And it hurts my heart.

The founders of Jane, an underground network in Chicago, US that assisted people in getting abortions. From the left moving right: Martha Scott, Jeanne Galatzer-Levy, Abby Parisers, Sheila Smith and Madeline Schwenk.

Martha Scott was 19 in 1965, when her friend's sister became pregnant and Scott helped her find a doctor to perform an abortion. The group connected individuals seeking abortions with doctors, and later, performed abortions themselves. Their clients were informed they were not doctors, but doing abortions themselves allowed them to keep costs low. They made people aware of the services through signs with slogans like "'Pregnant? Don't Want to Be? Call Jane." The group operated for seven years and performed an estimated 11,000 abortions; no deaths were ever reported.

Quote from Scott: "You're messing around inside somebody else's body. It's not necessarily given that you won't do harm. It wasn't perfect, by any means. But we were dealing with women who really didn't have other options."

Quote from Galatzer-Levy: "I hadn't had so much as a speeding ticket [when I joined]. But abortion really was the front line, it was where women were dying."

this (archived link) was a very recent article on conditions at MDC, here's some excerpts:

THE PEOPLE DETAINED AT MDC OFTEN don’t see the sky for weeks at a time. The little sunlight they get falls through small windows at the tops of a wall in the recreation center. When it’s cold, inmates stand in the squares of light, lifting their faces to the ceiling, to soak it in.

“You’re not breathing fresh air,” says Brandon, who adds that the windows are so small it’s sometimes hard to tell whether it’s day or night. The lack of access to fresh air is what makes MDC distinct from other federal prisons, where inmates are typically allowed an hour a day in outside yards. Brandon says the indoor rec centers resemble a high school gym, a square contained by four walls, only one with a window, with nothing inside but a basketball court.

“They cannot shower or shave and are sometimes not even afforded toilet paper. Meals are not provided with utensils, forcing inmates to eat with their hands. They have no ability to consult with loved ones or supportive figures. Ironically, individuals on ‘suicide watch’ don’t even receive psychiatric care.”

There have been a series of lawsuits against the detention center for inhumane conditions, particularly during the Covid pandemic.

At least three federal judges in recent years have refused to send defendants to MDC because of the conditions and frequent lockdowns, which can leave inmates in their cells for days at a time with no access to showers. In January 2024, federal judge Jesse Furman issued a 19-page decision about MDC’s conditions, citing a case in which the jail had refused to transport an inmate for surgery to repair his cheekbone, which another inmate had broken in a fight. The defendant had to have his cheek rebroken ahead of his surgery in order to heal properly.

In August 2024, a federal judge from the Eastern District of New York said he’d identified “shocking instances of brutal violence” within MDC in just the previous five months, including two homicides, two stabbings, and an assault resulting in fractured eye socket. He highlighted an incident where three inmates stabbed another inmate 44 times in an “open area without supervision,” and the judge wrote the response to the event took an “unconscionably long time.”

Just this past December, an inmate died in custody after MDC’s medical staff missed a lung cancer diagnosis for an inmate complaining of chest pain. A jail doctor ordered a CT scan in early November 2023, and the test was delayed for months. The inmate wasn’t told about the mass the CT found until the end of April 2024, after he was already coughing up blood and had repeatedly requested his test results. “The results were somehow missed by the health services department, and the delay was unfortunate,” the medical staff wrote in response to the missed diagnosis.

“The MDC has a long and documented history of inhumane conditions, including chronic overcrowding, severe understaffing, and woefully inadequate medical care,” Estevao tells me. She adds there have also been repeated reports of maggot-infested meals, and recently an inmate had to be treated medically for choking on a piece of plastic in his food.

“What people experience at MDC, it’s not just punishment, it’s neglect, chronic understaffing, systematic failure, dehumanization.”

I still notice the constant pins and needles in my right foot and the sun burnt feeling on my back as my shirt rubs. My back pain and leg pain is screaming at me near 24/7. Too many people talk to me at once and I can't figure it out because I have auditory processing disorder. Loud noises hurt my head.

For public libraries, one of the ways we secure funding year to year is lending. Governments don’t want to fund more books if they’re not being used and the way we measure use is by issues. Regardless of whether you read it or not, whether you have it for a day or a month, if you issue it to your library card, we get the stats! It makes the library look good!