James Mohr

The medical term once encompassed any form of pregnancy loss, including miscarriage.

By Rachel E. Gross
Aug. 13, 2024

One morning in 2012, eight weeks into her pregnancy, Shannon Withycombe woke up bleeding: She was having a miscarriage. In the emergency room, however, no doctor or nurse uttered that word. Instead, she had to wait to read her discharge papers, which read “incomplete abortion.”

Dr. Withycombe, a medical historian at the University of New Mexico, knew the term from her research on 19th-century medical journals; it was doctorspeak for a miscarriage that had not fully exited the uterus. But it was jarring to see it on her own 21st-century medical notes.

Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/13/science/medical-history-abortion.html

What will the future of abortion in America look like?

By Jessica Bruder
APRIL 4, 2022

One bright afternoon in early January, on a beach in Southern California, a young woman spread what looked like a very strange picnic across an orange polka-dot towel: A mason jar. A rubber stopper with two holes. A syringe without a needle. A coil of aquarium tubing and a one-way valve. A plastic speculum. Several individually wrapped sterile cannulas—thin tubes designed to be inserted into the body—which resembled long soda straws. And, finally, a three-dimensional scale model of the female reproductive system.

The two of us were sitting on the sand. The woman, whom I’ll call Ellie, had suggested that we meet at the beach; she had recently recovered from COVID-19, and proposed the open-air setting for my safety. She also didn’t want to risk revealing where she lives—and asked me to withhold her name—because of concerns about harassment or violence from anti-abortion extremists.

Continued: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/roe-v-wade-overturn-abortion-rights/629366/

USA – When ‘Abortion’ Wasn’t a Dirty Word

A covert network of activists is preparing for the end of Roe