News flash: Sex isn't going anywhere. Even people who don't like abortion need to recognize that unwanted pregnancies and abortion aren't going anywhere, either (especially, and frustratingly, and ironically when many "pro-life" "anti-choice" people oppose contraception and any kind of effective sex-ed). Here is a mere sampling from relatively recent history of the uncomfortable, painful, dangerous and deadly methods a woman would use when when abortion wasn't legal or accesible.
- putting a leech up her vagina
- putting cayenne pepper up her vagina
- swallowing lye
- swallowing gunpowder
- throwing herself down the stairs
- hitting her stomach with a meat pulverizer
- hitting her stomach with a brickbat
- spending a night in the snow
- bathing herself in scalding water
- consuming turpentine
- consuming pulverized Spanish fly
- consuming opium
- consuming ergot, a fungus, which was especially effective at ending pregnancies, while at the same time bringing on gangrene, psychosis and death
- consuming Tansy oil, which rots internal organs
- probing herself with a knitting needle or the infamous hanger, which could cause infection, sterility, permanent injury, puncture, hemorrhage, and death
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This is where we've come from. And we can never go back.
Leeches, Lye and Spanish Fly [NYT]
image via Photocrea/ shutterstock
