Abecedarian for Those Who Believe Birth Control Goes Against Nature
Angelica.
Ashwagandha.
Abstinence. Remember purity rings?
Alkanet, red-rooted, used by Edna St. Vincent Millay to induce abortion.
Acacia juice, spermicide in sixteenth-century BC Egypt.
Beeswax disks.
Bone shards of black cats.
Bundling boards Puritans placed between fully clothed, unmarried lovers.
Bleach.
Beaver testicles, rich in androgens, still used by Indigenous people in New Brunswick.
Crocodile dung.
Cedar rosin by suggestion of the Greek physician Aetios.
Cohosh.
Coat hangers.
Cotton root bark defiantly ingested by enslaved Africans.
Dilation and curettage.
Dong quai.
Depo-Provera.
Diaphragms, invented in Holland in 1882.
Electrocution.
Ergot.
Elephant feces mixed with water.
Flax soaked in menstrual blood.
Falling down stairs.
Ghee, palasha seeds, and honey.
Gunpowder.
Hare anus hung round the neck.
Hypothermia.
Herb of grace.
Intrauterine device with copper or hormone releasing coils.
Infanticide.
Implanon.
John XXI, pope in 1276, supported contraception, advised a plaster of hemlock to the testicles.
Jewish Queen of Persia, Esther, bathed in myrrh, an abortifacient, for a year before meeting the King.
Knitting needles.
Kudzu-related plants are used in Thailand.
Lead was ingested by people in China.
Lysol douches in the twentieth century. Hundreds died.
Lemon halves as cervical caps. Giacomo Casanova bragged about it.
Liver of cat.
Leeches.
Lactational amenorrhea.
Mercury causing sterility, kidney failure, brain damage, death.
Magic.
Moss balls.
Mugwort.
Myrrh, from Myrrha, the daughter of Cinyras, who raped her until the gods turned her into a plant.
Mifepristone & Misoprostol.
Male contraception—cheap, noninvasive, reversible—invented in 1979. No drug company will trial it.
Ndyuka people of New Guinea shaped leaves into chalices and inserted them vaginally.
Opium.
Oiled paper disks stuck to the cervix.
Pomegranate seeds. Maybe Persephone ate them on purpose?
Papaya.
Pessaries of peppermint and sicklewort.
Pebbles.
Plan B.
Paying a man $150 to beat your pregnant belly.
Puerto Rican pill trials. The main funder asked for a “‘cage’ of ovulating females”
Pennyroyal mentioned in Aristophanes’s play Peace and Benjamin Franklin’s The American Instructor.
Pine.
Quinine suppositories sold in London from 1885 to 1960.
Queen Anne’s Lace, still used in Watauga County, North Carolina.
Rajasthani people use Queen Anne’s Lace seeds too.
Rock salt soaked in oil.
Ruta graveolens of which Pliny the Elder wrote.
Rubber cervical caps stamped with the word “Racial” by Dr. Stope, a eugenicist.
Seaweed.
Sponge soaked in spermicide.
Squirting cucumber, from the Greek word ekballion, abortion. Favorite of Hippocrates and Linneaus.
Sharpened stick.
Shooting yourself in the stomach.
Strychnine.
Suicide.
Spanish fly, pulverized.
Starvation.
Squatting over a pot of boiling onions.
Submersion in scalding water.
Saint Hildegard von Bingen, a medieval nun, prescribed abortifacients.
Tubal ligation.
Turpentine.
Thuja.
Tear gas.
Turkey feathers.
Tansy.
Uterine removal by hysterectomy.
Vitamin C tablets in the 1970s. Some people experienced severe burns.
Vitex.
Vasectomy.
Vinegar.
Vacuum aspiration.
Walking where a pregnant wolf has urinated thrice.
Weasel testicles.
Willow.
Wormwood.
Whalebones.
Waist binding in ancient Rome, New Zealand, and elsewhere.
Xenophobic sterilization of Puerto Rican women without consent.
Title X funds (cut in 2019 from domestic and global clinics providing information on abortion).
Yarrow.
Yam, used by the Aztecs, from which Dr. Pincus would extract progesterone for the birth control pill.
Zafemy.
Zygote implantation may have been prevented by silphium, a Libyan plant harvested into extinction.
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-First published in Radar Poetry
Grace MacNair is a poet, teacher, and healthcare professional. A 2023 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Poetry, her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Threepenny Review, Poetry Northwest, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere. Grace’s micro-chapbook,Even As They Curse Us, is available from Bull City Press. IG: @ecarg_enna_m. Twitter@GraceMacNair.