Facts about abortion....

[ukyo895]

I know, abortion is a touchy subject. However, I really don’t know much about the beginning. Does anyone know who started a “safe” (if that’s possible) abortion? I know the RU-486 pill thing is the newest and safest, but I’m talking about the stuff in the clinics. Who started the abortion clinics? If a guy, what’s his obsession with abortion? If a woman, where’d her motherly instinct run off to?

[Boyo_Jim]

Abortions have been taking place for thousands of years. I don’t think there is any known “inventor”. Among more recently practiced techniques, it might be possible to track down the physicians who first described them in medical literature.

[Jpeg_Jones]

Starts off as a plausible enough General Question:

Does anyone know who started a “safe” (if that’s possible) abortion?

But then…

If a guy, what’s his obsession with abortion?

And finally…

If a woman, where’d her motherly instinct run off to?

You clearly have an agenda here that goes beyond scientific impartial curiosity.

Just lettin’ you know.

[alice_in_wonderland]

Couple of things:

**If a guy, what’s his obsession with abortion? **

Starting a clinic woulnd’t be an obsession with abortion. It would be an obsession with Women’s reproductive health.

**If a woman, where’d her motherly instinct run off to? **

Second, just becasue a woman CAN have a baby, doesn’t mean she want’s to, or SHOULD have a baby.

Abortion and motherhood are not mutually exclusive - a woman can still be a mother (of other children) and have an abortion. A woman could be a mother and perform an abortion.

Finally, abortion clinics were started by concerned health care providers. And FWIW, most early-term abortions would actually be “safer” and have less complications than carrying and delivering a baby to term.

Now, please tell me you were just curious and wern’t trying to start a debate. Manny will be WAY pissed if you were - this being General Questions and all.

[Whack-a-Mole]

Boyo Jim is correct. Abortions seem to extend all the way back in recorded history. If you absolutely must pick a gender responsible for starting it then you’d probably have to go with women and not men. Seems pointless though…

“Enzo Nardi, John Noonan, and Marie-Therese Fontanille have collected the classical references in literature to birth control. The corpus of references is substantial. The evidence is compelling that abortion and contraception were a part of the everyday world of classical antiquity.”

“In 1936 Norman Himes published a history of contraceptives. For the classical period he concluded, that oral contraceptives (“potions”) were not effective and, second, that the knowledge of the few other contraceptive devices that worked (specifically, vaginal suppositories) was “confined largely to the heads of medical encyclopedists, to a few physicians and scholars.” In the coming chapters, I suggest that their knowledge was primarily transmitted by a network of women working within the culture of their gender and that only occasionally was some of it learned by medical writers, almost all of whom were male.”

In antiquity, “nless a woman was demonstrably and visibly pregnant, she was not pregnant until she so declared.” page 27

  "How extensive a father's rights were to protect a fetus is unknown, according to what we know of Greek law. Clearly, as Richard Feen concluded, the crime of abortion was not the killing of a fetus or embryo but he depriving the father of his right to an heir." 

SOURCE: http://www.pinn.net/~sunshine/book-sum/contra1.html

[Whack-a-Mole]

Dang…the above cited quote is actually a sampling of various pieces from the linked web site. My quote may seem like it was written that way which it wasn’t.

[Captain_Amazing]

Abortion is extremely old. The earliest reference to it off the top of my head is in the Hippocratic oath, from around 400 BCE, where Hippocrates forbade his students to provide them:

I will give no deadly medicine to any one if asked, nor suggest any such counsel; and in like manner I will not give to a woman a pessary to produce abortion

However, it’s likely that people have known of plants that induce miscarriage for even longer.

[John_Kentzel-Griffin]

General Questions is for questions with factual answers. You started out with a borderline General Question:

*Originally posted by ***ukyo895 **
I know, abortion is a touchy subject. However, I really don’t know much about the beginning. Does anyone know who started a “safe” (if that’s possible) abortion? I know the RU-486 pill thing is the newest and safest, but I’m talking about the stuff in the clinics. Who started the abortion clinics?

The best answer was given in the first reply:

*Originally posted by ***Boyo Jim **
Abortions have been taking place for thousands of years. I don’t think there is any known “inventor”. Among more recently practiced techniques, it might be possible to track down the physicians who first described them in medical

The rest of your OP is too full of unwarrented assumptions for a factual answer. It looks more like fuel for a Great Debate, which we are not going to have in this forum.

*Originally posted by ***ukyo895 **
If a guy, what’s his obsession with abortion? If a woman, where’d her motherly instinct run off to?

This is closed.

DrMatrix - GQ Moderator