Looking for Jane (110)
“Jane,” she says again, and her daughter pulls her head back from her mother’s shoulder, her face shining with tears and joy. Maggie looks deep into her daughter’s eyes and finds herself there in the streaks of brown and gold.
“I’ve been looking for you.”
Author’s Note
Dear Reader,
When people ask me, “So what’s your book about?” my first inclination is always to say, “Abortion.” But it isn’t. Looking for Jane is about motherhood. About wanting to be a mother and not wanting to be a mother, and all the grey areas in between. It’s about the lengths to which women will go to end a pregnancy, and to become pregnant. And, as Nancy says, that razor-thin edge where many people find themselves hovering at some point in their lives, right between the terror of getting pregnant by accident and the terror of not getting pregnant when you want to. But most importantly, it’s about women supporting each other through their individual choices and the outcomes of those choices.
As I write this Author’s Note, I’m pregnant with my first child. I wrote the first draft of Looking for Jane before my husband and I had even begun trying to start our family. I’ll be pregnant throughout the editing process, and will be the mother of a young baby when the book is released. I undertook a lot of research and conducted interviews about individual experiences with pregnancy and childbirth in order to ensure this story rings true, but the fact that I’m pregnant during the editing process has ended up being quite a gift, and has made the book better than it was before I became pregnant.
It’s also given me a more nuanced perspective on abortion. I’m still in my first trimester, which is the time frame when most abortions will take place. I know rationally that the being growing in my uterus is a cluster of cells, a fetus, but I call it my baby. My husband and I have even given it a nickname. Its organs are forming. Right now, it has fingers and toes and an upper lip. A heartbeat that I got to hear for the first time at six weeks’ gestation. I understand now more than ever why abortion is a deeply emotional issue that causes severe, often irreconcilable sociopolitical divisions. Why some will view the fetus as a life unto itself. But although my baby has a heartbeat and fingers and toes and an upper lip, it still resides inside my body.
My. Body.
I was fortunate to be in the position where becoming pregnant was very much a meticulously planned choice, but still I am so grateful that I live in a country where it’s my legal right to make the choice to remain pregnant each and every day, because our courts have determined that my body—and everything that’s happening inside it—belongs to me and only me.
Like many people, I’ve had a bit of a rough first trimester, symptom-wise, and I’ve expressed to loved ones on a number of occasions that sometimes I don’t feel like I’m in control of my own body anymore, and that’s a bit unnerving, even though this pregnancy is a wonderful thing for my husband and me, and this baby is so very wanted. So I can’t imagine being pregnant against my will, not having legal control over my own body with the right to end that pregnancy if I wanted to. The prospect is horrifying. And equally horrifying is the idea of being told—like the girls at the postwar maternity homes were—that I am not allowed to keep my own child; that my parents, the state, and the Church are together going to make the decision for me that I must relinquish a baby that I want to keep, regardless of my own desires.
And that’s why becoming pregnant for the first time has given me a deeper understanding of the power and importance of bodily autonomy, and perhaps why I feel more strongly about reproductive choice and abortion access than ever. Because I can now put myself in the shoes of the pregnant woman who doesn’t want to be pregnant. I can imagine how terrifying that could feel for her. This book and its messages are more real to me now than ever before.
So with that said, let me tell you a bit about how Looking for Jane and its story came to be.
THE JANE NETWORK
The Jane Network in this novel is a composite of the many underground abortion networks that existed in major cities around the world prior to the legalization of abortion in their respective jurisdictions. Without a doubt, many of these networks still exist today in jurisdictions where abortion remains illegal or inaccessible.
When I set out to undertake preliminary research for a novel about an underground abortion network and the history of reproductive rights access in my home country of Canada, I found some interesting things. Among them was a reference to an organization with the unofficial nickname “Jane” that was operating in Chicago in the late 1960s and early 1970s, prior to the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion in the United States. The Canadian abortion networks didn’t have a particular name, records almost certainly weren’t kept for security reasons, and thus the details were more difficult for me to research. But as I wrote the early draft of this novel, the name “Jane” became very much representative of the anonymous, everywoman nature of all these networks, and seemed the most fitting for a story that attempts to capture the breadth and depth of these remarkable initiatives. While I certainly paid deliberate homage to the “Chicago Janes” through the fictionalization of a real-life event (their volunteers actually did eat patient records in the back of a paddy wagon to hide the women’s identities from the police—cue applause), the rest is borne of creative license based on facts I gathered about underground abortion networks through various research and interviews.