, the group ended the lives of more than 11,000 babies. Because reputable doctors were unwilling to end the lives of preborn babies, the members of the underground employed seedy abortionists and eventually taught themselves to commit abortions. A fawning piece about the group reads breathlessly:
Imagine a stay-at-home mom who can do an abortion. Or a college student. Imagine she knows how to administer local anesthesia, has the medicines to induce miscarriage, can dilate a cervix, scrape a uterus. Imagine a group — with no medical training — performing dozens of abortions a week, in secret, at great risk to themselves, their families and the women they serve.
“Great risk” indeed! To any sane person, the idea of untrained abortion activists violently ending the lives of dozens of preborn babies every week as an eccentric hobby is profoundly disturbing.
To abortion activists, endangering women and killing children through makeshift abortions only adds to the heroism of the “legendary” group. The same endorsement of dangerous behavior is seen today when abortion activists are quick to promote “DIY abortion” methods. The fact is that abortion is never “necessary,” and the dangerous methods employed by the Jane Collective were a grave abuse of the mothers who sought their help.
Sadly, as Brent Bozell and Tim Graham of Media Research Center (MRC) note, the dangers of abortion did not end with the legalization of the barbaric procedures. While Hollywood is happy to churn out stories glorifying abortion activists who contributed to the legalization of killing the preborn, the film industry ignores the horrors brought by legal abortion. For example, abortionist Kermit Gosnell was convicted of killing infants born alive in abortions, killing a patient, and subjecting mothers to deplorable abuse in his legal abortion mill. Far from an outlier, Gosnell represents the destructiveness inherent in an industry that violently ends the lives of the most vulnerable.
Ironically, producer Caroline Hirsch described Ask for Jane as a movie “that inspires us to act and protect.” The anti-Life movement can never be one that protects, because abortion is fundamentally an act of violence that betrays women and irrevocably harms children. Hollywood’s effort to support “women’s rights” glorifies the very industry that threatens women most.