Abortion is not a personal issue for me. As a gay man, I have never had a sexual partner who needed to terminate a pregnancy and, if all goes according to plan, never will. My distance from the risks and rewards of childbearing has meant that I have resisted voicing a strongly held point of view. When pressed, my stance accords with the one held by Bill Clinton and, if public polling is to be believed, the majority of the American public: Abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare.”

In the wake of last week’s Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, I watched a new documentary about an underground abortion network operating in 1960sChicago that made this most vexatious of moral quandaries register unlike anything I’ve ever seen. The Janestells the story of a group of young women who defied the Chicago political machine, police department, and Catholic Church to help other women in need of safe, affordable, and illegal abortions. The film opens with one such woman recounting her traumatic experience dealing with the local mob. Speaking over the phone, she had to communicate in code. Did she want a Chevrolet, a Cadillac, or a Rolls Royce, the man on the other end of the line asked, each a euphemism for the quality of the procedure, with the top-of-the-line option costing $1,000 (not a small amount, especially at the time). Able only to afford a Chevy, she was told to show up at a grimy motel room, where the abortionist muttered three sentences: “Where’s the money?,” “Lie back and do as I tell you” and, after he finished, “Get in the bathroom.” She was left bleeding and had to call herself a taxi home.

This situation was ripe for abuse. It was not uncommon for the abortionist—who in most cases was not a medical professional—to demand sexual favors in exchange for his work. Understandably fed up with these appalling circumstances, a group of women banded together to start the film’s eponymous collective, dubbed after the name they told women to ask for when calling their hotline. “There was a philosophical obligation on our part, on somebody’s part, to disrespect a law that disrespected women,” one of the organizers explains. Now that Roe has been overturned, there should be no doubt that women in states where abortion is suddenly illegal will confront conditions similar to those recounted so harrowingly in this film.

As the author of a new book about the Cold War-era gay subculture of Washington, D.C., this all resonated very strongly. Like women seeking abortions in pre-Roe America, gay people once were criminals, and they faced the same antagonists in law enforcement, the government, organized religion, and the medical establishment. (OBGYNs at the time were 95% male, one woman recalls, and doctors were treated “like kings.”) Gay men used to meet each other in public parks and toilets, where they were subject to the murderous predations of hustlers and the entrapment operations of police. Like the women of The Janes, gay people had to develop their own codes of communication and underground networks to ensure their survival, and a group consciousness was similarly forged through common struggle against adversity.

Chief among those adversaries was their own anonymity. In his 1955 essay “The Homosexual Villain,” Norman Mailer explained how his own negative attitudes toward gay people derived from ignorance. “I did believe—as so many heterosexuals believe—that there was an intrinsic relation between homosexuality and ‘evil,’ and it seemed perfectly natural to me, as well as symbolically just, to treat the subject in such a way. The irony is that I did not know a single homosexual during all those years.” When gay people lived in the closet, they were subject to the most vicious calumnies, whether in the fiction of novelists or the conspiracies of politicians. Only when they came out and made themselves visible by sharing their stories with friends, family, and neighbors, did the bigotry begin to dissipate.

Like the shame and disgrace that once attended to “the love that dare not speak its name,” the stigma around abortion has had a similarly inhibiting effect on those who have experienced it. Whatever one thinks about abortion, the debate must be informed by the testimonies of those directly affected by it, which is a massive number of people. One in four women will have an abortion by the age of 45, more than twice Alfred Kinsey’s famous (and likely inflated) estimate of 10% of the male population being homosexual. While homosexuality and abortion are very different issues, a similar transformation in public opinion could take shape if more women “come out.”

James Kirchick is a Tablet columnist and the author of Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington (Henry Holt, 2022). He tweets @jkirchick.