Illegal and In Use: Abortifacients Persists

This little booklet was found in Chichester's English Pennyroyal Pills made in Philadelphia, PA in the early 1900s. Pennyroyal was known as a strong abortifacient.

The manufacturers of Beecham's Pills intended for the product to relieve headaches, loginess, irritability, sour stomach, upset stomach (commonly referred to as biliousness), coated tongue, bad breath, listlessness, and constipation. Many women, however, also used it to induce miscarriages.

Parke, Davis and Company created this product in the 1920s as a laxitive, but it gained some reputation as an abortifacient and therefore was sold with caution.

Margaret Sanger recognized the dangers of unregulated self-adminstered reprodutive health and established the first birth control clinic in the United States

Despite the provisions of the Comstock Law, the use of abortifacients continued. Unregulated, these concuctions were often fatal. The consequences of their use caught the attention of Margaret Sanger who founded the American Birth Control League which would later become Planned Parenthood.