"Do-It-Yourself" Abortions: The Reemergence of Menstrual Extraction in Late 1980s

Newspaper accounts from the late 1980s reported with alarm that ordinary women across America were learning “do-it-yourself” abortions using a technique called “menstrual extraction.” This simple procedure often began with the woman who needed an abortion reclining on a living room floor.  Then, another woman would insert a sterilized cannula, a thin, flexible tube, into the woman’s cervix.  During the next forty-five minutes, the assembled group took turns pumping a plastic syringe, which suctioned the contents of the woman’s uterus into a glass jar.

Scholars of reproductive rights have explored how menstrual extraction was an integral part of the feminist self-help community that emerged in the early 1970s out of women’s lack of faith in the medical community and the growing women’s health movement. While most scholars have assumed the legalization of abortion in 1973 rendered menstrual extraction unnecessary, this paper explores its reemergence in the late 1980s.  As anti-abortion protest groups tried to restrict women’s access to abortion clinics and new laws challenged and chipped away at Roe, many pro-choice activists began to worry that abortion would soon become illegal. They believed they needed a backup option. Menstrual extraction was just such an option.  Acting as their own healthcare practitioners, feminists flaunted the technique of menstrual extraction to remind the government and the public that making abortion illegal would not make it go away.