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In the 18th and most of the 19th century, before abortion became the province of the medical establishment and the courts, the procedure was widespread, and abortifacients — drugs that cause abortions — were widely marketed. But there was no advertising for “abortions.” Instead there were ads for “Relief for Ladies” suffering from “obstructed menses.” “Female renovating pills” treated “all cases where nature has stopped from any cause.” Dr. Pierce’s Favorite Prescription promised to clear away “all the troubles and ailments that make woman’s life a burden to her. She’s relieved, cured, and restored.” (Kate Cohen, 6/3)

If the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, will psychiatrists resume their pre-Roe role as arbiters of abortion access? The law once compelled psychiatrists and pregnant women to perform dishonest rituals to get abortions. Will psychiatrists once again need to be complicit post-Roe? Before Roe v. Wade, a number of states allowed abortions if doctors could certify that the mother’s health, not solely her life, was at serious risk. A great number of those certifications were granted by psychiatrists, some of them by the professors who taught me as a resident in the mid-1980s in Connecticut. (Sally L. Satel, 6/5)

Should the Supreme Court’s final ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization resemble Justice Samuel Alito’s leaked draft opinion, it will be an unprecedented moment in the annals of the Court. Never before has the Court reversed its own decisions in order to completely eliminate a recognized constitutional right protecting personal conduct—and here one that thousands of people turn to every year. Probably on that account, the overwhelming majority of the American people oppose the action that the Court seems ready to take, which appears likely to lead in the near future to laws totally banning or tightly restricting abortion access in more than half of U.S. states. (Donald Ayer, 6/5)

When I was 16, I helped desperate women get abortions. This was in the sliver of time between New York State’s 1970 legalization of abortion and the Roe v. Wade decision three years later, which allowed women in every state to choose whether to continue their pregnancies. I answered phones for the Women’s Abortion Project at its headquarters in a shabby, unheated meeting space of the Women’s Liberation Center, on West 22nd Street in Manhattan. (Ellen Gruber Garvey, 6/4)

A nation divided — this time over access to abortion — will eventually mean it’s every state for itself. And so in Massachusetts it falls to lawmakers not just to protect the rights of its citizens to all forms of reproductive health care — something the Legislature did in 2020 — but now also to protect the rights of health care providers from the increasingly Draconian laws of other states. (6/6)

As the crisis over access to reproductive health deepens in the U.S., the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has been quietly working with two pharmaceutical companies pursuing a historic breakthrough in expanding access to contraception: eliminating the unnecessary barrier of a prescription for the birth control pill, and allowing people to purchase it directly. The safety and effectiveness of the pill has been well established during its 62 years on the market. That means the FDA has to decide only two things to move forward with making it an over-the-counter product: Can women understand the label on the packaging, and can they be trusted to follow the label instructions to determine whether these products are right for them? Answering those questions seems straightforward. So why is the FDA moving at an excruciatingly slow pace? (Dana Singiser, 6/6)