*Yet Another Reproductive Rights and Abortion
I have recommended in a couple of comments the e-publication When Abortion Was a Crime and started rereading it myself.
Publication info:
When Abortion Was a Crime
Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867-1973
Leslie J. Reagan
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Berkeley · Los Angeles · Oxford
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1 An Open Secret
Chapter 2 Private Practices
Chapter 3 Antiabortion Campaigns, Private and Public
Chapter 4 Interrogations and Investigations
Chapter 5 Expansion and Specialization
Chapter 6 Raids and Rules
Chapter 7 Repercussions
Chapter 8 Radicalization of Reform
Epilogue: Post-Roe , Post-Casey
Note on Sources
Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
Index
I could quote copiously from the entire text but will content myself with the first two graphs of the introduction.
There would be no history of illegal abortion to tell without the continuing demand for abortion from women, regardless of law. Generations of women persisted in controlling their reproduction through abortion and made abortion an issue for legal and medical authorities. Those women, their lives, and their perspectives are central in this book. Their demand for abortions, generally hidden from public view and rarely spoken of in public, transformed medical practice and law over the course of the twentieth century.
This book analyzes the triangle of interactions among the medical profession, state authorities, and women in the practice, policing, and politics of abortion during the era when abortion was a crime. As individual women consulted with doctors, they made them understand their needs. Sympathy for their female patients drew physicians into the world of abortion in spite of legal and professional prohibitions. Indeed, it was physicians and lawyers who initiated the earliest efforts to rewrite the abortion laws. Ultimately, women's pressing need for abortion fueled a mass movement that succeeded in reversing public policy, toward abortion in the 1960s and early 1970s.
The author draws on a variety of sources including coroner's inquests from abortions resulting in women's deaths.
Again, I highly recommend reading When Abortion Was a Crime. However, the purpose of this diary is to share another link.
The book is by no means a "how to" but cites various methods used to induce abortion non-surgically. I was not familiar with one of them and googled "slippery elm abortion." This is what I found.
Why I am an abortion doctor by Dr. Garson Romalis
I have been an abortion provider since 1972. Why do I do abortions, and why do I continue to do abortions, despite two murder attempts?
The first time I started to think about abortion was in 1960, when I was in second year medical school. I was assigned the case of a young woman who had died of a septic abortion. She had aborted herself using slippery elm bark.
I had never heard of slippery elm. A buddy and I went down to skid row, and without too much difficulty, purchased some slippery elm bark to use as a visual aid in our presentation. Slippery elm is not sterile, and frequently contains spores of the bacteria that cause gas gangrene. It is called slippery elm because, when it gets wet, it feels slippery. This makes it easier to slide slender pieces through the cervix where they absorb water, expand, dilate the cervix, produce infection and induce abortion. The young woman in our case developed an overwhelming infection. At autopsy she had multiple abscesses throughout her body, in her brain, lungs, liver and abdomen.
I have never forgotten that case.
The author of this February 2008 piece is a Canadian OB/GYN who survived two attempts on his life, once in 1994 and again in 2000. (It's not just Kansas)
Dr. Romalis writes that he did his internship at Cook County Hospital in Chicago. The Windy City is also a major data source for When Abortion Was a Crime
The first month of my internship was spent on Ward 41, the septic obstetrics ward. Yes, it's hard to believe now, but in those days, they had one ward dedicated exclusively to septic complications of pregnancy.
About 90% of the patients were there with complications of septic abortion. The ward had about 40 beds, in addition to extra beds which lined the halls. Each day we admitted between 10-30 septic abortion patients. We had about one death a month, usually from septic shock associated with hemorrhage.
I will never forget the 17-year-old girl lying on a stretcher with 6 feet of small bowel protruding from her vagina. She survived.
I will never forget the jaundiced woman in liver and kidney failure, in septic shock, with very severe anemia, whose life we were unable to save.
This is what anti-abortionists want to bring back.