It’s rare to hear the term “abortion” in a Hollywood movie. It’s far rarer to actually see one depicted on screen. Call Jane – which, starting today, is now available to purchase on digital platforms like Amazon’s Prime Video, Apple TV, Vudu, and more—does both, and shatters the stigma surrounding society’s most taboo procedure with one brilliant scene.
Based on the true story of underground abortions in 1960s Chicago, Call Jane stars Elizabeth Banks as a dutiful housewife named Joy who falls pregnant with her second child. When she is told she will likely die in childbirth and is refused a life-saving abortion, Joy finds her life in the hands of an underground network of reproductive activists called “The Janes.” The Janes used code names, safe houses, and fronts in order to secretly provide the then widely-illegal procedure to hundreds who needed it.
Joy is driven by one of the network’s leaders, Virginia (played by the always-great Sigourney Weaver) to a secret location, where a male doctor who works with the network provides the procedure for a steep fee. Unlike Virginia, this doctor, Dean, (played by Cory Michael Smith) expresses no sympathy for Joy. His bedside manner is non-existent. He offers no reassurances; he simply begins to rummage around in Joy’s cervix and explains—in a cool, detached voice—step-by-step what she will experience next.
Unlike the abortion scene in Andrew Dominik’s controversial Marilyn Monroe biopic Blonde—which featured both a POV “cervix shot” and a CGI talking fetus begging for its life—Call Jane director Phyllis Nagy (also known for writing Carol) doesn’t resort to graphic images for shock value. We stay on Banks’ face for the majority of the procedure, as she struggles to keep her terror in check. The camera doesn’t cut away. It creates a veil of intimacy between the viewer and Joy; the viewer feels for her in the way this stranger poking around in her clearly does not.
And yet, though it’s clearly terrifying, Joy’s abortion is not depicted as overly traumatic. She doesn’t run from the table screaming (as Ana de Armas does in Blonde). She doesn’t break down sobbing guilt-ridden tears for her unborn child. Nothing goes wrong. There are no complications. It is simply a routine—albeit stressful and scary— medical procedure. Anyone who has ever been stressed, anxious, and scared in the presence of a less-than-sympathetic doctor can, and will, relate.
In an interview with Indiewire, Banks said that was exactly the emotion she was going for while filming the scene. “Women… we give our bodies over to medical professionals all the time. And those procedures, none of them are fun. Your annual exam is not fun. And it’s invasive. It was a lot of sense memory, frankly,” Banks said. “I’ve had that experience of being in someone else’s hands, a man’s hands, in the stirrups and having zero empathy coming at me. I just wanted to build empathy in the audience for this woman and the other women in the story, going through these kinds of procedures where you are literally giving over your most intimate body to strangers.”
As you’re watching Joy lie on that table, you’ll be struck by how taboo the scene feels. There’s no nudity or blood, but it feels wrong—forbidden, almost—to be allowed to see this. Yet how many times have we watched a woman giving birth on screen? How many TV shows have depicted chemotherapy treatments, CAT scans, and brain surgeries? Though it’s increasingly hard to receive one in the United States, hundreds of thousands of people get an abortion every year.
Yet for such a common procedure, Call Jane is one of the few films brave enough to show abortion for what it actually is. Now, more than ever, that’s what post-Roe audiences need to see.
