#abortifacients

[fox-bright]

This meme is a MURDER ATTEMPT.

I am absolutely fucking serious. The original meme, without the big red denial, is someone's attempt to fucking kill people.

There is NO SAFE DOSAGE of pennyroyal oil. Even Mother Earth News says there's no reason to use pennyroyal essential oil for ANYTHING, even topically or as a fragrance, for fuckssake! That should give you some idea about how dangerous it is!

Pennyroyal tea, plant matter in hot water, is a traditional abortifacient. It is *incredibly* dangerous, induces abortion by bringing the body close to organ failure (and frequently pushing the system right over the edge, because dosage is impossible to meter), but I would drink a gallon of it before I took a half-teaspoon of pennyroyal essential oil.

Two teaspoons, taken across 48 hours, has successfully killed someone.

Three teaspoons taken as a single dosage killed the consumer within THREE HOURS.

There is NO SAFE DOSAGE! FOR PENNYROYAL OIL INTERNALLY! NONE!

The person who made this meme is PURPOSEFULLY, ACTIVELY, trying to get desperate people killed!

[odinsblog]

Funny how SCOTUS “originalists” ignore this history

Benjamin Franklin is revered in history for his fixation on inventing practical ways to make everyday life easier. He was a prolific inventor and author, and spent his life tinkering and writing to share his knowledge with the masses.

One of the more surprising areas Franklin wanted to demystify for the average American? At-home abortions.

Molly Farrell is an associate professor of English at the Ohio State University and studies early American literature. She authored a recent Slate article that suggests Franklin’s role in facilitating at-home abortions all started with a popular British math textbook.

Titled The Instructor and written by George Fisher, which Farrell said was a pseudonym, the textbook was a catch-all manual that included plenty of useful information for the average person. It had the alphabet, basic arithmetic, recipes, and farriery (which is hoof care for horses). At the time, books were very expensive, and a general manual like this one was a practical choice for many families.

Franklin saw the value of this book, and decided to create an updated version for residents of the U.S, telling readers his goal was to make the text “more immediately useful to Americans.” This included updating city names, adding Colonial history, and other minor tweaks.

But as Farrell describes, the most significant change in the book was swapping out a section that included a medical textbook from London, with a Virginia medical handbook from 1734 called Every Man His Own Doctor: The Poor Planter’s Physician.

This medical handbook provided home remedies for a variety of ailments, allowing people to handle their more minor illnesses at home, like a fever or gout. One entry, however, was “for the suppression of the courses”, which Farrell discovered meant a missed menstrual period.

“The book starts to prescribe basically all of the best-known herbal abortifacients and contraceptives that were circulating at the time,” Farrell said. “It's just sort of a greatest hits of what 18th-century herbalists would have given a woman who wanted to end a pregnancy early.”

“It's very explicit, very detailed, also very accurate for the time in terms of what was known ... for how to end a pregnancy pretty early on.”

Including this information in a widely circulated guide for everyday life bears a significance to today’s heated debate over access to abortion and contraception in the United States. In particular, the leaked Supreme Court opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade and states that “a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the nation's histories and traditions.”

Farrell said the book was immensely popular, and she did not find any evidence of objections to the inclusion of the section.

“It didn't really bother anybody that a typical instructional manual could include material like this,”she said. “It just wasn't something to be remarked upon. It was just a part of everyday life.”

(continue reading) more ←

[noimkillingboys]

Posting this for reference bc I found out recently that you can order abortion pills online if you can't access a clinic in America and I'm also linking directories to abortion providers in Canada (alt) and the US and because it's personally relevant, if you happen to be a Canadian who's been denied an abortion by a practitioner, here is a list of provincial medical colleges so you can report them.

[geezerwench]

Tear gas is an abortifacient.

[prairiefirewitch]

I’m starting to see a lot of misinformation about herbal abortifacients. When women have no other option, herbal abortions can be effective but only when they are induced by experienced herbalists and midwives. Herbs are medicine but understanding how they work is an absolute must because herbs can kill you. I also want to say that if you are in the horrific position of needing to use herbs because a safe abortion performed by medical professionals is not available to you, essential oils are not the same thing as an herbal dose and they can and have killed women. Do not ingest essential oils.

If you are in need of pregnancy termination currently, abortions are still currently legal. If you are in a place where abortion is not legal, there are organizations who can help you get to a provider and will help you pay for an abortion. I personally like the work that the Satanic Temple does to fund abortions, but there are other groups doing good work.

Last thing: If you are in the position to donate money to abortion funds, now is the time to do it. Women are not going to stop having unwanted pregnancies just because the Supreme Court wants to dick around with our ovaries.

[iant0jones]

Are you looking to support a queer artist and people’s right to access abortions? Then you should consider shopping at my friend’s redbubble page! All of their earnings will be donated to Abortion Rights Fund of Western Massachusetts

Allie The Brave Shop | Redbubble

Allie The Brave is an independent artist creating amazing designs for great products such as t-shirts, stickers, posters, and phone cases.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Allie Martineau (@alliethebrave)

She doesn’t know I’m posting this, I just thought it would be nice to spread the word :’)

I just bought two of these bags, one as a surprise gift for my cousin and one for me. And it’s not even black! I just love the design so much. They’re all abortifacients 👌🏻

Or just donate directly to your local abortion funds! Whatever you wanna do. I just thought I would share this :’) I can’t wait until my bag comes in

[superdeanlover]

Abortion through history

In graduate school, I’ve had the privilege to read a lot about women and gender. One of the main subsections (if you don’t consider sexuality, sexual identity, and gender politics) is women and knowledge. How did women pass down knowledge about a variety of things has been an inquiry historians and academics have looked into. It seems that this information and history is currently relevant given the current bans on abortion in different US states. 

First, let me stay I am pro-choice and will always be. 

1. banning abortion doesn’t address the core issues. If people are so concerned that women are having abortions then: (1) we must eliminate abstinence-only sex ed. The people will and do have sex. The people must know not how... trust me that they can figure out, but how to have sex safely. In addition, real sex ed often addresses the emotional elements of sex. Questions like are you ready? do you feel comfortable with this person? are you safe? (2) we must also provide proper care not just for women but for men and access to contraceptives.

2. people must care about these children being born after their first breath. PreK education, access to daycare, paid maternity, are all things that are essential if you want to force people to have children. 

3. class is also an issue. Wealthy women can have safe and legal abortions while these policies target those that are the most vulnerable, poor women. It saddens me because these are the people that need our help/support the most, and the ones our government is targeting. Then to make matters worse, our government blames them for their own situation. 

Rant aside, abortifacients is knowledge that has long existed in women’s circles. It has disappeared but when needed reappeared. Some of this knowledge has remained in lore, only to be rediscovered. (my mom wouldn’t let my sister eat parsley, cilantro or take vitamin C when she was pregnant. When we asked her why she said it was bad for you but couldn’t explain why. After we did some research, we realized they were all natural abortifacients.) While little research has been done on herbal abortifacients, we have records of women using them to control their own fertility. 

Women controlling their own fertility and family planning is not new. It is not something that came out of the sexual revolution. It is a human right that women have exercised for a long time, and it is one that will not be stopped. 

And as a true academic, I will be listing some suggested readings below. If you guys have more reading material please feel free to add it. 

John M. Riddle, “Eve’s Herbs: A History of Contraception and Abortion in the West.” 

John M. Riddle, “Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance.” 

Ann Hidner Koblitz, “Sex and Herbs and Birth Control: Women and Fertility Regulation Through the Ages.” 

Silvia Federici, “Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation.” 

Rebecca Chalker, Carol Downer, “A Woman's Book of Choices: Abortion, Menstrual Extraction, RU-486.” 

Uni M. Taimat, “Herbal Abortion: The Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.”

Sage-Femme Collective, “Natural Liberty the Rediscovery of Self-Induced Abortion Methods.”

[fox-bright]

PLEASE do not take herbal abortifacients.

I'm seeing so many posts going around about turning to pennyroyal, rue, black cohosh, et cetera to induce miscarriage, and I just have to post again about it: Please don't.

We live in a time where we've grown accustomed to knowing that our medication is going to do some fairly specific things, and to having lists of potential side-effects and interactions. Our medications come in carefully-compounded dosages, the same every time.

But okay, imagine you're growing pennyroyal, that toxic bitch, with the intent of brewing it into abortive tea. And early on in the season, your pennyroyal gets a pest. A beetle, say. Pennyroyal is resistant to most pests, but there's always going to be something that wants to gnaw on a plant. So this little critter chews on it for a bit, and the plant responds naturally, by increasing its terpene production.

The bug goes "Ugh!" and moves away (or dies). But this plant, which after a week or so will look just like all the other pennyroyal in the patch, is now extra-strong.

Okay, so what if you are super careful watching it for pests, you put mesh over your pennyroyal patch, you're sure it's been pampered and babied? Well, is there a hot day or two, or does the temperature rapidly swing from cool mornings to warm afternoons? Does half the patch get slightly more sunlight? Is there a bit of dirt that's less amenable to pennyroyal happiness, fewer nutrients or too many? EVERY PLANT in that patch could have a different level of pulegone in it.

How do you know how much pennyroyal tea to take, so that it convinces your body to ditch the fetus without accidentally also ditching your kidneys? The problem is, you don't. You absolutely can't. There's simply no way to be sure of the dosage, and when this stuff works--which is very, very far from every time--it does so because it is an actual poison and your body processes it the way it processes other poisons. It does so much damage to you that the pregnancy can't continue. This stuff is not kind, and it can kill you if you get the dosage wrong. Even getting the dosage right can cause you permanent organ damage.

The reason we don't use pennyroyal as actual medication now is because it's too dangerous to use. All of the would-be herbalists singing its praises are dangerous to you and need to be regarded as such. Cottagecore is an AESTHETIC, it's not a way to live, and the wisdom of our ancestors ultimately must boil down to when we know better, we do better. We know better than to drink pennyroyal tea now. We need to not go back to it.

(And as a reminder, pennyroyal essential oil has NO SAFE DOSAGE and even a drop can cause permanent organ damage to an adult. It kills you in a very ugly way, and there's not a lot that they can do to save you once you've been poisoned.)