Roevember and Beyond

 

All the talk today, and possibly for years to come, will be about the overturning of Roe vs Wade by the Supreme Court (06/24/22). Women are up in arms in what they consider an assault on their health care choices and rights. Many are sounding the alarm of a return to back alley abortions where many women lost their lives in a desparate attempt to get rid of an unwanted pregnancy. Women are pushing for a ROEVEMBER when they head to the voting polls to vote against those enacting laws making medical choices for women and limiting their healthcare choices. Hostages currently in the Israel - Hamas conflict, are being raped and inpregnated, and by U.S. laws, will be forced to continue the pregnancy of the rapist once released.

But will women really return to extreme and archaic means of aborting an unwanted pregnancy? Over fifty-one years ago, before the advancements in technology, women had to resort to dangerous practices and "gimmicks" to end pregnancies. The advancement of medical information and application at speeds and accuracies unimaginable in the day of back alley abortions, is now at the fingertips of women. Will HOME HERBAL ABORTIONS be a viable alternative for women seeking to end a pregnancy? Will the internet's medical offerings be the "go to" for desparate women wanting to end a pregnancy? As with the opiod epidemic, will there be a "health crises" of poisinings from attempt to end pregnancies herbally? (Most women do not admit to their physician to taking at home remedies to end pregnancies when seeking treatment when it goes wrong).

The internet has been a source for bomb making and the ability to make lethal weapons for several years now. Will it be the go to source for abortion needs? Will there be a rise in hollistic abortions or apothecary services as a healthy/safe alternative and a new choice in women's health care due to laws restricting doctors from performing abortions? Let's look to the past in determining a new possible path for the future.

Here I am today at the only abortion clinic in Jackson, MS as pro life and pro abortion activists make their voices known to women who enter the facility for a sceduled surgical abortion. When medical facilities offering safe surgical abortions were being closed down due to federal rulings, women began searching the internet for viable means of terminating pregnancies. Fear and desparation gave way to entertaining alternatives to keeping unwanted pregnancies. Women were immediately transported, if only in their minds, to the era of pre - Roe v Wade.

In “Eve’s Herbs: A History of Contraception and Abortion in the West,” the author, John M. Riddle, posits that while we may think of ancient and medieval people as superstitious and prone to rely on useless remedies when it came to abortion, many knew what they were doing. The historian illustrates how their methods, most commonly drugs taken orally, were developed through careful observation of nature (noticing, for example, which plants caused livestock to bear fewer offspring), experimentation, and the accumulation of botanical knowledge passed down by word-of-mouth, and also occasionally in written form, including a text by a thirteenth-century physician, Peter of Spain, who later became Pope John XXI!

The plants, which caused pregnancies to end were put in different classifications as to what affect they caused within the body. Certain chemicals within plants or herbs were noted to cause miscarriages or interrupt the nature pattern of menstruation. Detailed documentation of plants and outcomes each plant causes has been available and used for centuries. Modern medicine developed drugs which mimic "treatments" nature offered FIRST for centuries. The medical field also classified the drugs the pharmacidcal companies manufactured and made available for women's healthcare needs. Many plants ingested to terminate pregnancies, did not reliably do so.

An abortifacient ("that which will cause a miscarriage" from Latin: abortus "miscarriage" and faciens "making") is a substance that induces abortion. Common abortifacients used in performing medical abortions include mifepristone, which is typically used in conjunction with misoprostol in a two-step approach. Misoprostol (discussed above) is also used to treat peptic ulcers in patients who have had gastric or intestinal damage from use of NSAIDs. Synthetic oxytocin, which is routinely used safely during term labor, is also commonly used to induce abortion in the second or third trimester. Both synthetic oxytocin (Pitocin) and dinoprostone (Cervidil, Prepidil) are routinely used during healthy, term labor. Pitocin is used to induce and strengthen contractions, and Cervidil is used to prepare the cervix for labor by inducing softening and widening of this opening to the uterus. When used this way, neither medication is considered an abortifacient. However, the same drugs can be used to induce an abortion, particularly after 12 weeks of pregnancy. Methotrexate, a drug often used for management of rheumatoid arthritis, can induce abortion.

Emmenagogues are defined in herbal medicine as herbs capable of stimulating the menstrual flow even when it is not due and are also to be avoided during pregnancy. For centuries, herbal abortifacients have been made from infusions or oils of plants such as pennyroyal (Mentha pulegium), angelica (Angelica species) which I have planted in my flower garden at the moment, and tansy (Tanacetum vulgare). 

Such preparations are no more likely to terminate a pregnancy than they are to induce potentially lethal reactions such as vomiting, hemorrhages, and convulsions in the women who take them. Overconsumption of pennyroyal and mugwort, for example, can cause liver failure, according to Ryan Marino, the medical director of toxicology and addiction at the University Hospitals in Cleveland. Several extreme cases of herbal poisoning among his patients, including some who suffered seizures have been noted with Pennyroyal. Truly effective abortifacients were not developed until the end of the 20th century, when the biochemical processes behind cell division and growth and the role of hormones in reproductive processes were understood. 

The medical literature of classical antiquity often refers to pharmacological use of plants and herbs) means of abortion; abortifacients are mentioned, and sometimes described in detail, in the works of Aristotle, Caelius Aurelianus, Celsus, Dioscorides, Galen, Hippocrates, Oribasius, Paul of Aegina, Pliny, Theodorus Priscianus, Soranus of Ephesus, and others.

In ancient Babylonian texts, scholars have described multiple written prescriptions or instructions for ending pregnancies. Some of these instructions were explicitly for ingesting ingredients to end a pregnancy, whereas other cuneiform texts discuss the ingestion of ingredients to return a missed menstrual period (which is used repeatedly throughout history as a coded reference to abortion).

"To make a pregnant woman lose her foetus: ...Grind nabruqqu plant, let her drink it with wine on an empty stomach, [then her foetus will be aborted]."

The ancient Greek colony of Cyrene at one time had an economy based almost entirely on the production and export of the plant silphium, which had uses ranging from food to a salve for feral dog bites. It was also considered a powerful abortifacient used to "purge the uterus". Silphium figured so prominently in the wealth of Cyrene that the plant appeared on coins minted there.

The ancient city of Cyrene in modern-day Libya was famous for a plant called silphium that grew nowhere else. Silphium was the wonder herb of the classical world. It was a type of fennel, sort of like celery, or maybe parsley, with heart-shaped leaves. The Greeks and later the Romans imported it in massive quantities. They served it in fancy meals like stewed flamingo. They used it to cure growths in the anus and the bites of wild dogs. Men used it as an aphrodisiac. And women used it to, as Hippocrates and Pliny and other doctors at the time delicately put it, “purge the uterus.” Of course, not everyone could afford silphium. The Greek physician Dioscorides wrote down a recipe for “abortion wine” that contained ingredients that could be gathered closer to home—hellebore, squirting cucumber, and scammony—but neglected to mention quantities.

For Aboriginal people in Australia, plants such as giant boat-lip orchid (Cymbidium madidum), quinine bush (Petalostigma pubescens), or blue-leaved mallee (Eucalyptus gamophylla) were ingested, inserted into the body, or were smoked with Cooktown ironwood (Erythrophleum chlorostachys). In the Middle Ages, women who wanted to restore their cycles were instructed to eat, among other things, crushed ants, the saliva of camels, and tail hairs of black-tail deer dissolved in bear fat. But herbs were generally considered more helpful, not just in Europe, but everywhere in the world: blue cohosh, calamus, horseradish, and red cedar in North America; Peruvian bark in South America; the boat-lip orchid, blue-leaved mallee, and Cooktown ironweed in Australia.

Historically, the First Nations, people of eastern Canada used Sanguinaria canadensis (bloodwort) and Juniperus virginiana to induce abortions

According to Virgil Vogel, a historian of the indigenous societies of North America, the Ojibwe used blue cohosh (Caulophyllum thalictroides) as an abortifacient, and the Quinault used thistle for the same purpose. The appendix to Vogel's book lists red cedar (Juniperus virginiana), American pennyroyal (Hedeoma pulegioides), tansy, Canada wild ginger (Asarum canadense), and several other herbs as abortifacients used by various North American Indian tribes. The anthropologist Daniel Moerman wrote that calamus (Acorus calamus), which was one of the ten most common medicinal drugs of Native American societies, was used as an abortifacient by the Lenape, Cree, Mohegan, Sioux, and other tribes; and he listed more than one hundred substances used as abortifacients by Native Americans.

The historian Angus McLaren, writing about Canadian women between 1870 and 1920, states that "A woman would first seek to 'put herself right' by drinking an infusion of one of the traditional abortifacients, such as tansy, quinine, pennyroyal, rue, black hellebore, ergot of rye, sabin, or cotton root."

During the American slavery period, 18th and 19th centuries, cotton root bark was used in folk remedies to induce a miscarriage. Cotton root bark was historically used by indigenous North American tribes as an emmenagogue and abortifacient. Its use as an emmenagogue was adopted by the Eclectic physicians, and as an abortifacient by southern physicians into the 1800s. The plant has a profound history, reportedly used as an abortifacient by female slaves in the United States who were frequently victims of rape by their “masters,” and consequently, experienced unwanted pregnancies.

In the 19th century Madame Restell provided mail-order abortifacients and surgical abortion to pregnant clients in New York.

Early 20th-century newspaper advertisements included coded advertisements for abortifacient substances which would solve menstrual "irregularities." Between 1919 and 1934 the U.S. Department of Agriculture issued legal restraints against fifty-seven "feminine hygiene products" including "Blair's Female Tablets" and "Madame LeRoy's Regulative Pills."

The peacock flower (or flos pavonis) is an arresting plant, standing nine feet tall in full bloom, with brilliant red and yellow blossoms. But it’s more than beautiful; it’s an abortifacient, too. One of the most striking records of the plant comes from German-born botanical illustrator Maria Sibylla Merian who, in her 1705 book Metamorphosis of the Insects of Surinam, recounts “The Indians, who are not treated well by their Dutch masters, use the seeds [of this plant] to abort their children, so that their children will not become slaves like they are.” Two other naturalists had also discovered the peacock flower’s use as an abortifacient in the West Indies. Michel Descourtilz, a Frenchman, had observed its same use in Haiti, writing with disdain of the “ill intentions of the ‘negress’ who aborted their offspring.” Another remarked on the “guilty practice of preventing pregnancy by use of herbs” and was surprised that slave women used them effectively, that the “drinks did not destroy health.”

Commonly accepted abortifacients and emmenagogic herbs include (but are not limited to) tansy, thuja, safflower, scotch broom, rue, angelica, mugwort, wormwood, yarrow, and essential oil of pennyroyal. “Black Cohosh Root (Cimicifuga racemosa) is a relaxant and normalizer of female reproductive system. Eases painful and delayed menses, ovarian cramps, or womb cramps.” It’s best for, among other things — aborting a baby.

It took me only five minutes to find this history of herbal plants used to abort pregnancies throughout history. If I were in need of terminating a pregnancy the amount of information about the chemicals and their combinations and actions on the body could easily be found and researched. Access to materials such as medication, herbs, and chemical compounds is easier to obtain in our consumer economy. 

Of course, there is always danger in self medicating any health condition and we witnessed that first-hand with people turning to unsafe ingestion of medicine and herbs in an effort to fight off or prevent Covid-19 (Coronavirus) infection. But, nevertheless, people do turn to home remedies, herbs, and what is considered hollistic treatments. 

The internet has become a resource rich enviroment for almost anything a person has a desire to research and learn. There will be great sources of information and misinformation found on the internet. We will not know in which direction this wind of change regarding abortion will blow women when it comes to unwanted pregnancies. Only time will tell. Below was another online site I found that goes into detail on using herbs to abort a pregnancy with doses and pros and cons on using each herb. Notice it is a D.I.Y. (do it yourself) guide. How many women will be turning to such care? Have women been left to "Do It Yourself" in this area of medical health? A major reason Roe v Wade was inacted into law was to keep desparate women wanting to end a pregancy safe from dying trying to end an unwanted pregnancy. 

Herbal Abortion
a woman’s d.i.y. guide by Annwen

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/annwen-herbal-abortion

Don't forget to purchase my book When Will Eve Be Forgiven? on amazon.com and please like share comment follow for more posts on women's issues.