10 Comments

Thank you for this one, Pat! Stay strong!!

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Strong women! We always prevail!

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The memories are as an herbalist, as well as a young woman. Never, fear, I'm laughing all the way, at least when I'm not crying about the state of this country.

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There you go!

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OMG, you brought back memories, and a long ago shelved bank of herbal knowledge. Women have always had to find a way around the tyranny of the powers that be, will continue to do so, but how ridiculous it's still happening, or re-happening by a bunch of mostly male legislators who believe they own women's bodies. Thank you for adding humor to a serious mess.

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I hate that you have memories about this all. Long ago a wise woman told me to laugh through adversity is to fight effectively against it. It's surely hard but we'll get there--right?

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Alarming times we live in. Peggy Warne, a practicing obstetrician during the Revolutionary War, is buried in the Mansfield-Woodhouse cemetery near where I live. Interesting, but believable, that money would be the motivation for taking this important duty away from women.

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We need each other more than ever! I always seem to be mulling over what is it about women that make men think they can control us?

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Thank you, Pat. It's so important to get all of this out in the open. I'm sure you know the book but I wanted to mention for other readers Laurel Ulrich's book A Midwife's Tale, about a woman on the Maine frontier in the late 18th/early 19th century, based on Martha Ballard's diaries. Martha talks a lot about births, legitimate and not, and never mentions abortions, but reading between the lines you get a very clear picture of how the male medical profession moved in on midwifery and traditional woman-to-woman care and pretty much destroyed it.

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Thank you for this brave post, Pat. An excellent, well-documented book on the history of women's efforts to manage their bodies: John Riddle's Eve's Herbs (Harvard Univ. Press). https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674270268 An important book for all of us now, if only to refute Alito's ridiculous assertion that there is no tradition of abortion in our country.

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