you don’t need to ask for jane anymore: a guide to coming to chicago for a safe, low-cost abortion

A lot of people in the US are super worried about the Supreme Court axing Roe v. Wade, but what they might not know is that some states have laws in place that will protect the right to reproductive choice and abortion if that happens. One of these states is the state of Illinois. In 2019, a law was passed that protects abortion rights within the state even if the federal right to an abortion falls. This means that if Roe v. Wade is overturned, abortion will still be a protected right in Illinois. Even before Roe, Chicago was a haven for safe abortions- you just called and asked for Jane.

Now, safe abortion access is the law of the land in IL, and there are several groups who can help you. This post is long, but I think it’s worthwhile. Even if you don’t read all the way through it, maybe save it for later. You or someone you know might need it. If you want to stop now, the TL;DR is this:

I’d like to start by saying that the closer to home you get your abortion, should you need one, the easier it will be for you… probably. It depends on your individual situation AND your safety. If I still lived in Indiana and I needed an abortion, I’d probably leave to get it done, even though there are abortion providers in Indiana, because Indiana is super hostile and there’s lots of clinic protestors- for example, when I was taking my GRE my senior year at Notre Dame, the testing center was in this little strip mall in Mishawaka next to Planned Parenthood. Despite the fact that the PP in Mishawaka does not provide abortions, there were protestors who yelled at me for going in there. I wasn’t even going to PP. I’d like to say that I said something devastatingly cool but I just ran in flustered. Point being: It really, really would have sucked if I was there for healthcare instead of a standardized test for graduate school. And that’s a very tame, mild situation! Real abortion clinic protests are often much more devastating! 

ANYWAYS. The less you have to travel, the easier things tend to be, if it’s safe to get an abortion where you are and if your state will have protected abortions if Roe is overturned. If you’re not sure what might happen in your state in that case, this map has a clear, succinct overview of the legal status of abortion in each state and all US territories. You will want to click through to that link, because this image isn’t interactive.

[ID: a map of the US with states and territories sorted by their legal protections for abortion into four categories: expanded access in the case of Roe v. Wade being overturned, protected, not protected, and hostile. IL is highlighted.]

So let’s say you live in any of those red states. (Yellow and blue are safe- abortion access is protected there.) Let’s say, worst case scenario, Roe gets overturned and you get pregnant and you want to terminate. You will be able to do that in IL, and it’s relatively easy to do that in Chicago for a relatively low cost and with the benefit of a robust support network of people who want to reaffirm your reproductive choices.

First, if you’re a minor and you don’t want to tell your parents because it’s not safe for you to do so, get a judicial waiver of parental notification. The IL ACLU has a judicial bypass hotline. This will come at no cost to you. Do this ASAP, because it takes time to get it set up! You can do this by calling the hotline at 877-442-9727, texting 312-560-6607, or emailing judicialbypass@aclu-il.org.

Next, you need to get an appointment set up. You could get a referral from someone local to you, but this can be tricky- 87% of counties in the US don’t have an abortion provider, and google can lead you to a crisis pregnancy center. They will not help you. If you have a local Planned Parenthood, call them. Even if they don’t provide abortions, they can refer you to someone who can. If you’re coming to Chicago, which this post… kind of assumes you are… you can call any of these groups to talk about your options and what clinics can help you. I recommend starting with FPA or PP; those are two actual clinics. MAC and CAF are funds- they can direct you but they can’t schedule an appointment for you.

Family Planning Associates (FPA): 312-707-8988 or use their online schedule tool, found here: https://www.fpachicago.com/schedule-now/ Chicago Abortion Fund (CAF): Phone: 312-663-0338 (note: the helpline is only staffed MWF from 3:30-6:30 PM CST, or email helpline@chicagoabortionfund.org Midwest Access Coalition (MAC): 847-750-6224 or email support@midwestaccesscoalition.org Planned Parenthood of Illinois (PP): 1-800-230-7526

You might want to shop around and see which clinic costs the least, and is the most practical for you to get to. FPA has a lot of patient resources, as does PP. Don’t be afraid to ask for financial assistance. The people staffing those organizations have extensive networks and deep compassion for their patients- if the clinic can’t help, they might know who can.

Once you’ve made an appointment, now’s the time to start gathering financial aid. Some insurance, including IL Medicaid, covers it. If yours does not, or if the copay is still too much, this is where abortion funds come into play. Many states have their own abortion funds for state residents, so you might have to look around to see who can help you. I’d start with the National Network of Abortion Funds.

You also need to figure out transportation and housing while you’re in the city to get your abortion. This isn’t super necessary if you’re just coming for the pill abortion, but if you’re coming for a d and c or other surgical procedure, you will be staying for a couple of days. THIS is why I’m writing this up, because abortion funds typically only are able to help cover the financial cost of the procedure. It’s expensive to stay somewhere and it can be absolutely terrifying if you’re on your own! Navigating while you’re in pain from the procedure can be an absolute devil of a time, too! However, Chicago has MAC (contact info above), which is a practical access fund, which means that they help pay for transportation to the city (bus tickets and train tickets) and around the city (volunteer drivers or volunteers who take rideshares with clients), food, aftercare medicine (painkillers, etc.), and housing, and there’s also free access to emotional support staff throughout your stay. This is not just open to IL residents; it’s open to anyone coming to the city for an abortion. ALSO if you go through FPA, they have a partnership with the Hampton Inn a block away from their location where their patients get a discount. If you go that route, just talk to FPA about housing and they’ll hook you up. This can be super helpful if you need some evidence that you’re on a “business trip” or something like that- if you are in a position where you need an excuse for your safety, that might work well.

Hopefully you won’t need this post- but if you do, I hope it helps. Feel free to share it around. If you have anti-choice opinions and you feel the need to share, don’t. This isn’t the space for it; you will be blocked and your comments removed. And then remember that criminalizing abortion won’t stop abortion. It’ll just stop safe abortions. Also, increased access to abortion, funnily enough, tends to be the thing that lowers abortion rates, because increased access to abortion comes part and parcel with increased access to birth control and general health and sex education.

Reblogging this because it’s always relevant… and because an administrative decision by MAC’s incredible leadership means they don’t just do bus and train tickets anymore. They will also help pay for airline tickets if you need to fly. If you are in the US and need to come to Chicago for an abortion, MAC’s got your back.

In light of recent events.

https://www.elle.com/culture/career-politics/a37668369/abortion-funds-crisis-where-to-donate-end-of-roe/

https://abortionfunds.org/

http://www.sparkrj.org/

https://keepourclinics.org/

https://www.nirhealth.org/local-reproductive-freedom-index/

You know. Some people could really stand to get more comfortable with the idea of “you shouldn’t say that because it’s mean”. Especially with really common body shaming and straight up bullying lines.

“You shouldn’t make ugly bald jokes because what if a transman on T sees it!”

“You shouldn’t make virgin jokes because what if someone who’s asexual sees it!”

How about you just don’t make them because they’re mean. How about people can be balding or a virgin for a number of reasons and also don’t deserve to be routinely made fun of. How about saying that the reason you shouldn’t make x joke because it spares x specific identity’s feelings also let’s them know that you actually have no problem saying or thinking bald people are ugly or virgins are stupid or etc but you’re just not saying it in front of them. How about you understand this kind of body shaming and bullying especially in a very public setting online are always going to have way more unintended damage to people who did nothing wrong than damage to the person you’re upset with.

Sometimes the best reason to not make a bad joke like that is because it’s fucking mean.

i think people need to stop glorifying sassiness and bitterness and start promoting the idea of actually being fucking nice and civil to people who did nothing to you.

“they’re an asshole but they have a heart of gold” can fucking miss me, give me that “they’re kind with a heart of gold” every goddamn time. It doesn’t matter that he’s nice to his fucking dog if he makes the waitress cry, fuck that dude

TIL Dr. Sigmund Freud was addicted to smoking and failed to quit for good throughout a 45 years long battle that included 33 operations for cancer of the jaw, an artificial jaw replacement, and attacks of “tobacco angina” exacerbated by nicotine . He was known to smoke up to twenty cigars a day.

via reddit.com

Jesus ffucking christ bro.

Seems like he had an oral fixation… Almost as if he were replacing the cigarette with… No i shant say…

Then we’ll all say it together

F

O

R

F

R

O

D

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My little sister's new boyfriend got a tattoo for her about a month ago and he wanted matching tattoos so he decided to get uh. The tattoo on her ankle of her ex boyfriend's name that she hasn't gotten covered up yet

She broke up with him but I also just got the same tattoo

OK my dad also got it

DYLAN!

It took five months but we finally convinced my stepmom to also get it

My fucking manager got it

The human affinity for memes transcends all reason

Fuck it, post lamb stew slow cooker recipe

How high was I last night?

How much lamb stew did I want to make??

1,814¾ lbs of Lamb????

>960 cups beef broth >2 bay leaves

the unfathomable power of bay leaf

“Oh [other profession] wants better working conditions? WELL [MY profession] is HARDER I work TWENTY HOUR DAYS and I am NOT ALLOWED BREAKS and I’m PAID FOR SHIT and I have NO INSURANCE and I NEVER SEE MY CHILDREN so WHY are YOU COMPLAINING LOL”

have you considered that maybe YOUR job ALSO should not suck that much

Story time. This is not so much for OP but for anyone else who might not have union experience: Bear in mind that there is a strong propaganda effort to get people to this viewpoint. They’re not being willfully obtuse.

I spoke to a neighbour the other day. She’d just taken voluntary a lay-off from her factory job because she had an ongoing injury and they wouldn’t let her adjust her hours in a sensible way. She’d been struggling to make it work anyway but her back was getting really bad. So when they put the word out that they were looking for volunteers to take lay-offs, she put up her hand. Still, she was proud to tell me that she was considered one of their best and fastest workers, even with the injury. She was frustrated that one of the newer workers seemed to have gotten various accommodations, even though that worker was nowhere near as good.

I could tell that she’d been having similar conversations with her coworkers on the factory floor for years. Who got extras they didn’t “deserve.” Who was a shoddy worker and made life harder for everyone. Who came in to work even though their parent had just died to make sure that nobody had to pick up their slack. And all of that pervaded with propaganda about “greedy unions” who slim down your already-skinny paycheque just because they’re all lazy slackers who don’t want to pull their weight and don’t appreciate the nice boss for hiring them. (This is the same across all types of jobs. Next story time I’ll talk about two university profs who grew to fame and fortune via unions and the social safety net and yet both engaged in union busting.)

My neighbour’s injury, incidentally, was a result of her work at the factory, but she didn’t want to try for compensation or anything else. She’d “never taken a single sick day in 20 years” and wasn’t “the kind of person who made waves” so she was just going the regular unemployment route but finding the systems obscure and challenging. She was hurt and shocked that her old employer would treat one of their best workers this way and leave them to deal with the fall-out by themselves.

Meanwhile, Canadian (federal) government workers were striking in Ottawa. And she expressed frustration that they felt “entitled to strike” when the (provincial) services she was accessing were so shoddy and difficult to navigate. Why did they “get to” strike if their work was apparently so poor? She had no sympathy for them.

I pushed back gently. Her factory floor job wasn’t union, but the admin staff was union. They seemed to get a better deal. We spoke about strength in numbers, and how hard it is to try and get your due from your employer without anyone to help you. And how they make all these forms complicated on purpose so it’s easier to deny you money or other support. And how it would be great to have someone to go to meetings with you, who knew all the legal stuff, and who could help you with the forms, and get you the money for the medical services you needed.

She wasn’t pro-union by the time I left, but we’d agreed on a few things, and I’d framed a few of her concerns in a way that made her more ambivalent about strikes (rather than outright hostile). Still, as we were saying our goodbyes, she said, “let’s hope they hurry up and get back to work eh!”

Because imagine what it would cost her to turn around and agree that unions are good, and strikes are good, and you should fight your employer for your fair compensation and your rights. Twenty years of taking no sick leave, working herself to the bone on not enough money, laid off and struggling with the system for basic support. She’s proud of her suffering, all the times she didn’t complain, all the times she pushed on even as the going got harder and harder.

Because if she can’t be proud of it… then what? She’s dumb for taking a non-union job? She should’ve organised and could’ve had better pay and a severance package and free physiotherapy for life? If she accepts that unions and strikes are good, she’s still in pain, still unemployed, still stuck with her lack of support, but now also feels like a fucking idiot for giving 20 years of her life to a boss who threw her out without a second thought.

So. Don’t put up with union busting and do talk to the people in your life about solidarity, but do realise that being anti-union isn’t just folks being aggressively wrong for the sake of it. They’ve been lied to. And they possibly have a lot of complex grief and identity and other experiences tied up in this.

“If she accepts that unions and strikes are good, she’s still in pain, still unemployed, still stuck with her lack of support, but now also feels like a fucking idiot for giving 20 years of her life to a boss who threw her out without a second thought.”

This.

And this applies to a lot of other things you might want people to change their minds about.

t*rfs also like to twist the fact that there’s little long-term medical research into transitioning (for both trans women and trans men) in order to abuse and frighten trans men into detransitioning (which, btw, often leads to the suicidal depression that dysphoria causes and transitioning alleviates!)

like that popular post about how binding even with a good binder will fuck you up for life and make it impossible to have top surgery later on? written by a crypto-t*rf who thinks trans men are lesbians

the number of replies/tags that say something like “i’ve been terrified to bind and/or thought i’d completely fucked up my chance of getting top surgery because of that post” is horrific tbh and if you cis people actually gave a single shit about trans people you’d stop circulating shit like that

So wait. What’s the truth? Will binding fuck up your chances of getting top surgery?

no, it won’t. here’s an email from my GP, who’s been working in the Fenway Health system (which focuses on LGBT healthcare and research) for over a decade:

transcription:

Binders worn too tight or for too many hours in a day can certainly cause some chronic rib/chest pain; they may even cause some scarlike thickening of the tissue under the skin - usually at the margins where the breast folds down against the chest wall in general. This can be uncomfortable, too. But none of this translates into making top surgery a problem. Not at all.

None of the surgeons I’ve sent patients to have ever remarked about this and nothing in standard practice or the general literature suggests or supports that conclusion.

TIL The Double Empathy Problem theory suggests social difficulties experienced by autistic people when interacting with non-autistic people are due to reciprocal differences, not an inherent deficiency, most autistic people are able to display good social reciprocity with most other autistic people

via reddit.com

okay but the BEST part of the first study discussed (conducted by an autistic person!) Is that it shows that while easy, calm, mutual communication and social interaction is often more natural between two autistic people than it is between an autistic person and a non-autistic person, it is ALSO like this when an autistic person encounters a non-autistic person who imitates the autistic individual’s behaviours- neurotypical parents copying autistic children’s play, for example, apparently receive more positive engagement from their child- which is SERIOUSLY FUCKING IMPORTANT and VERY VERY GOOD because it is, once again, scientific evidence that bullshit like aversion therapy and enforced conformance and FUCKING “quiet hands” aren’t “”“”“solutions to the autism problem”“”“” and that “”“”“problems”“”“ with autism don’t stem from BEING autistic, but rather, from how NON AUSTISTIC PEOPLE TREAT AUTISTIC PEOPLE.

IE, once again, there is nothing bad or wrong about being autistic

"The trannies should be able to piss in whatever toilet they want and change their bodies however they want. Why is it my business if some chick has a dick or a guy has a pie? I'm not a trannie or a fag so I don't care, just give 'em the medicine they need."

"This is an LGBT safe space. Of COURSE I fully support individuals who identify as transgender and their right to self-determination! I just think that transitioning is a very serious choice and should be heavily regulated. And there could be a lot of harm in exposing cis children to such topics, so we should be really careful about when it is appropriate to mention trans issues or have too much trans visibility."

One of the above statements is Problematic and the other is slightly annoying. If we disagree on which is which then working together for a better future is going to get really fucking difficult.

I think this is something young people in particular are confused about. My dad has always had a slightly off color sense of humor, he always feels the need to privately ask me “boy turned girl or girl turned boy?” if I mention a friend and stress said friend’s pronouns, and yet when we had repair work done in the house and the worker was listening to a podcast discussing the evils of transgender people and how to cleanse society, he went out of his way to contact the owner of the business to discuss his disappointment with that worker’s conduct and stress the negative effect that could have had if there had been trans kids in our home.

Our allies will never be perfect. They will never use the perfect language or have the perfect politics. But we have to appreciate those allies and meet them where they are, especially if they are willing to learn.

“Tabitha the cat works as a resident vet nurse”

(via)

"This would fix her" no, it would make her happier, but it would also make her worse.

Genuine question: What criteria do you use to make that distinction?

Collateral damage.

#potentially also blast radius

Compare paychecks with you co-workers. It is the best way to get equality.

If you are confident you’re not being fleeced then you are the one holding the magic number the bosses don’t want your coworkers to know- the number the job is actually worth. You now have the power to do immeasurable good by making sure the people getting screwed over know that number.

That was me, once. It’s not hard. Do the thing.

bwaaaah

i hate it when you ask people to treat fat people with just some semblance of decency and you get hit with "stop promoting obesity" -_-................. just because you said that im promoting obesity now.