Chapter 29: Legal Argument - American women have unalienable Right to use herbs made by Nature and Nature's God to prevent and end pregnancy

I saw an online news report yesterday that President Joe Biden will use his executive order power to allow the federal government to assist women affected by the recent overturn of Roe v. Wade.

I read in an online Wall Street Journal this morning, that lawsuits are being filed in some state courts, asserting abortion is protected by those states' constitutions. As this Alabama lawyer pondered the legal arguments in the Times article, I thought there are stronger legal arguments for abortion that have not been used.

I think American lawyers and judges can easily prove herbal abortion was endemic in Colonial America. Herbal abortion was part and parcel of the fabric of Colonial America society. Herbal abortion was a natural right Colonial women possessed, which they continued to possess after the Declaration of Independence was signed, and the Revolutionary War was fought, and the United States Constitution was written and passed into law by Congress.

Consider, Ben Franklin's book, The American Instructor, published in 1748, described how Colonial America used and could use Mother Nature's herbs to prevent and end pregnancy. 

Franklin's book was the topic of a  May 28, 2002 NPR interview.

Here's a link to that interview:

https://www.npr.org/2022/05/16/1099244635/for-ben-franklin-abortion-was-basic-arithmetic

Excerpts from the transcript of that interview:

NPR's Emily Feng speaks with Molly Farrell from The Ohio State University on why Ben Franklin included instructions for at-home abortions in his reference book, The American Instructor.

EMILY FENG, HOST:

Bear with me as we go back in time, way back to Philadelphia in 1748. Benjamin Franklin put quill to paper that year, so to speak, adapting a popular British math textbook for the American colonies. He told readers his goal was to update the book with matters, quote, "more immediately useful to Americans." Among those matters, the founding father added a clear and easy-to-follow guide for an at-home abortion drawn from a medical pamphlet written by a doctor in Virginia. So how does that square with a leaked Supreme Court opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade, specifically the contention that, quote, "a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the nation's histories and traditions"?

Molly Farrell studies early American literature as an associate professor at the Ohio State University, which means she knows a lot about the nation's histories and traditions. She wrote about Franklin's abortion how-to for Slate and joins us now. Welcome, Molly.

MOLLY FARRELL: Thanks, Emily. It's great to be here.

FENG: Start by telling us a little bit about the original version of this textbook, which was called "The Instructor." What was in this book, and what was its purpose?

FARRELL: So "The Instructor" was by George Fisher, who is a pseudonym. We don't know who wrote it. It was a really popular catch-all manual published in London. I believe it went through eight or nine editions in London. And you could learn to read on it. It had the alphabet in it. It had basic arithmetic, recipes. And it had a how-to book on farriery, which is the care for horses' hooves.

So books were expensive at the time. And if you just had money to buy one or two books in your home, the Bible and maybe something else, this would be a great reference manual.

FENG: And Franklin saw this as useful for an American audience, but he wanted to make it more relevant for the colonies. What changes did he make to this textbook?

FARRELL: Yes. So he called it "The American Instructor." In the arithmetic section and the word problems, he changed the place names - made them Boston and Jamaica instead of London and Flanders. He added a little section on colonial history. And then the biggest change you can see from the title page is that he swapped out the big section on farriery and a medical textbook that was from London, and he inserted it with a Virginia medical handbook from 1734 called "Every Man His Own Doctor: The Poor Planter's Physician."

FENG: And what was in that section of the book?

FARRELL: So that's what I was most interested in. So I don't know if you grew up with these. You'd have a book around that just had, like, home remedies. You don't need to call your doctor for this. You can take care of it yourself. So I was looking at all the different entries in there, and there was one that was pretty long and pretty obvious. And it was called "For The Suppression Of The Courses." And I was reading this, and it comes right after entries for fever or dropsy. So those are - the entries were listed as problems that need to be solved. So fever, here's how to solve it. Gleet or gout, here's how to solve it. Suppression of the courses, here's how to solve it. And the word courses, from about the 15th to the 19th century - I looked in the dictionary - it means menses. So it means your period. So that's a missed period.

So I thought, OK, how do you solve the problem of a missed period? And it says this is a common complaint among unmarried women that they miss their period. And then it starts to prescribe basically all of the best-known herbal abortifacients and contraceptives that were circulating at the time. 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 in her pregnancy. And that's what, by the way, this abortifacient recipe would really be for was really early. It talks about, like, make sure you start to take it a week before you expect to be out of order. So take it before you've even missed that period, and it will be most effective. So it's very explicit, very detailed, also very accurate for the time in terms of what was known at the time for how to end a pregnancy pretty early on.

And then at the end, it just really comes out swinging and lets you know this is definitely related to sex 'cause it says, you know, also women - you know, in order to prevent this complaint at the end - so prevention for next time - don't long for pretty fellows or any other trash whatsoever.

FENG: You write in your article for Slate that Ben Franklin's instructions for an at-home abortion were actually taken from a medical pamphlet that was written by someone else. That seems to suggest that this knowledge was quite common. How much other documentation out there do we have from this time about abortion?

FARRELL: That's a good question. I mean, so, you know, if you kind of were in the market in Philadelphia and some women were chatting, what were they talking about? And particularly when you think about herbal remedies and herbal remedies for, as it says, female infirmities in the book, that's going to be something that's even less likely to enter into print because we have - midwives are taking care of that. Women's literacy rates were lower. They're not writing medical textbooks, but they have all this knowledge.

So what John Tennant did, this Virginia handbook - he tried to make it a really American herbal. And one way that typically that was done was stealing herbal knowledge from indigenous people in Virginia and from enslaved Africans. A lot of early American scientists, that's where they got their knowledge, and then they put it into print and called it their own.

What's interesting about what Franklin did is that he made sure to find a very American and actually very detailed, very accurate, according to the time, and very explicit herbal remedy and then promote it. You know, he was platforming it, basically. He circulated it loudly. He appended it into a volume that he was saying, this is basically all the knowledge that every American should know. And you should know your reading. And you should know your writing. And you should know home remedies that include how to have an abortion if you need to.

FENG: If this knowledge about the, quote, "suppression of the courses" back then was just as commonplace then as learning how to add or to spell, then how was abortion conceptualized? Was it considered taboo?

FARRELL: Clearly for Benjamin Franklin, one of the architects of our nation, and for the people that bought his book, which went through reprintings all the way throughout the 18th century, "The American Instructor" was hugely popular. It was absolutely not taboo. This was not banned. We don't even have any records of people objecting to this. It didn't really bother anybody that a typical instructional manual could include material like this, could include - address explicitly to a female audience, making sure they had all the herbals available to them that their local midwife might have as well and just putting that right into print. It just wasn't something to be remarked upon. It was just a part of everyday life. 

 

Consider the first paragraph (Preamble) of the Declaration of Independence, signed 28 years after Ben Franklin's book was published.

In Congress, July 4, 1776
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.  

 

The Declaration specifically states its authority derives from Nature and Nature's God, which Created the herbs Colonial American women used to control their menses.

Consider the beginning of the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--

 Women had no unalienable Rights? Seriously? 

"That among these" means there were other unalienable Rights, which were not named.

Now consider:

U.S, Constitution

Amendment 1

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

I had many discussions with anti-abortionists, and every one of them were religious right Christians. I saw many abortion discussions online, and the anti-abortionists were religious right Christians. 

In the law is the doctrine of res ipsa loquitur, Latin for, The thing speaks for itself. The American anti-abortionists want the national and state governments to ban abortion, thus establish their religion, which Amendment 1 prevents the federal government from doing, and Amendment 14 applies Amendment 1 to the states.

Further consider:

Amendment 14

Section 1.

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State where they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Amendment 1 only applies to born or naturalized persons. Amendment 1 does not apply to unborn.

The U.S. Constitution and its Amendments were derived from the Declaration of Independence, which assigned its authority to Nature and Nature's God. 

Unalienable Rights derived from Nature and Nature's God were acknowledged in the Declaration.

Herbs made by Nature and Nature's God were part and parcel of Colonial American society.

Marijuana, known as "bitch weed", was raised and smoked by Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson also used bitch weed smoke to calm his bees in their hives at Monticello, when he took their honey.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled American corporations have  Constitutional Rights, even though there is no mention of corporations in the Constitution and its Amendments, nor in the Declaration.

If corporations have Constitutional Rights, how could the herbs created by Nature and Nature's God, about which Benjamin Franklin wrote 28 years before the Declaration of Independence existed, not be unalienable fertility Rights Colonial American women enjoyed, which could not be taken away?

Consider, Native American tribes are allowed to use peyote, as part of their religion.

Consider, a great many pills the FDA, CDC, NIH, AMA and Big Pharma depend on were derived from plants.

Consider the medical uses today of marijuana extracts.

Here is PROOF that women used herbs made by Nature and Nature's God long before and after the Bible came into existence.

A book by John M. Riddle, CONTRACEPTION AND ABORTION FROM THE ANCIENT WORLD THROUGH THE RENAISSANCE, traced the anthropological history of herbs used by women to prevent and end pregnancy.

A later book by Riddle, EVE'S HERBS: A HISTORY OF CONTRACEPTION AND ABORTION IN THE WEST, was featured in an exhaustive article in The American Historical Society article:archives.

HERBALGRAM.ORG

Eve's Herbs: A History of Contraception and Abortion in the West. - American Botanical Council

https://www.herbalgram.org/resources/herbalgram/issues/45/table-of-contents/article763/?fbclid=IwAR2JFAxrzdIACzu7On4As59BE-OqZ5yJ9pfQMas_evGh_ZaqnByiMr_jG0I

The article's author reported that he and his wife enjoyed drinking pennyroyal tea. She was pregnant. She miscarried. He did research and learned pennyroyal was long used to end pregnancies. He did a lot more research and reported that, too, in his article, which some women told me is fascinating.

The EVE'S HERBS book was available for free via a PDF, until it was taken down recently, because Riddle was receiving death threats.

Here is a link to an Institute for New Economic Thinking interview of Riddle:

Abortion Drugs Fundamental to Ancient Economies, Argues Historian

As women’s rights to make reproductive choices come under assault, historian John M. Riddle argues that abortion...

https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/abortion-drugs-fundamental-to-ancient-economies-argues-historian

In sum, the evidence is conclusive that Nature and Nature's God created herbs that women could use to prevent and terminate pregnancy. 

The evidence is overwhelming that the anti-abortion movement in America is a religious right Christian Crusade, which rapes the first line of Amendment 1:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.

Amendment 14 made Amendment 1 applicable to the states:

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.

My home state Alabama's new abortion law, triggered by the overturn of Roe v. Wade, does not allow abortion for rape or incest.

I heard recently that Alabama and other red states are moving quickly to make herbs that cause abortion illegal. I can imagine the American Mafia, the drug cartels and the Russian Mafia are delighted to grow and sell those herbs on the streets of America. 

While the American religious right pretend Genesis 2:7 is not in their Bible:

And, the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

The Old Testament came from the Jewish religion. Some Jews today say life begins at birth. Jesus in the New Testament was a Jew. Women in his day, and before, used herbs to prevent and end pregnancy. Jesus had to know that. Yet there is nothing about that in the Old and the New Testaments, which men wrote.

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com