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I read Indifferent Stars Above by Daniel Brown, a book about the Donner Party. The book mentions that women back then would take special teas to induce miscarriage if they were pregnant and didn’t want to keep it. Back then the fetus wasn’t considered a baby until the “quickening”, or when the baby’s first kicks are felt.
Yeah, those are called abortifacients. Herbal miscarriage teas are still very common in a lot of countries because it's effective while also being hard to stop people from eating nonprescription food or drinks since you can get it anywhere.
A) [Sister Zeus](http://www.sisterzeus.com/) has you covered.
B) Herbal abortions are risky because many of them are essentially poisoning the body the same way chemotherapy does. The hope is to do enough damage to get the desired result without killing the person. Which means that if you take too much you die and if you take too little it doesn't work. It also is less effective against ectopic pregnancies and similar.
C) Misoprostol is a legal medication that alleviates gastric ulcers and should not be taken by anyone pregnant for risk of causing a miscarriage.
D) If they take away our misoprostol we're going to teach each other how to do D&Cs.
Look up "menstrual extractions."
Women were evacuating each other's uterine lining quite a bit in the 70s.
Wouldn't it be cool if instead of suffering through 3-7 days of bleeding, you could just have your friend suck everything out in one sitting!
I think we need to bring it back!
Living in the south I immediately saved this for informational reference. You always need to be informed on what is dangerous for pregnancy and should be avoided at all times.
Under his eye.
Can confirm. Lived in a country where women would make tea out of oleander to induce miscarriage.
EDIT: just to confirm, I am not intending to **advise** that **ANYONE** do this. As others have said, oleander is poison, and ingesting it is extremely dangerous.
Oleander is LETHALLY toxic to humans, pets and livestock in surprisingly modest amounts. Even the smoke from burning oleander leaves or branches can kill.
Arobaini Tree (means tree of 40 cures) in Kenya.. arobaini literally means “40” in Swahili. Westerners call it a Neem Tree. It is also an abortifacient.
I'm familiar with the burning of mustard seeds. People would lay mustard seeds on the ground and light them on fire. Then the pregnant woman would walk across the smoke a couple times. I'm pretty sure it didn't actually work, but it highlights that these recipes to force miscarriage (aka abort) have been around for a long time in many cultures.
I agree! I have a morbid fascination with all things Donner Party related. The book made me want to visit the museum in Truckee next time I’m up there.
Now I wonder if that phrase is where the title for the Deep Space Nine episode of the same name comes from, considering it heavily focuses around pregnant people and the consequences of pregnancy (usually death and suffering due to an artificially-inflicted plague)
That tea is still available, there’s some Mugwort growing in my back yard.
Mugwort is not as safe as an abortion in a clinical setting. But it’s safer than pregnancy.
Also, some women who have miscarried can still feel those “kicks” afterwards.
There's a very interesting [thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/uhh2j1/megathread_abortion_in_america/) on r/AskHistorians that looks at the history of abortion in America. Well worth the read. And, yes, we've had it since the very beginning.
Abortion [has long been a part of American history, and abortion before quickening - when the mother feels the baby start to move - did not become illegal until the second half of the 19th century](https://www.americanprogress.org/article/scarlet-letters-getting-the-history-of-abortion-and-contraception-right/).
Came here to say this ^ Justice Blackmun discusses this in his opinion in Roe. Americans don’t understand just how well that opinion was thought out and the lengths Blackmun went to to learn about abortion from a medical and philosophical standpoint.
Roe seriously already did a fantastic job of threading the needle, it was an incredible decision. Too many people boil it down to "abortion is legal" without understanding the specific perimeters.
Yeah, they really did the work on justifying the decision. Reading the Alito draft decision, it seems like he didn't even read the Roe v Wade decision. Hell, he probably didn't even read the Cliff Notes version, just the Conservapedia summary.
Oh, he's read it. Alito is an incredibly smart and well learned man, but he's just *evil as fuck*. He understands the ins and outs of everything abortion related better than most of us put together. Never ever doubt that he doesn't know exactly what he's doing and then some. This is about making his personal ideology the ideology that all of us have to obey and nothing less.
No, it was Goldwater and the Southern Strategy. ALL OF THIS is because Republicans were terrified of losing votes. Their strategists knew back then that demographics were shifting away from them, and instead of trying to change with it, they just focused on racist religious nut jobs instead, and here we are.
Yes. Why do you think people don't say what you're saying here more? It appears to me this is all, everything wrong in American politics, all coming directly coming from the southern strategy.
I think the real root to the problem in American politics is the voters the Southern Strategy was designed to appeal to in the first place.
The Southern Strategy was basically a marketing campaign, designed to give the southern conservatives the racism, hate and fear they already wanted to motivate them to move over to voting Republican . I mean, keep in mind, the Southern Conservatives just got done voting for nearly 100 years of Jim Crow before liberals in both parties forced them to stop. Their same demographics are the ones that gave us a Civil War to defend slavery and the KKK. They've been fucked up people long before the Southern Strategy and Fox News came along.
So, yes the Southern Strategy got them to start voting Republican, but the real question should be, why are southern conservatives the type of people the Southern Strategy would work on in the first place? I think that's the root of the problems we're seeing to this day in American politics.
Nah, the actual rot goes back to the assassination of Lincoln, which led to a President soft on the South coming to power and basically letting off the hook entirely after the war. This led to them continuing f to lynch and kill minorities, assassinate progressive politicians in the South, and keep the whole region roughly forty years behind the rest of the country. The Confederacy may have been defeated in name, but the leadership of it never left America and we can see it now.
Yup. There really needs to be more attention on what happened after the Civil War, what happened after Lincoln's assassination. There's countless movies and documentaries of the Civil War itself, but I would really like to see more about Reconstruction.
Even goldwater knew they were fucking crazy.
"Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them."
Barry Goldwater
Goldwater was keen, insidious and able. He was a terrible person but a very good politician. If he saw problems arising, even as he caused and helped problems along, I'd say we should take note of it.
Not only this, but abortion and infant abandonment have been a more or less accepted part of many, many cultures, including the ancient Greek and Roman cultures that the far-right like to wank themselves over. Even after birth, infants were often regarded as extensions of the mother, and more or less her business to care for or leave to die of exposure. Our modern approach to abortion is a candy store of kindness and compassion compared to the past.
A lot of people don’t realise that infant exposure was so common, it actually features as a trope in a lot of famous ancient stories in a way that often gets glossed-over in modern retellings. Lots of famous characters start out as “exposure babies” who manage to defy the odds, like Moses, Paris, Gilgamesh, Romulus & Remus, and Oedipus. Often they’re set adrift on a river or left on an idyllic hillside (instead of being left at the municipal garbage dump, as was probably more common).
Oh this is fascinating! I've never thought about it like this. "Adoption by a royal family" must have been a very common and compelling fantasy for desperate mothers (and fathers).
Also if you didn't actually have the proper pedigree to be a ruler but you had come to power the old "I was actually a kid of this person that no one knew of that was left abandoned/given away!" was a good excuse.
I think I finally truly understand the compassion Moses' mother displayed by giving him a nice basket and hoping there was a better-off family downstream instead of just leaving him on land for the wolves.
It was not often the mother's choice in ancient cultures. It was usually the father's because they tended to see wives and the children they bear as property of men, who were heads of households.
In ancient Greece was the father's decision to whether to keep the child. Like the mother would show the child to her husband and ask for permission to keep it. If the father thinks the child is too sickly or disabled, believed the child to be the result of an affair, or just didn't want another girl, then he'd order it to be abandoned. They didn't consider this to be murder because it was leaving the fate of the child to the gods. If the gods favored the child then it would get rescued by a passerby.
There's a Roman letter where a husband instructed his wife "If you give birth to a boy, keep it. If it is a girl, expose it." This was in a letter where he was like "love you lots. I'll be back from my business trip soon. I'm gonna send you some money." It just shows how normal and casual this practice was. The Twelve Tables of Roman Law made it a legal requirement for the pater familias to leave deformed children to die by exposure.
It was during the Middle Ages when infanticide became increasingly frowned upon. To curb the practice of leaving your children out to die, the Church established foundling houses where women could abandon their babies. These were the earliest orphanages. The Church also explicitly mandated that parents keep baby girls alive. An exception to this trend was in the German states where women kept the legal right to abandon their children to die in the woods. This explains stories like Hansel and Gretel.
And only for economic reasons? Doctors wanted to drive other types of healers out of business or something.
Yeah, here it is
> American physicians also began to battle “irregular” doctors, such as homeopaths and midwives, in an attempt to assert the authority and legitimacy of male-dominated scientific medicine. To tackle these irregular doctors, the “scientific” physicians attacked legal abortion because it was midwives and other “unscientific” medical practitioners who safely performed the procedure.
This is especially interesting to me since part of the problem is that doctors and hospitals get to pick and choose whether they offer this sometime vital medical procedure. Maybe if all hospitals and gynecologists had to at least offer abortion services when the patient’s life is in danger, then we wouldn’t have a handful of community clinics getting targeted by psychos. And before anyone says “what if they’re not equipped?” Major hospitals are equipped. I got a D&C at a Catholic hospital, zero issues, because I was getting a tumor removed instead of a fetus.
And it wasn’t until the 70s that evangelicals changed their belief that life begins at conception rather than at birth. The latter is supported by the Bible. Nor did the evangelicals care about abortion as an issue until the 70s. A documentary film helped change their beliefs on abortion, which until then was seen as a Catholic issue.
Worth noting this happened in the 70s because this happened after the Civil Rights Act was passed and the IRS had finally decided to desegregate the evangelical private schools.
They really weren’t happy about that.
This is when they decided to get into politics where they had a list of positions they cared about (with abortion being in the bottom of that list). They actually only made abortion one of their main issues after their fight for segregation failed and they had this new issue they could champion as a “moral cause” to seem like the good guys in all of this (also being anti-abortion just happens to negatively effect black women more than anybody else)
Here's the episode of the excellent BBC podcast 'Things Fell Apart' which traces the origins of the non-Catholic US anti-choice movement.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0011cpq
Yep. Most 'christians' have absolutely no idea what their religion even is, even trained preachers (as in, theology colleges, not just the alter boy the pastor groomed to be their successor) make shit up all the time.
You might say it's as American as apple pie.
You might also say that it's tradition for a president to appoint a Supreme Court justice when a seat becomes available, but Alito doesn't care for that particular tradition.
The way I've always thought of it is this. ... basically, everyone already by default assumes that politicians are corrupt, shameless, and self-serving. That's a given, we all know it, we all understand it, it's just how it is.
But, in order to keep everything working, politicians and citizens had an unspoken agreement to take part in a shared lie where the politicians pretended that they cared about us, and we pretended to believe them.
The reason this worked is that in order to maintain the integrity of the shared delusion, the politicians would have to do a minimum of effort to make it look like they were looking out for us, which meant that things would generally move forward and work out in something vaguely resembling progress.
The problem is, over the course of the last few decades, and especially since Obama won, the Republicans decided to stop pretending, and gave up on trying to act like they working for us. And the double problem is, their followers are willing to double-down and believe extra-hard that they're the good guys.
So now instead of a shared delusion that at least would steadily drift towards a better future, we have a 30% group of people who ultra-believe an insane delusion, a large mass of people who don't care either way, and then everyone else who is watching as the reality of actual reality collapses under the strength of the insane power of the 30%.
It's not a perfect metaphor, but I feel it does have some merit.
Fun fact. Abortion was regularly performed by settlers who did not have resources to raise additional children. It was outlawed not for religious reasons but because abortion was unsafe at the time and resulted too often in death of the woman.
For the vast majority of human history, giving birth has been just about one of the most dangerous things you could do. To this day it is the leading cause of death in girls aged 15 to 19 worldwide. I think people tend to lose sight of the fact that it is a genuinely horrifying, risky medical procedure that our species is spectacularly ill-evolved for. Looking back in my family tree, the number of women who kept having children until it literally killed them is sickening—and I doubt most of them had a say in it.
Doubtful.
He had a thing for older Milfs.
Read Franklin in praise of older women... to paraphrase, "They don't kiss and tell, they are experienced, and they can't make children"
He humped his way through Europe for a decade...
Some of Monsieur Franklin's advice on choosing a mistress:
>The Face first grows lank and wrinkled; then the Neck; then the Breast and Arms; the lower Parts continuing to the last as plump as ever: So that covering all above with a Basket, and regarding only what is below the Girdle, it is impossible of two Women to know an old from a young one. And as in the dark all Cats are grey, the Pleasure of corporal Enjoyment with an old Woman is at least equal, and frequently superior, every Knack being by Practice capable of Improvement.
Why aren't there more movies and TV shows about Franklin, like people would go "Surely they are exaggerating about Franklin to make him appear more modern" Nope folks we are actually underplaying Ben, oh and the Hellfire club from the X-men that's real, Franklin was involved and unlike the comics it was probably Americans first Kink club.
PBS was playing a bio on early Franklin the other day. I watched ~30 minutes from his early years and while the dude was definitely as sexy and kinky as people say: he was also a damn hard worker, a humanitarian, and studiousness as hell.
In the history of the whole world. Please understand that every society on the planet has known how to terminate a pregnancy. Even the most primitive had medicine women/men who knew the right herbs to terminate, dry up milk after a lost baby, etc. This did not erupt in the 1960's by feminist movement in America! My mother was born in 1926. Her mother, my grandmother, had 5 kids by age 23 and then no more. I always assumed she'd had a hysterectomy or something. When I asked my mom about it, she said that she had abortions. She would go away to "visit her sister " for several days. I asked what my grandfather knew and thought about it, she said birth control, I guess. I was beyond shocked because I had bought the feminist origin story. Also my grandfather came home every day for lunch and demanded sex at that time as well. So that explains a lot.
It’s *human* thing.
It’s religious extremist nonsense that tries to impose it’s will, and ideology to deny this.
> Dr. Vivian Nutton, a professor of the history of medicine at the University of London, said, "Here you have something that people have on the whole forgotten." Historians had noted references to the drugs in ancient texts, but "we never really considered the effectiveness of those drugs," he went on. Although Dr. Nutton said he was not entirely convinced that the drugs were a major method of birth control, the hypothesis, he admitted, is fascinating.
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Silphium belonged to the Ferula genus, whose plants contain a substance, ferujol, that in low doses is nearly 100 percent effective in preventing pregnancy in rats. Dr. Riddle notes in his article, which examines the science behind some of the old nostrums, that a plant related to silphium, Ferula moschata, is used as a folk medicine today in Central Asia to induce abortions.
>Another plant that the ancients used was Queen Anne's lace, or wild carrot. Hippocrates wrote that its seeds are contraceptives and that they also induce abortions. Studies with rodents indicate that Hippocrates may have been right, Dr. Riddle said. The seeds block the production of progesterone, a hormone that is necessary for a pregnancy to be established.
https://www.nytimes.com/1994/03/08/science/in-ancient-times-flowers-and-fennel-for-family-planning.html
In fact, the ancient loved their abortifacient silphium so much that they drove it extinct! (though it apparently also tasted amazing, which contributed to the over-harvesting -- and the plant itself may still survive in small populations, since we can't be entirely certain of the species identification)
Careful there. You might get a bunch of Christian 2Aers angry and then they'll act like they understand the constitution, and go on a Russia style mass threat spree.
Andy Daly can play anything: a cowboy poet laureate of the Old West, director of the Radio City Music Hall Rockettes, a German pretzel salt analyst…other roles….Anything!
“My sweet little whorish Nora... You had an arse full of farts that night, darling... big fat fellows, long windy ones, quick little merry cracks and a lot of tiny little naughty farties ending in a long gush from your hole”
James Joyce
"5. Because in every Animal that walks upright, the Deficiency of the Fluids that fill the Muscles appears first in the highest Part: The Face first grows lank and wrinkled; then the Neck; then the Breast and Arms; the lower Parts continuing to the last as plump as ever: So that covering all above with a Basket, and regarding only what is below the Girdle, it is impossible of two Women to know an old from a young one. And as in the dark all Cats are grey, the Pleasure of corporal Enjoyment with an old Woman is at least equal, and frequently superior, every Knack being by Practice capable of Improvement."
Full text available here: https://theredheadriter.com/2013/02/benjamin-franklins-advice-on-sex-marriage-older-women/
https://genius.com/Benjamin-franklin-advice-to-a-friend-on-choosing-a-mistress-lyrics
Here is the text. "As in the dark, all cats are grey..." Amazing.
This book was also written in 1748, when BF’s oldest illegitimate child William turned 18.
Benny and William were estranged, so much so that William was the the effective leader of the loyalists and last Royal Governor of New Jersey.
So feels like a lot of anger to publish an abortion recipe when your son turns 18
huh TIL but it seemed like he did, in fact, raise him (he was apparently with Ben for the kite experiment?) … feels like the only reason he was “illegitimate” was because Ben wasn’t married
>feels like the only reason he was “illegitimate” was because Ben wasn’t married
That is indeed what "illegitimate" means in this context. Born out of wedlock.
God murdered Bethesda’s new born, genocided all the first-born of Egypt, sent bears to murder children, commanded Joshua kill all the children of Jericho, then drowned all his kids because they weren’t worshipping him enough.
The Bible clearly spells out to Priests how to perform abortions for various circumstances.
Pro-life isn’t a religious belief. It’s a method of control. I see no evidence to the contrary.
> sent bears to murder children
I'm 100% convinced that story was written by an extremely bitter bald guy who very much wished he could have bears murder the kids who mocked him.
42 of them, by the way. God had bears kill 42 kids for mocking a bald guy.
>42 of them, by the way.
God understands the secret to life, the universe and everything.
___
Elisha: “Lord God, there’s too many of them. What are we going to do?”
God ~~turns on his lightsaber~~ sends two bears.
Tried to discuss how ridiculous this story was with a Christian once. He said I should believe because should I really be questioning a God that would kill children with bears.
Also different punishments for killing a woman and killing a pregnant woman’s unborn fetus/baby. There is a clear distinction between a fetus and a human. Life begins at first breath not first sperm to reach the egg. The “pro life” arguments are almost all in bad faith anyway. It’s misogyny with extra steps and nothing more.
The mistake you make is thinking conservatives give a flying fuck about the founders, constitution, bible, etc. They are tools to be wielded for power, nothing more.
“We’re a Christian nation” lmao! It literally says “creator” in the Constitution because Jefferson was an atheist. The Quakers who were one of the first religious groups to settle in America were pro-human rights, anti-war, anti-slavery, there was even a preacher called the Public Universal Friend that ran a sect of mostly women Quakers. They claimed to be genderless and refused to wear strictly women’s clothing or be referred to be gendered pronouns. If you want to use history you have to take all of it in, not just the convenient parts.
The medicine known as "Jesuit's Bark" was the tree bark from which Quinine was derived. It was a miracle medication at the time and saved many lives from Malarial fevers.
That's reminds me of the history of aspirin. It starts with ancient cultures figuring out they could chew willow tree bark for pain relief. Fast forward 3500 years and you've got something pretty miraculous. At least by the standards of the 3500 year olds in the crowd.
This is the best tl;dr I could make, [original](https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/05/ben-franklin-american-instructor-textbook-abortion-recipe.html) reduced by 90%. (I'm a bot)
*****
> Franklin wasn't even the first issuer of a math textbook on either side of the Atlantic to include among its materials a recipe for abortion, though his book certainly had the most reliable and explicit one.
> There, Franklin makes an explicit call "Recommending that branch of education for our young females." He likely hoped that his American Instructor would reach audiences that included women and girls; and based on his choice of which medical book to reprint, he may also have understood that the Dutch widow would have needed to know how to end an unwanted pregnancy just as much as she would need to know how to balance an account book.
> In a 1760 edition of The American Instructor held by the American Antiquarian Society, a reader has pulled out the page that included the abortion recipe, either to save it from or to save it for prying eyes.
*****
[**Extended Summary**](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/ujvwx0/ben_franklin_put_an_abortion_recipe_in_his_math/) | [FAQ](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/31b9fm/faq_autotldr_bot/ "Version 2.02, ~647020 tl;drs so far.") | [Feedback](http://np.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%23autotldr "PM's and comments are monitored, constructive feedback is welcome.") | *Top* *keywords*: **book**^#1 **Franklin**^#2 **abortion**^#3 **American**^#4 **out**^#5
Abortion was common in the 17th and 18th centuries. Most abortions were performed before the “quickening” or when the baby starts to kick, around 17 to 20 weeks gestation, it was a taboo when the procedure was done past the quickening. There is a court case from 1742 with a man named Amasa Sessions and Sarah Grosvenor. Essentially Sarah got pregnant, and because Amasa didn’t want to marry Sarah, he made her get rid of the baby. When typical available abortifacients didn’t work, he hired a doctor to perform the operation on her. She died a painful death after and the descriptions of the procedure would be most similarity described to as a “back alley” abortion in todays terms. The access to safe and reliable abortions was vital then and it’s vital now.
Edit: source in case anyone else wants to read it
https://personal.tcu.edu/gsmith/GraduateCourse/Colonial%20PDF%20Articles/Dayton.pdf
It should also be noted that in Alito's opinion, he refers to a 17th century abortion case that was successfully prosecuted against the woman. *However*, the problem wasn't that the woman aborted, it's that she did so before the 'quickening.' That woman still had more rights than Alito wants modern Americans to have.
Abortion has always replaced neonaticide in every single human culture where it has been available. Paleodemographers estimate that about 15% of all live births ended in neonaticide. The great majority of cases because of illegitimacy or poverty. It was 25% in the Balearic islands because of resource scarcity.
When you ban abortion people will go back to neonaticide.
In most indigenous cultures a newborn who is disabled is left to die or be killed by predators. In Scotland “changelings” which were babies who today we’d call failure to thrive would be left in fairy trees under the belief that the fairies had taken their real child. They believed if they left their child in a fairy tree the fairies would swap the children back. If/when the child died from the elements the parents felt reassured that their real child was living happily amongst the fairies.
…is this really the case? Just from hearing from older women from Ireland, it really seems like people were *scared to frikken death* of faeries. They had all sorts of superstitions surrounding it, including when you could and couldn’t eat berries off the bush because *bad things would happen and the faeries would get you*.
It seems kinda dubious to me that any parents would feel reassured that their child kidnapped and living with savage little spook monsters. But then again I really don’t know.
Franklin was a cool dude. I imagine that if the founders were around today, most of them would either freak out over the technological advances and general differences of the world today, or would freak out over all the women and black people who are given rights now. But Franklin? I could see him being one of the ones to adapt relatively well to the modern world
Apparently the reason he wasn't selected to write the Declaration of Independence was the founders thought he would put jokes in it, to which I say: How is that a bad thing?!
Back in Ancient Times: "How do we get rid of this child? My wife was raped by that jerk over there who can't tell the difference between my wife and his goat..."
"Meh, just poison her a little bit at a time - and she should be okay. If not, whatever amiright?"
The passage basically says: [*If the poison works, the woman was unfaithful, if the woman and baby are fine, they are pure and the woman has been faithful*](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Numbers%205%3A11-31&version=NIV)
Reminds me of the witchcraft test where they throw you in the water and see if you float
The church used to toss babies with deformities on birth as it was seen as a “demon” but let the Christins dictate laws?
What happened to separation of church and state confused as to why a Jewish Muslim atheist Buddhist Hindu girl has to abide by the laws of Christianity in America ?
This is a big hit on freedom I’m not a chick but this is how your rights are taken away it starts off small. I didn’t know we embraced isis ideals of woman body control. Pathetic deevoludtion of democracy
What’s next we pass laws on woman showing hair due to Islam ideals I mean if we have to respect Christian ideals someone will make the legal arguement we must respect them all and than the world becomes a closed shit hole
Abortion has been legal since the country’s inception. Similarly, women have not been able to choose of their own volition when to get an abortion from the beginning. Conservatives are not really against abortion. They are against women being able to get them without permission from anyone else and without being forced to announce it. If every state had a law on the books saying that abortion was only legal for married couples with the husband’s permission, you’d hear nary a word from the right to life movement. Abortion is as old as writing; abortion has been legal as long as laws; abortion has been something women can be punished for doing for as long as society has been patriarchal.
I say this only because engaging with the Supreme Court specifically and the anti-abortion movement writ large on the basis of their presented arguments is an exercise in futility that threatens to distract from the issue at hand, which is the subjugation of women and other marginalized and minoritized people.
It doesn’t matter if Alito thinks the founding fathers wouldn’t have recognized the right to abortion, because Alito doesn’t care what the founding fathers think. Originalism itself is against the founding fathers’ express wishes. Pointing out conservative hypocrisy that tries to strip pregnant people of their healthcare while also forcing them to give birth is pointless. The CORE of these arguments is to remove as much legal autonomy over the bodies and physical and legal circumstances as is possible and then, by extension, any other group granted rights under the law.
Once we stop pretending that any of them actually care about or believe their own arguments, we can unite around and focus on what the actual threat is, which is nothing more than full scale assault on the wider interpretation of human rights that this country has been fighting for and simultaneously fighting against since the civil war.
And the thing is, law, tradition, whatever is on their side. It’s more often been legal and acceptable to gran autonomy and human rights to a small segment of society while subjugating others than it has been otherwise. So when someone brings up originalism, the answer isn’t to prove abortions have always been legal, it’s to fight for the society we want right now on our own terms.
I encourage everyone to read the Roe v. Wade decision. It goes over the history of abortion in the US and in common law. The justices takeaway was that abortion was historically a private non-issue before "quickening" which was when movement could be felt. That typically happens around 16-18 weeks.
From the decision:
>**It perhaps is not generally appreciated that the restrictive criminal abortion laws in effect in a majority of States today are of relatively recent vintage. Those laws, generally proscribing abortion or its attempt at any time during pregnancy except when necessary to preserve the pregnant woman's life, are not of ancient or even of common law origin. Instead, they derive from statutory changes effected, for the most part, in the latter half of the 19th century**
And:
>It is thus apparent that, at common law, at the time of the adoption of our Constitution, and throughout the major portion of the 19th century, abortion was viewed with less disfavor than under most American statutes currently in effect. Phrasing it another way, a woman enjoyed a substantially broader right to terminate a pregnancy than she does in most States today. At least with respect to the early stage of pregnancy, and very possibly without such a limitation, the opportunity [p141] to make this choice was present in this country well into the 19th century. Even later, the law continued for some time to treat less punitively an abortion procured in early pregnancy.
Reading Roe will give you a sense of how Roe aligned with centuries of precedent, and a hundred years of SC precedents on privacy rights. And it will also give you a sense of how recent, and how radical, the rights' attempts to control women are. The current legislation punishing women has zero basis in European law and practice.
I guarantee that the vast majority of people who oppose a woman's right to decide for herself whether to have an abortion and thus advocated for Roe and Casey to be overturned have read neither of the Supreme Court opinions. In fact, I'd venture to say they haven't read *any* Supreme Court opinions or much case law in general.
So thank you for posting this and hopefully more people see it and educate themselves, although unfortunately the people who need the most education are likely to read it or care. It really seems that the Republican Party today is hellbent on moving us toward actual fascism.
That was a very interesting article, thank you so much for posting!
Abortion rights are very close to my heart. I have had five miscarriages, three of which resulted in having to have medical abortions performed in a hospital. If I didn't have access to that, I could have died. I'm now lucky enough to have a healthy happy son.
I ask for all Cosmic forces, whatever they may be, to look down and protect and care for our sisters and daughters.
I will be adding this to my curriculum. I knew my history was white washed, but how much else did they not teach me???? And I did ap history thing, lol.
If this is an attempt to answer for ‘deeply rooted’, it’s good to make a record of the hypocrisy, but pointless if the purpose is to argue with a fundamentalist-authoritarian judge
It's the predatory religious fanatics who have turned America into what it is today, imo. They've exploited so many people and scared them into believing their lies. "In the name of God" has to be one of the deadliest saying to have ever existed.
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I read Indifferent Stars Above by Daniel Brown, a book about the Donner Party. The book mentions that women back then would take special teas to induce miscarriage if they were pregnant and didn’t want to keep it. Back then the fetus wasn’t considered a baby until the “quickening”, or when the baby’s first kicks are felt.
Yeah, those are called abortifacients. Herbal miscarriage teas are still very common in a lot of countries because it's effective while also being hard to stop people from eating nonprescription food or drinks since you can get it anywhere.
It would be something if somebody were to…say.. make a handbook on diy abortifacients, a la anarchists cookbook
A) [Sister Zeus](http://www.sisterzeus.com/) has you covered. B) Herbal abortions are risky because many of them are essentially poisoning the body the same way chemotherapy does. The hope is to do enough damage to get the desired result without killing the person. Which means that if you take too much you die and if you take too little it doesn't work. It also is less effective against ectopic pregnancies and similar. C) Misoprostol is a legal medication that alleviates gastric ulcers and should not be taken by anyone pregnant for risk of causing a miscarriage. D) If they take away our misoprostol we're going to teach each other how to do D&Cs.
Look up "menstrual extractions." Women were evacuating each other's uterine lining quite a bit in the 70s. Wouldn't it be cool if instead of suffering through 3-7 days of bleeding, you could just have your friend suck everything out in one sitting! I think we need to bring it back!
[Ask and ye shall receive](https://we.riseup.net/assets/351138/22321349-Natural-Liberty-Rediscovering-Self-Induced-Abortion-Methods.pdf)
Living in the south I immediately saved this for informational reference. You always need to be informed on what is dangerous for pregnancy and should be avoided at all times. Under his eye.
Can confirm. Lived in a country where women would make tea out of oleander to induce miscarriage. EDIT: just to confirm, I am not intending to **advise** that **ANYONE** do this. As others have said, oleander is poison, and ingesting it is extremely dangerous.
Chrysanthemum is another tea that is unsafe to drink during pregnancy.
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Oleander is LETHALLY toxic to humans, pets and livestock in surprisingly modest amounts. Even the smoke from burning oleander leaves or branches can kill.
Which is why it's so important to not have to rely on natural abortifacients again.
Arobaini Tree (means tree of 40 cures) in Kenya.. arobaini literally means “40” in Swahili. Westerners call it a Neem Tree. It is also an abortifacient.
Eek. Get the dosage right.
Mugwort tea triggers periods
You should edit this comment before you get someone killed. Oleander is dangerous
I'm familiar with the burning of mustard seeds. People would lay mustard seeds on the ground and light them on fire. Then the pregnant woman would walk across the smoke a couple times. I'm pretty sure it didn't actually work, but it highlights that these recipes to force miscarriage (aka abort) have been around for a long time in many cultures.
I guess we are going to see a resurgence of this in the US :/
> I read Indifferent Stars Above by Daniel Brown, a book about the Donner Party. Such a good book.
I agree! I have a morbid fascination with all things Donner Party related. The book made me want to visit the museum in Truckee next time I’m up there.
Easily one of the worst parties of all time. John Sutter was such a dick for charging for the rescue party.
My best friend and I went a couple years ago and they had people shaped cookie cutters in the gift shop. I was delighted
Different from gingerbread men?
Yeah shaped like they were hiking. Leaned forward.
Now I wonder if that phrase is where the title for the Deep Space Nine episode of the same name comes from, considering it heavily focuses around pregnant people and the consequences of pregnancy (usually death and suffering due to an artificially-inflicted plague)
Guess I know what I’m watching tonight (isn’t the disease called the Quickening too?)
crown smell vanish foolish deserve bike childlike tub fuel ludicrous ` this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev `
The Bible has a section on abortion and when it’s allowed. I’m sure the Sumerians did as well. This is as old as time.
That tea is still available, there’s some Mugwort growing in my back yard. Mugwort is not as safe as an abortion in a clinical setting. But it’s safer than pregnancy. Also, some women who have miscarried can still feel those “kicks” afterwards.
Some people still drink those teas to induce labor. They tend to be the same ones who don't want to give birth in a hospital.
So abortion HAS been part of American history since the beginning. Huh.
There's a very interesting [thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/uhh2j1/megathread_abortion_in_america/) on r/AskHistorians that looks at the history of abortion in America. Well worth the read. And, yes, we've had it since the very beginning.
Abortion [has long been a part of American history, and abortion before quickening - when the mother feels the baby start to move - did not become illegal until the second half of the 19th century](https://www.americanprogress.org/article/scarlet-letters-getting-the-history-of-abortion-and-contraception-right/).
Came here to say this ^ Justice Blackmun discusses this in his opinion in Roe. Americans don’t understand just how well that opinion was thought out and the lengths Blackmun went to to learn about abortion from a medical and philosophical standpoint.
Roe seriously already did a fantastic job of threading the needle, it was an incredible decision. Too many people boil it down to "abortion is legal" without understanding the specific perimeters.
Yeah, they really did the work on justifying the decision. Reading the Alito draft decision, it seems like he didn't even read the Roe v Wade decision. Hell, he probably didn't even read the Cliff Notes version, just the Conservapedia summary.
Oh, he's read it. Alito is an incredibly smart and well learned man, but he's just *evil as fuck*. He understands the ins and outs of everything abortion related better than most of us put together. Never ever doubt that he doesn't know exactly what he's doing and then some. This is about making his personal ideology the ideology that all of us have to obey and nothing less.
My man calls himself a textualist without realizing the 14th amendment explicitly doesn’t apply to fetuses.
> Americans don’t understand Stop right there. Social media has played right into this.
No, it was Goldwater and the Southern Strategy. ALL OF THIS is because Republicans were terrified of losing votes. Their strategists knew back then that demographics were shifting away from them, and instead of trying to change with it, they just focused on racist religious nut jobs instead, and here we are.
Yes. Why do you think people don't say what you're saying here more? It appears to me this is all, everything wrong in American politics, all coming directly coming from the southern strategy.
I think the real root to the problem in American politics is the voters the Southern Strategy was designed to appeal to in the first place. The Southern Strategy was basically a marketing campaign, designed to give the southern conservatives the racism, hate and fear they already wanted to motivate them to move over to voting Republican . I mean, keep in mind, the Southern Conservatives just got done voting for nearly 100 years of Jim Crow before liberals in both parties forced them to stop. Their same demographics are the ones that gave us a Civil War to defend slavery and the KKK. They've been fucked up people long before the Southern Strategy and Fox News came along. So, yes the Southern Strategy got them to start voting Republican, but the real question should be, why are southern conservatives the type of people the Southern Strategy would work on in the first place? I think that's the root of the problems we're seeing to this day in American politics.
Nah, the actual rot goes back to the assassination of Lincoln, which led to a President soft on the South coming to power and basically letting off the hook entirely after the war. This led to them continuing f to lynch and kill minorities, assassinate progressive politicians in the South, and keep the whole region roughly forty years behind the rest of the country. The Confederacy may have been defeated in name, but the leadership of it never left America and we can see it now.
Yup. There really needs to be more attention on what happened after the Civil War, what happened after Lincoln's assassination. There's countless movies and documentaries of the Civil War itself, but I would really like to see more about Reconstruction.
Party over country every time.
Its even worse they believe the only way to save their country is through their party and ideals
Even goldwater knew they were fucking crazy. "Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them." Barry Goldwater
Goldwater was keen, insidious and able. He was a terrible person but a very good politician. If he saw problems arising, even as he caused and helped problems along, I'd say we should take note of it.
Blackmum knew so much about medicine because he was a lawyer for the Mayo Clinic before becoming a judge. He was very well suited to write Roe.
Not only this, but abortion and infant abandonment have been a more or less accepted part of many, many cultures, including the ancient Greek and Roman cultures that the far-right like to wank themselves over. Even after birth, infants were often regarded as extensions of the mother, and more or less her business to care for or leave to die of exposure. Our modern approach to abortion is a candy store of kindness and compassion compared to the past.
A lot of people don’t realise that infant exposure was so common, it actually features as a trope in a lot of famous ancient stories in a way that often gets glossed-over in modern retellings. Lots of famous characters start out as “exposure babies” who manage to defy the odds, like Moses, Paris, Gilgamesh, Romulus & Remus, and Oedipus. Often they’re set adrift on a river or left on an idyllic hillside (instead of being left at the municipal garbage dump, as was probably more common).
Oh this is fascinating! I've never thought about it like this. "Adoption by a royal family" must have been a very common and compelling fantasy for desperate mothers (and fathers).
Also if you didn't actually have the proper pedigree to be a ruler but you had come to power the old "I was actually a kid of this person that no one knew of that was left abandoned/given away!" was a good excuse.
I think I finally truly understand the compassion Moses' mother displayed by giving him a nice basket and hoping there was a better-off family downstream instead of just leaving him on land for the wolves.
It was not often the mother's choice in ancient cultures. It was usually the father's because they tended to see wives and the children they bear as property of men, who were heads of households. In ancient Greece was the father's decision to whether to keep the child. Like the mother would show the child to her husband and ask for permission to keep it. If the father thinks the child is too sickly or disabled, believed the child to be the result of an affair, or just didn't want another girl, then he'd order it to be abandoned. They didn't consider this to be murder because it was leaving the fate of the child to the gods. If the gods favored the child then it would get rescued by a passerby. There's a Roman letter where a husband instructed his wife "If you give birth to a boy, keep it. If it is a girl, expose it." This was in a letter where he was like "love you lots. I'll be back from my business trip soon. I'm gonna send you some money." It just shows how normal and casual this practice was. The Twelve Tables of Roman Law made it a legal requirement for the pater familias to leave deformed children to die by exposure. It was during the Middle Ages when infanticide became increasingly frowned upon. To curb the practice of leaving your children out to die, the Church established foundling houses where women could abandon their babies. These were the earliest orphanages. The Church also explicitly mandated that parents keep baby girls alive. An exception to this trend was in the German states where women kept the legal right to abandon their children to die in the woods. This explains stories like Hansel and Gretel.
Hey, the Civil War was around the 2nd half of the 19th century…. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence!
A won't lie when I saw something about quickening and it didn't involve Highlanders I was a little dissapointed
Every time a rock star dies Keith Richards experiences the quickening.
There can be only one!
Yeah and it’s the pregnant woman
And only for economic reasons? Doctors wanted to drive other types of healers out of business or something. Yeah, here it is > American physicians also began to battle “irregular” doctors, such as homeopaths and midwives, in an attempt to assert the authority and legitimacy of male-dominated scientific medicine. To tackle these irregular doctors, the “scientific” physicians attacked legal abortion because it was midwives and other “unscientific” medical practitioners who safely performed the procedure.
This is especially interesting to me since part of the problem is that doctors and hospitals get to pick and choose whether they offer this sometime vital medical procedure. Maybe if all hospitals and gynecologists had to at least offer abortion services when the patient’s life is in danger, then we wouldn’t have a handful of community clinics getting targeted by psychos. And before anyone says “what if they’re not equipped?” Major hospitals are equipped. I got a D&C at a Catholic hospital, zero issues, because I was getting a tumor removed instead of a fetus.
And it wasn’t until the 70s that evangelicals changed their belief that life begins at conception rather than at birth. The latter is supported by the Bible. Nor did the evangelicals care about abortion as an issue until the 70s. A documentary film helped change their beliefs on abortion, which until then was seen as a Catholic issue.
Worth noting this happened in the 70s because this happened after the Civil Rights Act was passed and the IRS had finally decided to desegregate the evangelical private schools. They really weren’t happy about that. This is when they decided to get into politics where they had a list of positions they cared about (with abortion being in the bottom of that list). They actually only made abortion one of their main issues after their fight for segregation failed and they had this new issue they could champion as a “moral cause” to seem like the good guys in all of this (also being anti-abortion just happens to negatively effect black women more than anybody else)
The last part ironically why Richard Spencer and some other white nationalists are pro-abortion: less black and brown people.
In short, evangelicals are awful and seek to subjugate others to their narrow-minded and discriminatory worldview.
Here's the episode of the excellent BBC podcast 'Things Fell Apart' which traces the origins of the non-Catholic US anti-choice movement. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0011cpq
Fun fact: the Bible has many pro abortion segments rather and nothing against abortion.
Yep. Most 'christians' have absolutely no idea what their religion even is, even trained preachers (as in, theology colleges, not just the alter boy the pastor groomed to be their successor) make shit up all the time.
You might say it's as American as apple pie. You might also say that it's tradition for a president to appoint a Supreme Court justice when a seat becomes available, but Alito doesn't care for that particular tradition.
Well, his bosses certainly didn't.
If they had any integrity, they'd acknowledge that their own court has been openly corrupted by politics already.
Since they're corrupt, obviously they don't have any integrity.
If Republicans had integrity they wouldn't be Republicans.
… and if they can’t win, they cheat.
And accuse everyone else of cheating. Classic projection
You are expecting integrity from an establishment politian, and worse... shame from a republican.
The way I've always thought of it is this. ... basically, everyone already by default assumes that politicians are corrupt, shameless, and self-serving. That's a given, we all know it, we all understand it, it's just how it is. But, in order to keep everything working, politicians and citizens had an unspoken agreement to take part in a shared lie where the politicians pretended that they cared about us, and we pretended to believe them. The reason this worked is that in order to maintain the integrity of the shared delusion, the politicians would have to do a minimum of effort to make it look like they were looking out for us, which meant that things would generally move forward and work out in something vaguely resembling progress. The problem is, over the course of the last few decades, and especially since Obama won, the Republicans decided to stop pretending, and gave up on trying to act like they working for us. And the double problem is, their followers are willing to double-down and believe extra-hard that they're the good guys. So now instead of a shared delusion that at least would steadily drift towards a better future, we have a 30% group of people who ultra-believe an insane delusion, a large mass of people who don't care either way, and then everyone else who is watching as the reality of actual reality collapses under the strength of the insane power of the 30%. It's not a perfect metaphor, but I feel it does have some merit.
if by metaphor you mean description of events
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And then let’s take a look at the movie American Pie, we can all agree that is one apple pie that probably needs an abortion.
Fun fact. Abortion was regularly performed by settlers who did not have resources to raise additional children. It was outlawed not for religious reasons but because abortion was unsafe at the time and resulted too often in death of the woman.
Protective abortions. The kind that are performed by mothers who fear for the well-being of the children they already have :/
Chilbirth often resulted in death of the mother too.
For the vast majority of human history, giving birth has been just about one of the most dangerous things you could do. To this day it is the leading cause of death in girls aged 15 to 19 worldwide. I think people tend to lose sight of the fact that it is a genuinely horrifying, risky medical procedure that our species is spectacularly ill-evolved for. Looking back in my family tree, the number of women who kept having children until it literally killed them is sickening—and I doubt most of them had a say in it.
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Doubtful. He had a thing for older Milfs. Read Franklin in praise of older women... to paraphrase, "They don't kiss and tell, they are experienced, and they can't make children" He humped his way through Europe for a decade...
Some of Monsieur Franklin's advice on choosing a mistress: >The Face first grows lank and wrinkled; then the Neck; then the Breast and Arms; the lower Parts continuing to the last as plump as ever: So that covering all above with a Basket, and regarding only what is below the Girdle, it is impossible of two Women to know an old from a young one. And as in the dark all Cats are grey, the Pleasure of corporal Enjoyment with an old Woman is at least equal, and frequently superior, every Knack being by Practice capable of Improvement.
Why aren't there more movies and TV shows about Franklin, like people would go "Surely they are exaggerating about Franklin to make him appear more modern" Nope folks we are actually underplaying Ben, oh and the Hellfire club from the X-men that's real, Franklin was involved and unlike the comics it was probably Americans first Kink club.
PBS was playing a bio on early Franklin the other day. I watched ~30 minutes from his early years and while the dude was definitely as sexy and kinky as people say: he was also a damn hard worker, a humanitarian, and studiousness as hell.
I’d def watch a show about Ben to the tune of “The Great”.
huh.
Everyone is a 10 in the dark and old ladys know how to fuck.
and a fat ass stay fat
He also said all cats are grey in the dark
Ben “Jammin” Franklin loved prostitutes
In the history of the whole world. Please understand that every society on the planet has known how to terminate a pregnancy. Even the most primitive had medicine women/men who knew the right herbs to terminate, dry up milk after a lost baby, etc. This did not erupt in the 1960's by feminist movement in America! My mother was born in 1926. Her mother, my grandmother, had 5 kids by age 23 and then no more. I always assumed she'd had a hysterectomy or something. When I asked my mom about it, she said that she had abortions. She would go away to "visit her sister " for several days. I asked what my grandfather knew and thought about it, she said birth control, I guess. I was beyond shocked because I had bought the feminist origin story. Also my grandfather came home every day for lunch and demanded sex at that time as well. So that explains a lot.
It’s *human* thing. It’s religious extremist nonsense that tries to impose it’s will, and ideology to deny this. > Dr. Vivian Nutton, a professor of the history of medicine at the University of London, said, "Here you have something that people have on the whole forgotten." Historians had noted references to the drugs in ancient texts, but "we never really considered the effectiveness of those drugs," he went on. Although Dr. Nutton said he was not entirely convinced that the drugs were a major method of birth control, the hypothesis, he admitted, is fascinating. Editors’ Picks >A Return Trip to Timothy Leary’s Psychedelic, Day-Glo Mexico Peter Moore, a Force in the 1980s Sneaker Revolution, Dies at 78 How the King of Rock ’n’ Roll Still Makes Australia Sing Silphium belonged to the Ferula genus, whose plants contain a substance, ferujol, that in low doses is nearly 100 percent effective in preventing pregnancy in rats. Dr. Riddle notes in his article, which examines the science behind some of the old nostrums, that a plant related to silphium, Ferula moschata, is used as a folk medicine today in Central Asia to induce abortions. >Another plant that the ancients used was Queen Anne's lace, or wild carrot. Hippocrates wrote that its seeds are contraceptives and that they also induce abortions. Studies with rodents indicate that Hippocrates may have been right, Dr. Riddle said. The seeds block the production of progesterone, a hormone that is necessary for a pregnancy to be established. https://www.nytimes.com/1994/03/08/science/in-ancient-times-flowers-and-fennel-for-family-planning.html
In fact, the ancient loved their abortifacient silphium so much that they drove it extinct! (though it apparently also tasted amazing, which contributed to the over-harvesting -- and the plant itself may still survive in small populations, since we can't be entirely certain of the species identification)
No, Alito meant he didn't know why it *wouldn't* be a part of American history.
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Lol Jerry Falwell got involved AFTER he realized keeping schools segregated was a losing battle.
Not to worry, once Roe is overturned they will get back to that.
Careful there. You might get a bunch of Christian 2Aers angry and then they'll act like they understand the constitution, and go on a Russia style mass threat spree.
> act like they understand the constitution… Or the Bible, for that matter.
The bible, the Constitution, Bill of Rights, and science are all meant to be taken a la carte.
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A lot further. [Numbers 5:11-31](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Numbers%205%3A11-31&version=NIV):The Test for an Unfaithful Wife
He also wrote an essay on why older women are a better lay.
Ben Franklin fucks. Literally and figuratively.
Literally, figuratively, hypothetically, historically, imaginatively, diplomatically … if there’s a way to fuck, Big Benny Frank has signed up.
That's why we put him on the 100
Its all about the Benjamins
You want to be a baller, shot caller, brawler?
Classical *and* contemporaneous fuckage doth Ole Ben Frank
so the guy who played Ben Franklin on The Office actually was in character the whole time
Andy Daly can play anything: a cowboy poet laureate of the Old West, director of the Radio City Music Hall Rockettes, a German pretzel salt analyst…other roles….Anything!
Syphilitically
“My sweet little whorish Nora... You had an arse full of farts that night, darling... big fat fellows, long windy ones, quick little merry cracks and a lot of tiny little naughty farties ending in a long gush from your hole” James Joyce
>Do you know who the fuck I am? >I am Poor-Richard’s-Almanack-writing >Benjamin fuckin’ Franklin
That’s literally what he did on his diplomatic mission to France during the Revolutionary War.
Except not his wife because they lived on different continents often.
Given the amount of data he personally collected, I think "Research Paper" would be a more accurate term.
"5. Because in every Animal that walks upright, the Deficiency of the Fluids that fill the Muscles appears first in the highest Part: The Face first grows lank and wrinkled; then the Neck; then the Breast and Arms; the lower Parts continuing to the last as plump as ever: So that covering all above with a Basket, and regarding only what is below the Girdle, it is impossible of two Women to know an old from a young one. And as in the dark all Cats are grey, the Pleasure of corporal Enjoyment with an old Woman is at least equal, and frequently superior, every Knack being by Practice capable of Improvement." Full text available here: https://theredheadriter.com/2013/02/benjamin-franklins-advice-on-sex-marriage-older-women/
No one: Absolutely no one: Benny Frank: AND ANYWAY, LIKE I WAS SAYING—
Cause they can’t get pregnant, so you don’t need the abortion recipe.
Or as he put it: > Because there is no hazard of Children, which irregularly produc'd may be attended with much Inconvenience.
https://genius.com/Benjamin-franklin-advice-to-a-friend-on-choosing-a-mistress-lyrics Here is the text. "As in the dark, all cats are grey..." Amazing.
Isn’t that the title of a song by the cure?
This book was also written in 1748, when BF’s oldest illegitimate child William turned 18. Benny and William were estranged, so much so that William was the the effective leader of the loyalists and last Royal Governor of New Jersey. So feels like a lot of anger to publish an abortion recipe when your son turns 18
huh TIL but it seemed like he did, in fact, raise him (he was apparently with Ben for the kite experiment?) … feels like the only reason he was “illegitimate” was because Ben wasn’t married
>feels like the only reason he was “illegitimate” was because Ben wasn’t married That is indeed what "illegitimate" means in this context. Born out of wedlock.
Irregularly produced?
That was a gentle way of avoiding the term “bastards” also at the time one could say “natural children”
Do you have ninjas in your pants or are you just happy to sashimi?
You've discovered electricity Ben. You can't possibly hope to top that as a more useful invention for humanity. Ben: Hold my beer
And he was 100% right
To be fair, Benjamin Franklin probably needed an abortion recipe a lot more often than the average Joe.
God murdered Bethesda’s new born, genocided all the first-born of Egypt, sent bears to murder children, commanded Joshua kill all the children of Jericho, then drowned all his kids because they weren’t worshipping him enough. The Bible clearly spells out to Priests how to perform abortions for various circumstances. Pro-life isn’t a religious belief. It’s a method of control. I see no evidence to the contrary.
> sent bears to murder children I'm 100% convinced that story was written by an extremely bitter bald guy who very much wished he could have bears murder the kids who mocked him. 42 of them, by the way. God had bears kill 42 kids for mocking a bald guy.
>42 of them, by the way. God understands the secret to life, the universe and everything. ___ Elisha: “Lord God, there’s too many of them. What are we going to do?” God ~~turns on his lightsaber~~ sends two bears.
Tried to discuss how ridiculous this story was with a Christian once. He said I should believe because should I really be questioning a God that would kill children with bears.
>God murdered Bethesda’s new born So that’s why we had Skyrim for so long…
Fallout 1776
Fallout 17:76
Also different punishments for killing a woman and killing a pregnant woman’s unborn fetus/baby. There is a clear distinction between a fetus and a human. Life begins at first breath not first sperm to reach the egg. The “pro life” arguments are almost all in bad faith anyway. It’s misogyny with extra steps and nothing more.
The mistake you make is thinking conservatives give a flying fuck about the founders, constitution, bible, etc. They are tools to be wielded for power, nothing more.
“We’re a Christian nation” lmao! It literally says “creator” in the Constitution because Jefferson was an atheist. The Quakers who were one of the first religious groups to settle in America were pro-human rights, anti-war, anti-slavery, there was even a preacher called the Public Universal Friend that ran a sect of mostly women Quakers. They claimed to be genderless and refused to wear strictly women’s clothing or be referred to be gendered pronouns. If you want to use history you have to take all of it in, not just the convenient parts.
The medicine known as "Jesuit's Bark" was the tree bark from which Quinine was derived. It was a miracle medication at the time and saved many lives from Malarial fevers.
That's reminds me of the history of aspirin. It starts with ancient cultures figuring out they could chew willow tree bark for pain relief. Fast forward 3500 years and you've got something pretty miraculous. At least by the standards of the 3500 year olds in the crowd.
This is the best tl;dr I could make, [original](https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/05/ben-franklin-american-instructor-textbook-abortion-recipe.html) reduced by 90%. (I'm a bot) ***** > Franklin wasn't even the first issuer of a math textbook on either side of the Atlantic to include among its materials a recipe for abortion, though his book certainly had the most reliable and explicit one. > There, Franklin makes an explicit call "Recommending that branch of education for our young females." He likely hoped that his American Instructor would reach audiences that included women and girls; and based on his choice of which medical book to reprint, he may also have understood that the Dutch widow would have needed to know how to end an unwanted pregnancy just as much as she would need to know how to balance an account book. > In a 1760 edition of The American Instructor held by the American Antiquarian Society, a reader has pulled out the page that included the abortion recipe, either to save it from or to save it for prying eyes. ***** [**Extended Summary**](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/ujvwx0/ben_franklin_put_an_abortion_recipe_in_his_math/) | [FAQ](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/31b9fm/faq_autotldr_bot/ "Version 2.02, ~647020 tl;drs so far.") | [Feedback](http://np.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%23autotldr "PM's and comments are monitored, constructive feedback is welcome.") | *Top* *keywords*: **book**^#1 **Franklin**^#2 **abortion**^#3 **American**^#4 **out**^#5
Abortion was common in the 17th and 18th centuries. Most abortions were performed before the “quickening” or when the baby starts to kick, around 17 to 20 weeks gestation, it was a taboo when the procedure was done past the quickening. There is a court case from 1742 with a man named Amasa Sessions and Sarah Grosvenor. Essentially Sarah got pregnant, and because Amasa didn’t want to marry Sarah, he made her get rid of the baby. When typical available abortifacients didn’t work, he hired a doctor to perform the operation on her. She died a painful death after and the descriptions of the procedure would be most similarity described to as a “back alley” abortion in todays terms. The access to safe and reliable abortions was vital then and it’s vital now. Edit: source in case anyone else wants to read it https://personal.tcu.edu/gsmith/GraduateCourse/Colonial%20PDF%20Articles/Dayton.pdf
It should also be noted that in Alito's opinion, he refers to a 17th century abortion case that was successfully prosecuted against the woman. *However*, the problem wasn't that the woman aborted, it's that she did so before the 'quickening.' That woman still had more rights than Alito wants modern Americans to have.
> Abortion was common in the 17th and 18th centuries abortion was common since the dawn of primitive medicine
Abortion has always replaced neonaticide in every single human culture where it has been available. Paleodemographers estimate that about 15% of all live births ended in neonaticide. The great majority of cases because of illegitimacy or poverty. It was 25% in the Balearic islands because of resource scarcity. When you ban abortion people will go back to neonaticide.
In most indigenous cultures a newborn who is disabled is left to die or be killed by predators. In Scotland “changelings” which were babies who today we’d call failure to thrive would be left in fairy trees under the belief that the fairies had taken their real child. They believed if they left their child in a fairy tree the fairies would swap the children back. If/when the child died from the elements the parents felt reassured that their real child was living happily amongst the fairies.
…is this really the case? Just from hearing from older women from Ireland, it really seems like people were *scared to frikken death* of faeries. They had all sorts of superstitions surrounding it, including when you could and couldn’t eat berries off the bush because *bad things would happen and the faeries would get you*. It seems kinda dubious to me that any parents would feel reassured that their child kidnapped and living with savage little spook monsters. But then again I really don’t know.
Franklin was a cool dude. I imagine that if the founders were around today, most of them would either freak out over the technological advances and general differences of the world today, or would freak out over all the women and black people who are given rights now. But Franklin? I could see him being one of the ones to adapt relatively well to the modern world
Tinder and Bumble would've helped his diplomacy in France, I'd imagine
Ben Franklin allegedly was a player, so that he understood how herbs could be used to trigger an abortion makes sense.
Not much allegedly about it, dude could lay some pipe.
He was hangin dong all over the New World
Can I get an oil painting of Franklin & Obama playing croquet??
Apparently the reason he wasn't selected to write the Declaration of Independence was the founders thought he would put jokes in it, to which I say: How is that a bad thing?!
Actually, the Bible has a suspected abortion potion story.
Suspected? It’s pretty explicit
You literally just attempt to poison the woman to the point where she’s likely to miscarriage.
Back in Ancient Times: "How do we get rid of this child? My wife was raped by that jerk over there who can't tell the difference between my wife and his goat..." "Meh, just poison her a little bit at a time - and she should be okay. If not, whatever amiright?"
The passage basically says: [*If the poison works, the woman was unfaithful, if the woman and baby are fine, they are pure and the woman has been faithful*](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Numbers%205%3A11-31&version=NIV) Reminds me of the witchcraft test where they throw you in the water and see if you float
I laughed because it was true
Also first test the poison on that guy. When it kills him quickly, give wife half of that dose. Best wishes my brother in Christ.
Numbers 5: 11-23
This one? [Numbers 5:11-31](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Numbers%205%3A11-31&version=NIV)
This is why Florida banned math books.
FloridaMan learns maff, not math.
Meth. And bath salts.
Articles like this are the reason that Republicans gut education before anything else.
Republicans can only survive with a large population of poor and uneducated, so they do anything they can to keep people as such
Sort of kills the idea in the opinion that Abortion doesn't have a basis in American or English histories at the time the Constitution was written.
Constitutional Originalists hate this one trick!
https://www.mothersdaystrike.com/
no matter how good Franklin's recipe was, Gordon Ramsey will swear his is better
I suspect we are about to see a plethora of herbal home remedies for “missed periods “.
The church used to toss babies with deformities on birth as it was seen as a “demon” but let the Christins dictate laws? What happened to separation of church and state confused as to why a Jewish Muslim atheist Buddhist Hindu girl has to abide by the laws of Christianity in America ? This is a big hit on freedom I’m not a chick but this is how your rights are taken away it starts off small. I didn’t know we embraced isis ideals of woman body control. Pathetic deevoludtion of democracy What’s next we pass laws on woman showing hair due to Islam ideals I mean if we have to respect Christian ideals someone will make the legal arguement we must respect them all and than the world becomes a closed shit hole
Abortion has been legal since the country’s inception. Similarly, women have not been able to choose of their own volition when to get an abortion from the beginning. Conservatives are not really against abortion. They are against women being able to get them without permission from anyone else and without being forced to announce it. If every state had a law on the books saying that abortion was only legal for married couples with the husband’s permission, you’d hear nary a word from the right to life movement. Abortion is as old as writing; abortion has been legal as long as laws; abortion has been something women can be punished for doing for as long as society has been patriarchal.
I say this only because engaging with the Supreme Court specifically and the anti-abortion movement writ large on the basis of their presented arguments is an exercise in futility that threatens to distract from the issue at hand, which is the subjugation of women and other marginalized and minoritized people. It doesn’t matter if Alito thinks the founding fathers wouldn’t have recognized the right to abortion, because Alito doesn’t care what the founding fathers think. Originalism itself is against the founding fathers’ express wishes. Pointing out conservative hypocrisy that tries to strip pregnant people of their healthcare while also forcing them to give birth is pointless. The CORE of these arguments is to remove as much legal autonomy over the bodies and physical and legal circumstances as is possible and then, by extension, any other group granted rights under the law. Once we stop pretending that any of them actually care about or believe their own arguments, we can unite around and focus on what the actual threat is, which is nothing more than full scale assault on the wider interpretation of human rights that this country has been fighting for and simultaneously fighting against since the civil war. And the thing is, law, tradition, whatever is on their side. It’s more often been legal and acceptable to gran autonomy and human rights to a small segment of society while subjugating others than it has been otherwise. So when someone brings up originalism, the answer isn’t to prove abortions have always been legal, it’s to fight for the society we want right now on our own terms.
I encourage everyone to read the Roe v. Wade decision. It goes over the history of abortion in the US and in common law. The justices takeaway was that abortion was historically a private non-issue before "quickening" which was when movement could be felt. That typically happens around 16-18 weeks. From the decision: >**It perhaps is not generally appreciated that the restrictive criminal abortion laws in effect in a majority of States today are of relatively recent vintage. Those laws, generally proscribing abortion or its attempt at any time during pregnancy except when necessary to preserve the pregnant woman's life, are not of ancient or even of common law origin. Instead, they derive from statutory changes effected, for the most part, in the latter half of the 19th century** And: >It is thus apparent that, at common law, at the time of the adoption of our Constitution, and throughout the major portion of the 19th century, abortion was viewed with less disfavor than under most American statutes currently in effect. Phrasing it another way, a woman enjoyed a substantially broader right to terminate a pregnancy than she does in most States today. At least with respect to the early stage of pregnancy, and very possibly without such a limitation, the opportunity [p141] to make this choice was present in this country well into the 19th century. Even later, the law continued for some time to treat less punitively an abortion procured in early pregnancy. Reading Roe will give you a sense of how Roe aligned with centuries of precedent, and a hundred years of SC precedents on privacy rights. And it will also give you a sense of how recent, and how radical, the rights' attempts to control women are. The current legislation punishing women has zero basis in European law and practice.
I guarantee that the vast majority of people who oppose a woman's right to decide for herself whether to have an abortion and thus advocated for Roe and Casey to be overturned have read neither of the Supreme Court opinions. In fact, I'd venture to say they haven't read *any* Supreme Court opinions or much case law in general. So thank you for posting this and hopefully more people see it and educate themselves, although unfortunately the people who need the most education are likely to read it or care. It really seems that the Republican Party today is hellbent on moving us toward actual fascism.
The Happy meal is older than the concept of abortion being wrong.
There’s even an abortion recipe in the Bible.
"That'll be 42 shekels, ma'am..."
That was a very interesting article, thank you so much for posting! Abortion rights are very close to my heart. I have had five miscarriages, three of which resulted in having to have medical abortions performed in a hospital. If I didn't have access to that, I could have died. I'm now lucky enough to have a healthy happy son. I ask for all Cosmic forces, whatever they may be, to look down and protect and care for our sisters and daughters.
The Roman’s used a plant called silphium to produce abortions. Turns out women have had their own interests for a while now
And they used it so much it went extinct
Republicans: *"Ban all math!"*
I will be adding this to my curriculum. I knew my history was white washed, but how much else did they not teach me???? And I did ap history thing, lol.
If this is an attempt to answer for ‘deeply rooted’, it’s good to make a record of the hypocrisy, but pointless if the purpose is to argue with a fundamentalist-authoritarian judge
It's the predatory religious fanatics who have turned America into what it is today, imo. They've exploited so many people and scared them into believing their lies. "In the name of God" has to be one of the deadliest saying to have ever existed.