‘You have to stand up to illegitimate authority’: what veteran abortion activists can teach us in the Trump era

The telephone sat in the dormitory hallway, and when it rang it might have been for any of the residents – young women in their teens and early 20s, all students at the University of Chicago. Calls came from family and friends and boyfriends, from colleagues and classmates and clubs. But sometimes the voice at the end of the line would ask for “Jane”.

This was 1965, and in Chicago the social justice movement was gathering pace – a new era that encompassed civil rights, student rights, women’s rights and resistance to the war in Vietnam. Among those involved was Heather Booth, a 19-year-old social sciences student from New York. Booth had spent the summer of 1964 in Mississippi, volunteering as part of the Freedom Summer project, an attempt to register as many African American voters as possible. It was an experience that had galvanised her and taught some valuable lessons: “One is that if you organise, even in what seem like the most hopeless circumstances, you can change the world,” she says. “Number two: sometimes you have to stand up to illegitimate authority.”

Back in Chicago, her reputation as an underground organiser now well-rooted, she was approached by a friend with a quite different problem: his sister was pregnant, not ready to have a child and nearly suicidal. She wanted an abortion, which was then illegal across the US. Booth was startled. “I hadn’t ever thought of the issue before,” she recalls. “But I said I’d try to find a doctor for her.”

Booth approached the medical committee for the civil rights movement and identified Dr TRM Howard as potentially sympathetic. A former civil rights leader from Mississippi, he had relocated to Chicago after his name appeared on a Ku Klux Klan death list. They talked over the phone. “I found out the terms and made an arrangement, and didn’t really think much more about it,” she remembers. “But then word must have spread, and a little while later someone else called, and then a little while later someone else. And I realised there was a far greater need than I had appreciated.”

For three years, Booth ran a one-woman illegal abortion service – first from her university dormitory, and then from her Chicago apartment. Keen to keep the process as