Sunday, July 10, 2022

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:
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

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...

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
at No comments:

Wednesday, July 6, 2022

Chapter 28: Did Colonial America women have an unalienable Right to use herbs made by God or Mother Nature (you pick) to prevent or end pregnancies?

A friend reported a dream earlier today, in which Archangel Michael said there are people who might try to kill me over my discussing "Eve's herbs", which end pregnancy.

Same friend told me later today, that he'd heard from a woman interested those herbs, that my home state Alabama, and other red states, are preparing legislation to go quickly into effect,  which makes herbs that cause miscarriage, class 1 drugs, which require a doctor's prescription. I replied that no doctor known to me would prescribe herbs for any reason. It later occurred to me that the Mafia and the south of the border drug cartels are gearing up to grow lots of those herbs to sell on the streets of America. 

That Pearl Harbor lookout issue aside, I marvel over the federal and state governments presuming they know better than God or Mother Nature (you pick😎) what Americans should or should not do with herbs made by God or Mother Nature (you pick😎). 

As a licensed attorney in Alabama, I have a serious legal problem with the federal and state governments preventing people from using herbs that grow wild in nature. Since when do governments have legal jurisdiction over God and Mother Nature?

In that context, let me say I am not a physician, and I do not advise people about medical conditions, other than sometimes I tell people what I do about my own medical problems, by using physicians sometimes, alternative methods sometimes, and blending the two approaches sometimes. 

Sometimes I tell people how I use herbs, vitamins and minerals to make me smell like a skunk to Covid-19 and its many variants. I also had 3 Pfizer shots.

Although I am not an herbalist, I used herbs in past times, which helped me, and I use a few herbs today, which seem to help conditions that medicine alone has not been able to help.

The first time I caught salmonella and felt I surely would die, I took an herbal combination prescribed by a naturopath and the salmonella cleared up in a few days. 

The next time I caught salmonella and felt I surely would die, a veterinarian, who treated his animal patients with homeopathic remedies, as well as with modern veterinary medicine, gave me homeopathic arsenic, and the salmonella cleared up in a few days.

Did I break state laws? Did those doctors violate state laws? Did that matter to me or them? No. What mattered was the salmonella went away.

Some years ago, I read a very interesting report of a federal lawsuit filed by the Texas medical profession, seeking to ban acupuncturists, who were not M.D.s, from practicing acupuncture. The Texas medical profession's lawyers argued  acupuncture was experimental medicine and, under Texas law, only the Texas medical profession could regulate and use acupuncture. The female federal judge noted that the Texas medical profession had been around about 100 years, while acupuncture had been used in China for 5,000 years and was not experimental. Judgment for the acupuncturists.

Beyond all of that, I can say, based on many conversations I have had with religious right Americans face to face, on Facebook, and elsewhere online, that the root of the opposition to abortion in Alabama, and in America, is the religious right.

If I were hired as a trial attorney, to deal with federal and/or state restrictions on herbs in a court case, I would subpoena anti-abortionists and put them on the witness stand, and prove through them that their opposition to abortion is rooted in their religion.

I would hand them a Bible and ask them to read Genesis 2:7 to the Court.

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.

They would be between a rock and a hard spot. 

I would ask them if the Bible is the inerrant word of God, every word in it is true? They would be between a rock and a hard spot.

I would ask them who created the heavens and the earth, and al the plants and living beings on the earth? They would be between a rock and a hard spot. 

I would ask them if, in the Bible, the only herb God told Adam and Eve not to eat was the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil? They would be between a rock and a hard spot.

I would ask them if God ever made a mistake? They would be between a rock and a hard spot. 

I would the witnesses if God made herbs that would cause miscarriage? The witnesses would be between a rock and a hard spot.

I would hand them a copy of the Declaration of Independence and ask them to read the Preamble:

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. 

I would ask them if the Founding Fathers drew their authority from Nature and Nature's God? The witnesses would be between a rock and a hard spot.

I would hand them a copy of Amendment I, U.S. Constitution and ask them to read the first line to the Court:

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 would hand them a copy of Amendment 14, and ask them to read it to the Court.

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.

I would ask them if they see anything in Amendment 14 saying unborn persons have any of those rights and immunities. They would be between a rock and a hard spot.

I would ask them if Amendment 14 applies the 1st line of Amendment 1 to the states? They would be between a rock and a hard spot.

Of course, opposing legal counsel would object to questions that ask a lay person to state an opinion on the law. I would reply that I"m simply asking the witnesses to read the law and use their common sense to reply to my questions.

In that context, and continuing my mystical and legal opining about such matters also were addressed in the two previous chapters of this unfolding book...

Before and after Bible times, women used herbs to prevent and end pregnancies.

Women used herbs in Colonial America to prevent and end pregnancies. Benjamin Franklin covered the practice in his book, THE AMERICAN INSTRUCTOR.

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 similar, 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

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 yesterday, 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

The American Declaration of Independence says:

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."

Unalienable means it cannot be taken away. 

Among these means there were other unalienable Rights. 

Clearly, the Declaration does not say women had unalienable rights. However, if men had unalienable rights, surely women had them, even if men back then did agree 😎.

Was women's ancient and ongoing use of herbs made by God or Mother Nature (you choose 😎) to regulate their fertility, an unalienable Right? 

As pointed out earlier in this chapter, Benjamin Franklin, who was reputed to be a ladies man, spoke of such herbs in THE AMERICAN INSTRUCTOR. 

The American Declaration of Independence birthed the United States of America. 

The Declaration was America's first legal document. 

The U.S. Constitution and its Amendments were derived from the Declaration. 

Unalienable Rights were inherent in the U.S. Constitution and its Amendments.

The U.S. Supreme Court decided American corporations have some 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 God or Mother Nature (you choose😎), about which  Benjamin Franklin wrote, not be unalienable fertility Rights Colonial American women enjoyed, which could not be taken away?

Well?

Consider further rhetorical questions.

Would the American religious right dare contest herbs God made, knowing very well what those herbs could be used for?

Would anyone that heard, "It's not wise to piss off Mother Nature," dare contest herbs She made, knowing full well what those herbs could be used for?

Would the American medical profession (AMA) contest those herbs?

Would Big Pharma contest those herbs?

Would the FDA, CDC and NIH contest those herbs?

Would the Republicans and MAGAs and Donald Trump contest those herbs?

Would 6 religious right U.S. Supreme Court Justices contest those herbs? 

Would Joe Biden and the Democrats contest those herbs?

So, what about pregnant women living in red states, who do not want to carry their fetus to term?

They birth a baby they don't want and resent?

They commit suicide?

They use a coat hanger?

They do things to try to kill the fetus, so a doctor can legally perform an abortion to save the life of the mother?

They go out of state to get abortions?

They find pharmacy pills that cause abortions?

They become herbalists and claim their herbs are an unalienable right, protected by the Declaration of Independence? 

They claim their herbs are part of their religion, protected by Amendment 1 and Amendment 14 of the U.S. Constitution?

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.

Consider hemp was raised and sold by some of the Founding Fathers, including George Washington. Do you think they ever lit and smoked hemp?

Do you think the Founding Fathers ever used hashish and opium brought back by The East India Trading Company to England and America?

Do you know any forms of booze, a known killer, not derived from a plant?

Do you smoke or chew tobacco, a known killer?

Is it any skin off your nose, if women use God or Mother Nature's herbs (you choose😎), to prevent or end pregnancy?

Don't you have something more important to do than butt your nose into the uteruses of women you don't know and could care less about, unless they are pregnant and want an abortion?

Are you standing at an abortion clinic every day it's open, begging women who go inside to agree to let you adopt and raise their unwanted baby?

Have you ever had a young child of yours die? If so, you know that hurt you far more than anyone can begin to imagine, who has not had a young child die. 

My first wife had two miscarriages, which upset her a lot. I was upset,  but not nearly as much as her. 

When our son was later born, and then at 7 weeks he died of sudden infant death syndrome, my wife and I were devastated. It was a zillion times worse than the miscarriages.

We did not have funerals for her miscarried fetuses, but we certainly had a funeral for our beautiful, dead infant son, whom we grieved for a very long time.

I don't see funerals for miscarried or aborted fetuses. 

In the law is the doctrine of res ipsa loquitur, Latin for, "The thing speaks for itself."
Sloan Bashinsky
at No comments:

Monday, June 27, 2022

Chapter 26: Eve's Herbs vs. 5 US Supreme Court Justices and the Christian Right

Sit and dunk pennyroyal tea
Distill the life that's inside of me
Sit and dunk pennyroyal tea

I'm anemic royalty.

An eye-opening, paradigm-busting review of Riddle's book appeared in THE AMERICAN HERBAL COUNCIL's HerbalGram issue 45, and is reproduced in full at the end of this chapter.

The author of the review correctly points out that herbalists of old knew what they were doing with the herbs they used to prevent pregnancy and cause miscarriage, but is that knowledge still around today? 

Meanwhile, being a lawyer and all, I can't help shooting off my mouth a bit more.

I have had women tell me that no man has standing to talk about abortion. 

Assuming that is correct, the male US Supreme Court Justices should have recused themselves in the case that overturned Roe v. Wade.

Alas, what women think about who has standing to talk about abortion perhaps is a great law school exam question, but otherwise is irrelevant in the context what actually happened.

You don't have to be an 80-year-old white male lawyer like me to see there is nothing in the US Constitution about contraceptives or abortion.

Or that, before the US Constitution, is the US Declaration of Independence, which says:

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

Note, "among which". 

So, clearly there were other unalienable rights that were not named, which men enjoyed. White men, actually.

What were the unnamed unalienable rights? 

To dominate women? 

To dominate non-white people? 

Hmmm.

Did women in America have even 1 unalienable right when the Declaration of Independence was signed?

Well?

In pursuit of happiness, did women have the right not to conceive?

The right to abort unwanted pregnancies?

Well?

Certainly not, if you ask the 5 Christian-Right United States Supreme Court Justices, who overturned Roe v. Wade, Etc. 

Certainly not, if you ask the Pope.

Certainly not, if you ask any antiabortionist in America today.

Ridiculous! Preposterous! The Devil's handiwork! For women to have such unalienable rights!

And, to use herbs God made to enforce those rights?😊

Hold those thoughts, while I share with you what a woman I met when I lived in Key West posted at her Facebook, and what I replied to her.


Sloan Bashinsky
Never knew an anti-abortionist, who, to prevent an abortion, offered to adopt, love and raise or financially support a pregnant woman’s unwanted unborn. What the antiabortionists really want is lots more welfare babies, and lots more babies being raised by mothers who don’t want and resent and abuse their children. I wonder what Lady Karma might be dreaming for anti- abortionists’ next lifetimes on Planet Earth. The framers of the US Constitution knew women used certain plants to cause miscarriage. It was the same in Jesus’s and Moses’ times. All this is just religious fanatics ignoring the very plants God created, which women used for aeons to end unwanted pregnancies.

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com

American Botanical Council review of John Riddle's book, Eve's Herbs: A History of Contraception and Abortion in the West

https://www.herbalgram.org/resources/herbalgram/issues/45/table-of-contents/article763/?fbclid=IwAR14lJCMDUwvDFYQb1rSckQuBCumskxWkiLhtEyvps8h4lfLJ2iSYLfuuVk

HerbalGram
Issues
Issue #45

Eve's Herbs: A History of Contraception and Abortion in the West.
John M. Riddle. 1997. 341, pages ISBN: 0674270266

By
Burkhard Bilger 

A few years ago, when obscure herbs and botanical remedies were just beginning to reappear in American stores, my wife and I developed a taste for pennyroyal tea. Our food co-op sold herbs in bulk, from glass canisters and funky smelling barrels, so Jennifer and I had no recipes to follow. We knew only that the pennyroyal plant was a member of the mint family, and that when we steeped its pale-blue flowers in hot water they gave off a heady, amber-colored essence. The tea had a flavor of mint that was not quite peppermint, with a certain melancholy sweetness about it like chamomile, and for a while we drank it nearly every day.

It happens that, around the same period, Jennifer became pregnant for the first time. In retrospect, there were signs of trouble from the beginning -- her hormone levels weren't rising as they should, and she seemed to be losing some color -- but we managed to shrug them off in the excitement. There were names to choose, birthing classes to schedule, and our doctor didn't seem overly concerned.

Then one night, I woke up to find Jennifer clutching herself and crying, and within an hour the pregnancy was over.

A miscarriage is a peculiar sort of tragedy: a reversal of fortune so sudden and absolute it feels like a judgment, a guilty secret. But miscarriages are also extremely common -- a third of all first pregnancies end in them -- and many of our friends, we suddenly discovered, had had to endure more than one. Like them, we learned to credit our loss, however halfheartedly, to the body's vigilance, to think of it as a test run, a tune-up.

About a year later, though, something happened to change my mind. I was sitting in our living room, listening to a song by the rock group Nirvana, when the singer's keening carried a few words above the noise:

Sit and dunk pennyroyal tea

Distill the life that's inside of me

Sit and dunk pennyroyal tea

I'm anemic royalty.

It was a kind of sinister nursery rhyme, innocent on its surface but appalling once decoded. Pennyroyal, we came to learn, is an abortifacient, an old friend to "luckless girls in need," as the Nebraskan novelist Mari Sandoz once wrote. Too much of it can damage the liver and cause convulsions, coma or even death. A little less can end a pregnancy.

A thousand, two thousand, even three thousand years ago, Jennifer and I would have known that. Any midwife in ancient Athens could have told us about the penny-royal in her garden. And we would have laughed, during a comedy by Aristophanes, to hear Hermes advise the hero to "add a dose of pennyroyal" to keep his mistress out of trouble. Had we lived in Persia at the time of the Islamic empire, Jennifer might have taken pennyroyal as a contraceptive, along with pomegranate pulp, willow leaf, and colocynth. And in 18th-century London, her copy of The Experienced Midwife would have explained that pennyroyal "hastens the menses" -- an old euphemism for abortion.

But we live in an impoverished age for herbal lore, when pennyroyal and pomegranate have given way to the pill, and midwives to physicians. Herbs are considered mostly harmless -- good for cooking and the occasional sore throat. Even their extracts, sold as nutritional supplements in drugstores, carry labels that barely hint at their uses. Modem medicine, it seems, has finished off what parish priests, grand inquisitors, and temperance leagues began: it has made people forget the drugs in their own backyards. Not so long ago herbs were a woman's secret weapon, a magic bullet against reproductive demands at home and at church. Now they're a secret affliction -- a curse courted by accident, encrypted by a song.

The irony is that contraceptives have never been more badly needed. In spite of dramatic advances in reproductive science, more than half of all pregnancies in the United States are unintended, and a quarter end in abortions. Contraceptives are safer and more effective than ever, but they can also be expensive, troublesome, and prone to side effects. For years, family-planning specialists have promised more convenient alternatives: vaccines, "morning after" pills, painless implants, and male contraceptives. But when new drugs do materialize -- such as the abortion pill RU 486, or mifepristone -- they become ensnared in lawsuits, drug regulations, and religious protests.

Along the way, vital information gets lost. Only 36 percent of adult Americans, according to a recent poll, know that a dose of birth-control pills can prevent pregnancy even three days after sex.

In Eve's Herbs John M. Riddle shows just how much more has been forgotten. A historian at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, Riddle works his way from Egyptian papyrus to papal bull, medieval antidotarium to Victorian nostrum, tracing the slow erasure of herbal lore in the West across three millennia. Riddle aims, above all, to reveal the hidden history of abortion -- to prove that women practiced it as a matter of course long before Jane Roe. But his work makes an even more telling political point, albeit indirectly: the same forces that once repressed pennyroyal and other herbs are keeping new contraceptives off the market today.

When historians mourn the lost wonders of the ancient world they tend to mean the Colossus of Rhodes or the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Pharos of Alexandria or the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus. To that list, Riddle might add one seemingly unremarkable candidate: a species of giant fennel known as silphium to the Romans, that once grew in North Africa. In the seventh century B.C., a band of Greek settlers from Thera founded the city of Cyrene, in what is now Libya. "What they found," Riddle writes, "must have made them question the oracle's advice to go there." The landscape was parched, the people unfriendly and Greece dishearteningly distant. But Cyrene, it turned out, had a single asset -- silphium -- that was enough to make the colony rich.

As a condiment or cough syrup, silphium was already pretty good. But as a contraceptive it had no equal. According to the second century Greek physician Soranus, the juice from a chickpea-size portion, taken once a month, was enough to do the trick. To the delight of the Cyrenians, and the everlasting dismay of everyone else, the plant grew exclusively in North Africa, along a 30-mile strip near the city. When it failed to transplant to Syria and Greece, prices rose quickly, as did harvests. By the beginning of the first century A.D., silphium was more costly than silver by weight. Three centuries after that it was extinct.

Silphium was the aristocrat's contraceptive -- the classical equivalent of lambskin condoms. But contraceptives of any kind were beyond the ken of common folk, or so most historians have held. Peasants hardly knew the connection between sex and pregnancy, the reasoning goes, much less which plants might inhibit conception. To counter such arguments. Riddle presents a chart of the declining birthrate in ancient Greece -- from 5.0 births per female in 2000 B.C. to 3.3 in 120 A.D. "How did they do it?" he asks. Infanticide, some historians answer But then why are women's skeletons from ancient sites scarred by so few childbirths? Chastity, one might venture. But sexual restraint, as Riddle writes, "was not a quality about which the ancients could boast or lament."

The best answer seems to be the obvious one: the common folk were not as ignorant as they seemed. For centuries farmers must have noted how plants could affect their pregnant livestock -- according to some estimates nearly a third of all miscarriages among animals are caused by plants. Mothers and midwives must then have passed on the information and refined it in what Riddle calls, with a touch of melodrama, a "chain of learning...forged by vocal cords."

By the time of the Greeks the seeds of herbal lore first cultivated in Egypt had grown into a pharmacopoeia. Socrates, in one of Plato's dialogues, tells a student that "midwives, by means of drugs and incantations, are able to arouse the pangs of labor and, if they wish...cause miscarriages." (Socrates would have known: his mother was a midwife.) Some of those drugs are disconcertingly familiar. Celery, dates, and figs made the lineup, next to suspicious characters such as motherwort and birthwort. And although death carrot and black cohosh sound like known felons, it is surprising to see parsley, sage. rosemary, and thyme among their ranks. The ancient sources are far from infallible, of course. "If a woman takes a frog and spits into its open mouth three times," one early physician recommended, "she will not conceive for a year." But modem pharmacological studies back up the ancient witnesses more often than not. One study found, for instance, that a diet of figs and fig leav es can reduce mouse litters by more than half. (No wonder Pacific islanders were still using figs as contraceptives as recently as the 1970s.)

At certain dosages, other plants seem even more effective: aloe, artemisia, corn mint and Queen Anne's lace consistently prevent or end pregnancy in rats, and birthwort, pomegranate and squirting cucumber can be just as potent.

Sixty-five years ago German chemists discovered that date palms contain compounds identical to female sex hormones, ushering in a new era of plant studies. Since then herbal contraceptives have been found to work in numerous ways. Corn mint keeps an embryo from implanting; seeds from the chaste tree, one of the rare male contraceptives mentioned in ancient texts, disrupt sperm production. Abortifacients, predictably, work by more brutal means: rue, for instance, poisons the body until it gives up on the fetus.

All things considered, ancient Greece was a kind of golden age for family planning -- even more so than for art and philosophy. Antifertility herbs were well known and widely used and though there were some strictures against abortion (the Hippocratic oath may or may not have forbidden it, depending on the translation), contraception was never regulated. But then, century by century, statute by statute, the screws tightened. Among the Romans, contraception was tolerated, but prescribing an abortifacient could get you exiled -- to the mines if you were poor, or to an island if you were rich. By the early Middle Ages priests were asking women in confession, "Have you drunk any maleficium so that you could not have children?" If the answer was yes, the sinner had to do penance for 40 days -- a slap on the wrist by later standards.

In the scriptural debates and witch-hunts that would follow one can see prefigured, as if in an allegorical painting, the Supreme Court decisions and clinic shootings of today. In Italy during the late Middle Ages members of a fertility sect known as I Benandanti, or the do-gooders, would stage symbolic duels in forest clearings with local witches, who probably practiced birth control and abortion. For weapons, the Benandanti wielded stalks of fennel, which was thought to prevent abortions, whereas the witches had stalks of sorghum, which contains an abortifacient alkaloid. Exchange the plants for placards and you have a modern-day abortion fracas, pitched outside a family-planning center.

Both groups were eventually rooted out by the Inquisition, which had no tolerance for fertility cults of any stripe. But the true tragic figures of the period were the midwives and "wise women." For centuries they had preserved recipes for contraceptives and abortifacients, tending to women and filling in where physicians were ignorant. Now they were caught in a pincer movement. On one side was the Roman Catholic Church, declaring ever more strictly in favor of procreation and fetal rights, until even sperm were suspected of having souls. On the other side was the medical establishment, which grew less tolerant as it grew more professional.

By the 14th century, Riddle writes, physicians, surgeons, apothecaries, and even barbers had to be licensed to practice. University degrees were a prerequisite, but women were not allowed to earn them and so were effectively shut out of medical practice. Wise women, once honored members of their communities, became vulgares or illiterati mulieres, their healing arts dismissed as mere folklore or, increasingly, witchcraft. Physicians had never learned much gynecology; now, with the church's help, they demonized what they did not know. "Midwives were the victims of a vicious syllogism," Riddle writes. "To know the secrets was to be a witch: it was necessary to know the secrets to be a midwife; therefore, a midwife is a witch." Or, as one church dictum put it: "If a woman dare to cure without having studied, she is a witch and must die."

The people took the church at its word: of the half-million witches burned at the stake in western Europe between 1450 and 1700, more than a third, in some areas, were midwives, and nearly all were women. King James I of England best conveyed the prevailing philosophy: "The more women, the more witches."

The result, in gynecological terms alone, was a disaster. The midwives' simple prescriptions, most of which could be filled in any herb garden, were gradually replaced by complicated concoctions with exotic ingredients -- the precursors of today's patented drugs. One 16th-century "menstrual regulator" contained more than 25 ingredients. "It is such a mess," a commentator later wrote, "I verily think the labour and cost of it put in an equal balance would outweigh the benefit."

A medieval woman could still step into an apothecary and buy a decent contraceptive. "What she lacked," Riddle says, were the "precise, careful, and expert directions midwives had once offered. And what of the women who never made it to an apothecary? Chances were they fell prey to the fabulous fictions in which medieval minds seemed to specialize. "Let a woman eat a bee and she shall never conceive," recommended one 14th-century book. Others put more stock in sapphire jewelry, rabbit stomachs, or mule uteruses as contraceptives; vulture feces, donkey dung, or the "oil of philosophers" as abortifacients. Physicians and prelates, so intent on dispelling superstition, effectively conjured it up instead.

It was to be more than 500 years before medicine replaced what it had helped destroy. As late as the 19th century, Riddle writes, physicians "were less aware of what women were doing, and women were themselves less knowledgeable, than their forebears thousands of years before." In 1877, for instance, a contraceptive guide called Fruits of Philosophy: the Private Companion of Young Married People, caused an uproar -- one judge called it "a...dirty, filthy book" and proceeded to fine its publisher. Yet any woman could have gotten more and better information at her local library from works by Hippocrates.

Thank goodness those days are over, one is tempted to say after reading Riddle's book. And in ways both tearful and encouraging, this is the true heyday of family planning. Nearly 40 years after the pill was invented, investigators are still perfecting ways to deliver hormones to the body, even as breakthroughs in biochemistry are pointing to entire new categories of contraceptives. In the spring of 1996, after a 20-year search, molecular biologists identified the protein (or proteins) that sperm cells use to bind with eggs. (In fact, three separate teams identified three distinct proteins -- which one is the real McCoy remains to be seen.) In addition, investigators have found ways to immobilize sperm; to "blind" them to the presence of an egg, and to induce men to produce antibodies that shut down sperm production. Every new approach, in theory, could give birth to a revolutionary new drug.

"It's really Wild West out there," says Elof D. B. Johansson, a vice president of the Population Council in New York City and director of its Center for Biomedical Research. "Basic research has come up with so many possible leads, and all of them are being tested." Testosterone injections for men -- painful, but effective -- have been shown to prevent conception, and other such contraceptives are in the works. The Population Council alone has two in early clinical trials: a vaccine and a synthetic steroid, both of which have proved effective in male rats. Investigators in India, meanwhile, are preparing to test a vaccine for women in a massive human trial -- the final step before the vaccine can be sold to the public.

Yet for all the commotion on the frontier next contraceptives are likely to remain a distant murmur. Even their greatest boosters tend to sound like physicists discussing the future of fusion power: with any luck, they say, the new vaccines may be around "in the first third of the 21st century." Although the world population will double in the next half century, and although some 228 million women lack effective contraceptives, birth control remains a risky business economically, culturally, and politically. The Middle Ages, in some ways, are still with us.

In the past two decades, eight out of 12 major pharmaceutical companies have stopped developing new contraceptives. The science is there, it seems, but the numbers are not. Developing a new contraceptive and getting it approved can cost as much as $500 million -- and then the real costs kick in. Contraceptives are powerful drugs, prone to side effects. Given that they are also designed for healthy users, who are likely to notice such side effects, they are natural targets for lawsuits. Copper intrauterine devices (IUDs) and the Norplant system, two long-term contraceptives, have both been crippled by litigation, though none of the charges has stuck. "We can find no scientific or medical basis for these litigations," Johansson says, "But they're enormously costly and they drive sales down to the bottom -- it's a double whammy." The same mixture of fear and perfectionism once suppressed herbal contraceptives when no better alternatives existed.

True, abortionists are no longer burned at the stake, but religious protests can still kill a new drug. It has been nearly 10 years, for instance, since the abortion drug RU 486 was approved in France. In that time French women have come to prefer it over surgical abortions two-to-one, and more than 200,000 women have used it safely. Yet RU 486 still cannot be sold in the United States. President Clinton originally scheduled the drug for fast-track approval, but protests from Christian and pro-life groups soon stalled the process. Last year the drug seemed ready for release at last. Then its Hungarian manufacturer, Gideon Richter, pulled out suddenly, consigning RU 486 to limbo once again.

The worst knock against the new drugs, ironically, is that they are too convenient. Pro-life groups object to RU 486 mainly because it makes having an abortion too easy. And female vaccines have drawn the ire both of women's groups and Catholics (no small feat) precisely because they promise to be cheap and effective. Longterm vaccines would be so easy to administer, both groups say, that governments might well foist them on unsuspecting women. In the Philippines three years ago, Catholic activists accused health authorities of slipping contraceptive vaccines into tetanus shots. The charges proved groundless, but not before they had kept thousands of women from getting the shots.

And so it goes, each new drug stumbling over a different set of trip wires. In 1990 and again in 1996, committees at the Institute of Medicine in Washington, D.C., suggested some ways to clear the path. The federal government could protect the makers of contraceptives against excessive liability as it does the makers of vaccines. Or a central agency could purchase and distribute contraceptives in bulk. Or insurers could cover contraceptive costs, recognizing that unintended pregnancies cost far more in the long term. But political will is lacking. The countries most likely to pay for new contraceptives are looking for ways to raise their fertility rates, not lower them. Singapore, for instance, has an entire bureaucracy devoted to matchmaking, and France rewards large families with government stipends. Population control is fine and good, such policies imply, as long as it's practiced somewhere else.

No wonder some women are turning back to herbs. In the past five years, as food and drug regulations have loosened, herb sales in the United States have doubled. Disenchanted with modern medicine, people have begun taking echinacea to fend off colds, ginkgo to sharpen memory, and any number of herbs to prevent pregnancy. More and more, a trip to a health-food store or vitamin shop can feel like a visit to a medieval apothecary. Jars of odd-colored powders and tinctures line the shelves, their labels promising vaguely to "promote well-being," their contents largely unregulated.

There is a certain bittersweet quality to the sight of all those ancient remedies, reemerging after centuries underground. But nostalgia can be dangerous where contraceptives are concerned. Unscrupulous manufacturers aside, herbs are unpredictable by nature. Depending on where and how they are grown, what part of the plant is used and how they are processed, herbs can have a host of different effects. Standardized herbal extracts dodge some of those uncertainties, but dosages remain largely guesswork. Two years ago, when Consumer Reports tested 10 ginseng products, one contained virtually no ginseng at all; the concentrations in the others varied by 1,000 percent. Medieval customers, at least, had midwives and apothecaries to guide them. But today's pharmacists know little if anything about herbs.

In the epilogue to Eve's Herbs, Riddle describes a dinner party he once attended in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina. He was telling a public health nurse named Mary about his research, he says, when she mentioned that some of her clients were taking an herbal contraceptive. Intrigued, Riddle asked her what part of the plant they were eating and whether they took it before or after sex.

"Told that the seed was ingested after intercourse, I guessed that they were taking Queen Anne's lace, about a tablespoon. It was then Mary's turn to be surprised, and she asked how I knew.

Ignoring her question for a moment, I told her, "Thank you, you have just provided me with my only source since the 17th century for its use!"

More than anything, that story shows just how tenuous most herbal lore has become. Riddle is a tireless scholar and an engaging writer, and as his story moves along in chronological order, it begins to read like an official history. But at heart Eve's Herbs is just the opposite: a gathering of nervous confessions and forbidden secrets, committed to paper as proof of a hidden tradition. Like a covey of quail flushed from tall grass, these anguished facts burst from the page with startling life. But they will go back into hiding just as quickly -- back to their old haunts in wives' tales and herbal manuals, midwives' formulas and nursery rhymes.

In the end, maybe that's where they should stay. Medicinal herbs have their uses, but nowadays contraception and abortion needn't be among them. If any one theme runs most plainly through Riddle's history, it is the sheer physical danger family planning once entailed. Even in modern times more than one woman has died from taking too much pennyroyal oil or colocynth powder -- an abortifacient favored by the Egyptians -- and past fatalities must have been much higher. Eve's herbs worked better than physicians were long willing to admit, better than anything science had to offer for thousands of years. But it will be a sad coda to Riddle's tale if many more women begin to use them, just when they should need them least.

Burkhard Bilger is deputy editor of The Sciences.

Article copyright American Botanical Council

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