āAs we face a dangerous, ever-widening rollback of reproductive rights, Iām so proud to share this guide and community resource for self-managing abortion by @ArielleSchw, illustrated by @Lubchansky. Everyone deserves to control their own reproduction.ā
How to Give Yourself an Abortion
āIn 2020, however, the safest way to perform a self-managed abortion is with pillsāusually some variation of the same ones administered at doctorsā offices. Unfortunately, safe and affordable medical care isnāt accessible everywhere or to everyone. Since the 2010 midterm elections, weāve seen anti-choice legislation spread across the country at unprecedented speed. From mandatory waiting periods to laws regulating the width of hallways in abortion clinics, targeted restrictions on abortion providers (known as TRAP laws) have shut down hundreds of clinics.Ā
Now, conservative states are taking advantage of recent hard-right appointments to the Supreme Court by introducing laws that either ban abortion outright or restrict it to the first six to eight weeks of pregnancyābefore many people even know theyāre pregnant. Ā Everyone deserves to control their own reproduction. This guide to self-managing your abortion using misoprostol, a medication which causes uterine contractions, is intended as a community resource in the service of reproductive justice.
According to a 2018 statement from Physicians for Reproductive Health, āself-administered medication abortion is as safe, effective and acceptable to patients and providers as healthcare facility-based medication administration.ā Numerous medical groups, including the World Health Organization, have endorsed self-managed abortion using misoprostol in situations where abortion care through a medical provider is unavailable. That said, self-managed abortion using misoprostol takes longer than a clinic abortion, which typically uses a combination of medications, and the side effects (including nausea, diarrhea, and abdominal pain) are usually more pronounced.
Additionally, self-managing an abortion could put a person at legal risk. Though advocates only know of 20 people in the United States who have been arrested for self-managing an abortion since 1973, and fewer than ten states explicitly ban the practice, there are laws on the books in many states that can be used to punish a person managing their own abortion, such as those criminalizing harm to a fetus, or governing the disposal of medical byproducts. And people who are disproportionately targeted by law enforcement (people of color, trans people, homeless people, and undocumented people, for example) are at greater risk of legal punishment. For a few legal resources, check out the āMore Informationā section Ā at the end of this article.ā
