15 Dangerous and Deadly Methods Women Have Used When Abortion Is Illegal

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