huffingtonpost:9 Ancient Abortion Methods So Terrible You’ll Be Even More Grateful For The Right To
huffingtonpost:9 Ancient Abortion Methods So Terrible You’ll Be Even More Grateful For The Right To ChooseThis post originally appeared on Bustle. By JR ThorpeAbortion is both a tricky and a touchy subject. In the midst of fervent pro-choice and pro-life debates today, we can lose sight of the fact that abortion actually has a long medical history. We’re by no means the first society to debate the rights and necessities of a mother’s control over her pregnancy; evidence suggests that many civilizations in history, from the Egyptians to the ancient Romans and Greeks, had these conversations too. The crucial difference? Those who seek an abortion in modern America can, for the most part, have a safe and successful procedure. Women throughout most of human history were not as lucky.There’s no one way in which history has regarded abortion. Greek writers (all men) had long arguments amongst themselves about the procedure, suggesting that it wasn’t uncommon – and scholars of the Qu'ran, which doesn’t mention it, have beendebating Islam’s position for thousands of years. It’s when we start to look at medical texts, however, that we start to get a real grip on how abortion treatment must have felt through the ages – and a vision of the terror, pain, and risk that many women endured.Today, in countries that allow abortion, pregnant women have a choice of different options depending on the law and the duration of the pregnancy, from surgery to pills. These options are painful and not without risk, but they also don’t involve, for example, putting dung up your private parts. Through historical perspective we can see just how far we’ve come, how lucky we are, and how utterly necessary it is to continue the fight for reproductive rights. -- source link