An Underground Abortion Collective Helps Women In Need In This Excerpt From All You Have to Do Is Call

One year after the release of  Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the landmark Supreme Court decision that rescinded a five-decade right to an abortion, women’s reproductive care is still a battleground across the United States. According to the Associated Press, twenty-five million women of childbearing age (about 2 in 5 nationally) now live in a state where it’s harder to get an abortion than it was a year ago,  As a result, women in need of care in states where the procedure is banned have often found themselves traveling considerable distances to find states where abortion is still legal at their particular point in pregnancy. But, as the forthcoming historical novel All You Have to Call illustrates, this is hardly the first time in history that women have had to undertake difficult or extraordinary measures to terminate an unwanted or unsafe pregnancy—or to seek care outside of their comfort zone.

Kerri Maher’s latest focuses on the Jane Collective, an underground Chicago-based women’s health group that risked arrest and prosecution throughout the early 1970s by performing abortions before Roe v. Wade made the procedure legal, and which was staffed by normal everyday women who (often anonymously and at significant danger to themselves) cared for one another in their hours of great need.

A story of 1970s sisterhood, sacrifice, and community that will likely feel all too real for modern-day women who are once again fighting for their right to choose, All You Have to Do Is Call is a book that belongs on our must-read lists for Fall. 

Here’s how the publisher describes the story. 

Chicago, early 1970s Who does a girl call when she needs help? Jane.

The best-known secret in the city, Jane is a women’s health organization composed entirely of women helping women, freeing them from the expectations of society and family. Veronica, Jane’s founder, prides herself on the services she has provided to thousands of women, yet the price of others’ freedom is that she leads a double life–when she’s not at Jane, Veronica plays the role of a conventional housewife–which becomes even more difficult during her own high-risk pregnancy.

Two more women in Veronica’s neighborhood are grappling with similar disconnects. Margaret, a young professor at the University of Chicago, secretly volunteers at Jane as she falls in love with a man whose attitude toward his ex-wife increasingly disturbs her. Patty, who’s long been content as a devoted wife and mother, has begun to sense that something essential is missing from her life. When her runaway younger sister Eliza shows up unexpectedly, Patty is forced to come to terms with what it really means to love and support a sister.

In this historic moment when the personal was nothing if not political, when television, movies, and commercials told women they’d “come a long way, baby,” Veronica, Margaret, and Patty must make choices that will change the course of their lives forever.

All You Have to Do Is Call won’t arrive on shelves on September 19, 2023. But we’re thrilled to bring you an exclusive excerpt of this necessary, relevant story right now—as well as a brief note from the author herself to set up where we are in the story. 

Paste readers: 

I am so excited to share this exclusive excerpt from All You Have To Do Is Call with you! The novel is told from the perspective of three main characters braided together—Veronica, Margaret, and Patty—and explores their rich and complex friendships and families in early 1970’s Chicago.  Loosely based on the Jane Collective, an underground reproductive health clinic in the days before Roe, this novel does a deep dive into parenthood, career, and the myriad, inspiring ways women support other women. 

In this section, you get a sneak peek at what makes Jane so special.  Told from the point of view of Veronica, Jane’s founder, it’s from the start of Chapter 6 and the first time we get a glimpse inside the clandestine organization. – Kerri Maher

Chapter 6

Veronica

A red stream flowed over her hands and faded to clear as water from the bathroom faucet chased blood down the drain. The water felt cool on her skin, and the rushing from the tap was soothing—a familiar, clean sound. Even once the curette was shiny and silver once again, Veronica stood at the sink watching and feeling the water and the surgical instrument, light and firm between her fingers.

She breathed deeply, trying to steady her stomach. The pregnancy had recently added nausea to her usual list of Service shift maladies, though she’d be damned if she let any of the brave women coming to her know that every single one of their vaginas made her feel like she was on a boat pitching furiously on an angry sea. This was never easy work, and her back and shoulders regularly twinged with exhausted pain from the tense hours of leaning forward and—as gently as she could—using forceps and flashlights and speculums to complete the day’s roster of D&C’s.

Normally, she didn’t mind the physical costs; normally, it felt like sitting down to an adventure. What secrets would this woman, this remarkable body, reveal to her? There was such astonishing variation—browns and pinks and ruffles and serrations, soft spots and cysts, striations and smoothness, moles and warts and cysts and tears and lesions; hair of every brown and red and black hue. In the early months, it had been a trick to remain poker-faced when she was presented with an outbreak of some sort, lice or yeast or blood, and the range of largely maritime smells that went with those problems, but she’d mastered even that.

She soaped and rinsed a speculum, and continued to breathe. If the women coming to her could fight through the turmoil in their minds and bodies, so could she. After all, she was the provider; she had the advantages of a safe home and a (usually) supportive husband and a healthy child and enough money in the bank to afford to have a second child growing inside her.

This was no time for self-indulgence. She’d done eleven so far today, and she had eight more to go.

Veronica shut off the faucet, dropped the last curette into the stainless steel lobster pot, where it clanked against a dozen others; hugged the pot to her; and opened the bathroom door. The hallway was quiet, but the living room it opened into was a hive of activity as always, every church sale sofa and chair in the carpeted room sprawled upon by women talking, reading, knitting, or darning as they either waited to get their abortion or recovered before being taken back to the Front. Another World, the second soap opera of the day, played quietly on the television in the corner.

She was proud of this apartment, which the Service had rented just six months ago to be a permanent Place where the abortions could happen; it was a spacious three-bedroom unit at the rear of a large, clean apartment building where there was plenty of coming and going: families with small children, young single professionals with roommates, and, she was pretty sure, two women working as prostitutes on the second floor. The building housed Black and white equally, which was essential because so many of the women Jane served were Black.

Veronica’s favorite item in the Place was a beautiful framed watercolor that Siobhan had painted of the female reproductive system based on the diagrams in Our Bodies, Ourselves, a radical women’s health pamphlet published last year by a collective in Boston, complete with names for each and every part—vulva, clitoris, urethra, ovary, cervix. Powerful words. Like the Latin words priests of the Middle Ages didn’t want commoners to know.

Next to it hung a poster Trudy had found at a garage sale, with the words TODAY IS THE FIRST DAY OF THE REST OF MY LIFE from the John Denver song blocked out in rainbow print. Yes. To her, that summed up everything the Service stood for. In some ways, Veronica was prouder of this Place than she was of her own tidy house, in which she packed healthy, colorful lunches for Kate and made sure everyone had clean clothes for work and school. This room was a vault of female secrets and sovereignty, with none of the shame or apologies that came from asking for what they wanted the moment they stepped outside.

She only wished they could unite the Place with the ever-changing Fronts they had to use as waiting rooms around Chicago, houses and apartments belonging to Service members where the people supporting the woman getting the abortion would await their return. But they had to protect themselves—and the women—and putting some distance between the crime and the bystanders had always seemed prudent.

No blindfolds, though. As soon as she and Siobhan had realized they could do the D&C’s themselves, that they could make the Service an entirely female organization, they had burned every scrap of fabric they’d ever used to take women to see male abortionists. Instead, drivers between Fronts and the Place took a circuitous route and turned onto the apartment block from the corner where the street sign was hidden in a tangle of oak branches.

Veronica took the lobster pot of surgical tools into the kitchen, where she found Trudy making more coffee. The Service consumed a lot of coffee between Fronts and the Place; since they asked women not to eat before their abortions, it was the only thing with flavor they could consume for hours; afterward, women were always served a treat like a Danish or sandwiches or stew, depending on the time of day. When no-nonsense Trudy with her trusty black notebook and calculator took over the ordering of basic supplies, she quickly saw they went through two cans of Folgers every day, pretty consistently. Plus, twelve extra-large boxes of Kotex, eleven boxes of Kleenex, nine of plastic gloves, a gallon of bleach, and a partridge in a pear tree.

“How’s it going?” Trudy asked Veronica as she turned up the heat on the other lobster pot, which was full of water on the stove.

“More vaginas than Mick Jagger sees on tour. And the same number with the clap.”

Trudy snorted a laugh. “Ours are healthier overall, I bet.”

“You don’t think all that LSD makes for healthy pussies?”

“Don’t you mean honky tonk pussies?” Holding an invisible mic to her mouth, Trudy sang, “Hooo-o-o-o-o-o-onky tonk pussies . . . Gimme, gimme, gimme . . . the . . . honky ton—”

The two of them laughed too hard for her to keep singing.

“That’s as good as ‘Blue Suede Balls.’” Veronica practically hiccuped her words, recalling Trudy’s pee-in-your-pants-funny rendition of the Elvis classic from last year’s holiday party.

When they recovered, Veronica wiped a tear from her eye and asked, “How are you anyway? Still studying for the CPA exam?”

“I took it and passed,” Trudy said with a proud smile.

“Congratulations! So what’s next?” And please don’t tell me you have to quit the Service; you’re the best, and we’re short-staffed as it is.

While she waited for the water to boil, Veronica listened to Trudy describe interviews at accounting firms, and whether she might also want to study international tax law, and was immensely relieved when she concluded, “And don’t worry, I’m going to stay at the Service. A new job just might mean I have to work nights and weekends instead of weekdays, though.”

“Anything you want,” Veronica said, meaning it. Trudy had come such a long way since her own abortion a year ago, one of the very first Veronica had performed with her own hands; then, Trudy had been ready to drop out of college and was high half the time, but the scare of the pregnancy and release of the abortion had woken her up to the life she wanted to live. A month later, she’d come back to Veronica and said she was going to stay in college and give up the weed and wanted nothing more than to work with the kindest women she’d ever known. And thank God, because no one could keep books like Trudy.

Veronica went to the cupboard and got out the Oreos. She unscrewed the top of one and licked out the creamy middle. The baby inside her just could not get enough junk food. Lately, she craved things she never would have eaten normally: every kind of grocery store cookie, flavored potato chips, and strawberry ice cream. Strawberry! Usually, she hated strawberry; in fact, when faced with a carton of Neapolitan, she always scooped out the chocolate and vanilla and left the pretty but ultimately unappealing strip of pink untouched.

Danielle wandered in looking freshly showered, her wet hair pulled back in a ponytail, her jeans hanging off the blades of her narrow hips. Veronica inhaled deeply to see if she could detect the smell of pot, but thankfully all that hit her nose was the fruity scent of Danielle’s shampoo; her eyes seemed to track pretty normally, too. What a relief. She’d shown up high to a shift about a month ago, and Veronica had sent her home, whispering furiously, Never come here on any kind of drug again. Way too much was at stake to risk it all on a sloppy D&C. Danielle had never come smelling of anything worse than nicotine since then.

That day, Danielle was Veronica’s partner in the OR for the afternoon since Siobhan, who’d been her morning partner, had to leave to meet Kate and Charlie. Fingering her long braid with fingers denuded of their usual rings, since it was Service policy to pull back their hair and wear no jewelry when in the OR, Veronica admired the sliver of impossibly small, supple midriff that showed between Danielle’s belt and shirt hem. Oh, to be twenty-three again. How was it possible thirty-one could feel so old?

“That guy is chain-smoking again on the corner,” Danielle informed Veronica and Trudy as she poured herself a cup of coffee.

“The one in the Cubs cap?” Trudy asked.

“Yep.” Danielle slurped her coffee, unperturbed. “You think maybe he’s competition? Or, like, a Peeping Tom?”

“Nothing to peep here,” Veronica said, enjoying the irony—what there was to see here would make most people, especially men, quake in their Cubs caps.

“Peep!” Trudy chirped, and the other two laughed.

“How many times have we seen him now?” Veronica asked. “Three? In as many weeks? Is he always here on the same day? Wednesday?”

“I think last time, Melanie saw him on a weekend,” offered Danielle.

“Good thing we have friendlies at the precinct,” said Trudy, looking to Veronica for verification.

“Yep, there’re plenty of officers looking out for us.” Every pore on her body erupted in goose bumps, however, as she thought about Officer Sam Wilder, who’d been champing at the bit to raid Jane for ages. They were safe because Wilder’s boss, Chief Robert Sullivan, had sent his daughter to the Service, then recommended it to several other officers in the city, who sent their own wives and daughters and nieces and girlfriends to Jane and made them the safest open secret in Chicago. Doug’s connections at the police station said those guys kept Wilder in line. Still, she worried about him occasionally. If she let herself think about him too often, she started to feel sick, so she’d walled him off in a part of her mind.

“How many D&C’s this afternoon?” Danielle asked, changing the subject as she opened the fridge and took out the sandwich supplies.

“Eight,” Veronica replied.

“Ten,” Trudy corrected her.

“What?”

“I had to add two more,” she said apologetically.

This is why we need to hire more people. Veronica sighed.

“Tomorrow is full, too. I already added three to that schedule. You can go home, if you need to, and I’ll do them,” Trudy offered.

“I can stay late,” said Danielle.

“I can’t,” Veronica said, filling with dread at the thought of the long afternoon ahead of her. “I need to meet a new prospective member tonight.” Much as she hated to admit it to herself, she was starting to realize that she couldn’t book her days quite so solid. The pregnancy just made her too tired, and she regretted her agreement to meet with this mysterious Phyllis, who’d insisted on meeting Veronica in person. But in order to maximize her time with Kate all the days she wasn’t at the Service, she had to fill her workdays to the brim.

“That’s fine, I can fill in tonight when you have to go,” Trudy insisted.

“Thank you.” Veronica sighed. “And I’m sorry.”

“You’ve worked late a thousand times.” Trudy shrugged, and even though it was true, Veronica felt guilty.

“Still. Thank you,” she said again.

The pot of water had come to a rolling boil, so she began dropping the curettes and speculums from the other pot into the water for sterilization. Veronica liked these mundane tasks, when she felt like she was being productive but her mind could also wander, and she didn’t have to be as fully present as she did every other minute of her life when there were so many—so many—other demands on her time.

 All You Have to Do Is Call will hit shelves on September 19, 2023, but you can pre-order it right now. 

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Lacy Baugher Milas is the Books Editor at Paste Magazine, but loves nerding out about all sorts of pop culture. You can find her on Twitter @LacyMB.