Sh*t To Help You Show Up May 6, 2022

What Integrity Isn't

I’ve never had a medical abortion. Yet, I couldn’t honestly tell you if I’ve ever ended a pregnancy on purpose. Why? Because when I was in college I started using herbal abortifacients as a matter of course anytime my period was 5-7 days late, even though I was using birth control. Reliably, within a handful of days they stimulated my bleeding— a sure sign that, whether or not I’d been pregnant prior to taking them, I wasn’t now. Which was all I really needed to know.

I didn’t need to know whether I’d been pregnant yesterday. I just needed to know that I unequivocally wasn’t today.

This sort of early termination of pregnancy was so common as to be considered outside of the confines of the law in the United States for much of its history. Prior to “quickening”— when the mother can feel the fetus start to move— the pregnancy wasn’t even considered to involve a being separate from the mother. So, to drink a tea to “bring on your courses” wasn’t considered ending life as much as taking care of life— one’s own.