Hell no. I was born after Roe v. Wade, and my mom is super left-wing, a feminist, and pro-choice. She raised me to believe that abortion is nothing to be ashamed of and that women shouldn’t have children until they’re ready to be moms.
Whoa, that just made me remember something totally unrelated to the thread. You know how kids get the little safety pamphlets saying, I dunno, kids in Australia probably get safety pamphlets on staying away from jellyfish in the ocean. Anyway, you could tell I was a farmgirl when I got one on ergot.
Back to the thread. The one and only time abortion was ever mentioned between my mother and I was her saying she’d raise any child of mine if I didn’t want it, abortion is BAD.
I’m approximately the same cohort as the OP, and my sisters are technically pre-boomers (they were born during WW2.) If there was a safe, effective way to terminate an unwanted pregnancy in those days, I know a whole lot of young women who didn’t hear the news – off the top of my head, I can remember at least a half-dozen, probably more, who got married while they were still in high school.
I’m sure there were many myths about how to end an unwanted pregnancy, and Southern women knew at least their share of them, but that’s a far cry from any of them actually being effective.
Fenugreek is another on the herbal list that supposedly can be used. So can nightshade (belladonna). Of course, nightshade can kill you. I don’t know what the dangers of fenugreek are.
I know because I knew a hippie herbalist.
Get a slimmer tummy TODAY!
So the family hand-me-down custom is dead? As dangerous as some were (as a male, I have no clue what a uterus feels like, but the idea of inserting any mechanical device scares the hell out of me), tat may not be an entirely bad thing.
But, now that anyone who can spell curette can buy the proper instrument, maybe an underground “med school” will pop up.
Having never read “Our Bodies, Our Selves”, I have only the vaguist idea of what all it covered.
I do know it blew the lid off the “great mystery” of the female reproductive system.
Believe it or not, for generations, women were to just trust the (universally male) doctor to care for all those “little problems”.
The bad side: a woman used to be able to tell the rest of the household (screaming kids, obnoxious hubby) to leave her the hell alone simple by making vague references to “female problems”.
In fact, that little room which eventuually became a “sewing room” was originally called a “fainting room”, as in “I feel faint - female problems” - that room was her absolute refuge - NOBODY messed with mom after she made that statement and closed the door.
(my source on this? I owned a house in San Francisco built in 1919 - the little room over the stairs was built as a “fainting room”)
Oh, c’mon! Now I have to stop huffing and puffing! I wanted to huff and puff! 
As an addendum, the same great-aunt I mentioned before had a string of abortions in between her two strings of children; these abortions were performed by the same midwife who performed the deliveries and the second string of children was caused by her refusal to endanger herself, her practice and her other patients because my aunt was too stupid to use the prevention methods the midwife had told her about. This was back when the normal place to give birth was at home and presided over by a midwife (between 1935 and 1960, in Barcelona).
My grandmother, who btw bore 5 children at home with her “spinster” English teacher sister as lay midwife, once told me that in her day (1902-2002) women used ergot, bought OTC at the drug store, to induce abortions. She strongly implied she had done so herself, but we really didn’t go into details.
There is some evidence that the Catholic Church was very active in suppressing indigenous herbal birth control and abortifacients wherever they went, and this is, imo, likely true. Like the Muslim burning of the great libraries, we may never know what we lost in the name of religion. We do know that such herbs were recorded and widely used in ancient times, one, recorded in ancient Rome, is now thought to be extinct…
There are many herbs which can induce abortion. Pennyroyal is one. But like ANY herb/drug, proper dosage is essential to safety and effectiveness. The deaths from pennyroyal I’ve hard of have been due to massive overdose, due to ignorance of proper use.
Home manual extraction is something being increasingly taught and used.
It is a good thing that we (currently) have access to legal drug and surgical abortion and birth control, but IMHO, it is best to always keep alive the knowledge of how to control our own fertility without reliance upon such methods, should the need arise.
If by mechanical device, you are talking knitting needles and coat hangers, I’d guess those are somewhat more effective at inducing abortion - they are also somewhat more effective at causing the woman to bleed to death or die of a raging infection.
We tend to forget that we made abortion legal because so many women were dying of abortions - either self induced or performed by some guy in a parking lot.
Yes, several. Most are extraordinarily dangerous (as in, potentially fatal), and none are particularly effective.
No; mostly from histories of medicine and suchlike. If I had been told of any of them as an actual useful method, I would seriously doubt the sanity and/or commonsense of said woman.
No, insofar as I have no children. I would support telling kids about said methods, in a “see what happens if safe legal medical abortion isn’t available” framework.
He mentioned a curette - the instrument used in a D&C.
Why would they want to, since it’s legal? I mean, there are remote places where it’s hard to find an abortion provider, but I find it hard to believe that people are going to start doing underground abortions just because they can when abortion done by a medical doctor is so safe and effective.
Cost ($350 to thousands). Parental notification laws. Limited access (not being able to miss work to travel a day or more to visit a doctor).
And denial. How many women would love for this difficult decision to be taken out of their hands, to have a miscarriage instead of taking specific steps one way or the other? Especially if they’ve been raised pro-life, or are in a relationship with someone who is? Inducing miscarriage, I think, taking herbs and seeing what happens rather than ‘getting an abortion,’ feels passive to some people, and that’s what they need.
[hijack]What on earth are you talking about?[/hijack]
I know of a couple of herbal abortifacients; my mother never told me about them, and i sure as hell would not share them with the next generation, until the break down of all civilization and other birth control.
However, I also know of a few herbs that, while not strictly abortifacients, might “bring a woman around” before implantation.
I have heard of douching with Coke used as a kind of morning-after pill. Shake it up and shove it in the ol’ orifice. The pressure assured that the fluid got everywhere, and supposedly Coke is so acidic it will kill any sperm it encounters. I don’t recall whether it was supposed to have any effect on an ovum, or an already fertilized fetus.
But wouldn’t buying a curette and using it be quite the opposite of passive behavior?
I just saw a Mythbusters episode last night where they tried this (on lab samples, not in vivo), and Coke did nothing to even slow them down, much less kill any.
This thread got me thinking about the movie “Vera Drake” and the seemingly simple and safe method used by her. I wiki’d it, (Vera Drake - Wikipedia) and found this truly frightening quote:
Bolding mine.
I would have thought this method dangerous only in the way that it might affect the lining and prevent all future pregnancies, as opposed to ending only the current one. The trouble with home-methods is that what seems to be logical, is sometimes fatal.
ETA: Ferret Herder, That is really crazy! I have to know: Who gave the sample?
Sadly, I missed the part about where the sperm sample came from! It’s from an older episode than I thought; it’s their first season, the 5th episode, from a series on myths about cola.
There has been other research done as well, not surprisingly, which confirms the result.