When making a major decision, it is always important to know all sides of the argument at issue, as well a the consequences of change.
Now that Roe vs. Wade has been overruled, it’s worth remembering what used to happen to women who sought (illegal) abortions prior to 1973.
Before abortion’s legalization, the cleaning agent called Lysol was commonly used to induce abortion.
It was often fatal.
Why would anyone do such a thing? Curiously enough, Lysol was subtly marketed as a (secretly) safe abortion method.
Though I am not “pro-abortion,” I certainly understand why so many women are now angry and upset. The majority of women who seek abortions are married and poor.
Below is an excerpt from an article in The Atlantic Magazine written by Caitlin Flanagan, titled “The Dishonesty of the Abortion Debate” originally published in December 2019:
We will never know how many women had abortions via this method, or how many died because of it. Why was Lysol, with its strong, unpleasant smell and its corrosive effect on skin, so often used? Because its early formulation contained cresol, a phenol compound that induced abortion; because it was easily available, a household product that aroused no suspicion when women bought it; and because for more than three decades, Lysol advertised the product as an effective form of birth control, advising women to douche with it in diluted form after sex, thus powerfully linking the product to the notion of family planning.
In a seemingly endless series of advertisements published from the ’20s through the ’50s, the Lysol company told the same story over and over again: One woman or another had “neglected her feminine hygiene” and thereby rendered herself odious to her husband, leaving her “held in a web of indifference” and introducing “doubt” and “inhibitions” into their intimate life. It was illegal to advertise contraception nationally before 1977, so the Lysol ads performed a coy bit of misdirection—they said that if women didn’t douche after sex, they would lose their “dainty,” or “feminine,” or “youthful” appeal. The implication was that sex made them stink, which revolted their husbands. However, women in the past knew what women of the present know: Having sex doesn’t make a woman stink, and the only necessary items for keeping clean are soap and water.
Read with this in mind, the ads appear rife with coded references to the idea of contraception. One woman’s doctor has told her “never to run such careless risks” and prescribed Lysol. Another is told by her doctor that failing to douche with Lysol could “lead to serious consequences.” Many of the ads stress that Lysol works “even in the presence of mucous matter,” a possible reference to the by-products of intercourse; some promote the fact that it “leaves no greasy aftereffect,” probably a reference to the vaginal jellies that some women used as birth control.
A doctor tells one woman, “It’s foolish to risk your marriage happiness by being careless about feminine hygiene—even once!” This is the language of contraception: something that must be used every single time, that can lead to serious repercussions if skipped even once, that one should never be careless about. The “doubts” introduced to the marital lovemaking, and the “inhibitions,” are not the result of stink; they are the outcome of there being no reliable form of birth control and the constant anxiety that sex could result in an unwanted pregnancy.
There are dozens of these ads on the internet, where they forever shock young feminists. I’ve seen so many of them that I thought I knew all of their tropes and euphemisms. But this summer I came across one that stopped me cold. It was a simple image of a very particular kind of female suffering. The woman in this ad was not caught in a web of indifference; she was not relieved because she had been prescribed Lysol by her doctor. The woman in this image has been “careless”; she is facing the “serious consequences.”
In a single panel, we see a line drawing of the kind of middle-class white housewife who was a staple of postwar advertising, although invariably the products she was selling were of use and of interest to women of all socioeconomic classes and all races—this product in particular. Her hair is brushed and shining, her nails are manicured, and she wears a wedding ring. But her head is buried in her hands, and behind her loom the pages of a giant calendar. Over her bowed head, in neat Palmer-method handwriting, is a single sentence: “I just can’t face it again.”
There’s a whole world in that sentence. To be a woman is to bear the entire consequence of sex. And here is one woman bearing that consequence: a married woman—probably with other children, for this is a matter of “again”—who for whatever reason is at her breaking point.
Boom unable to face one more pregnancy? Start making a list of the possible reasons, and you might never stop. Maybe she’d had terrible pregnancies and traumatic births and she couldn’t go through another one. Maybe she had suffered terribly from postpartum depression, and she’d just gotten past it. Maybe her husband was an angry or violent man; maybe he had a tendency to blame her when she got pregnant. Maybe she had finally reached the point in her life when her youngest was in school and she had a few blessed hours to herself each day, when she could sit in the quiet of her house and have a cup of coffee and get her thoughts together. And maybe—just maybe—she was a woman who knew her own mind and her own life, and who knew very well when something was too much for her to bear.
Go here to read the entire article.
