The components of Carachipita are pennyroyal Mentha pulegium , yerba de la perdiz Margiricarpus pinnatus , oregano Origanum vulgare , and guaycuri Statice brasiliensis. Abortion occurred in 23 cases after the ingestion of parsley, ruda, Carachipita, celery, Cedron, francisco alvarez, floripon, espina colorada. Out of the 23 cases, 15 involved the only the ingestion of plants, 4 cases used injected drugs presumably hormones , and in 4 cases there was associated self-inflicted instrumental manipulation.
Multiple organ system failure occurred in those patients who had ingested ruda alone or in combination with parsley or fennel , Carachipita, arnica, or bardana. Sixty-five years ago German chemists discovered that date palms contain compounds identical to female sex hormones, ushering in a new era of plant studies. Since then herbal contraceptives have been found to work in numerous ways. Corn mint keeps an embryo from implanting; seeds from the chaste tree, one of the rare male contraceptives mentioned in ancient texts, disrupt sperm production.
Abortifacients, predictably, work by more brutal means: rue, for instance, poisons the body until it gives up on the fetus. All things considered, ancient Greece was a kind of golden age for family planning -- even more so than for art and philosophy.
Antifertility herbs were well known and widely used and though there were some strictures against abortion the Hippocratic oath may or may not have forbidden it, depending on the translation , contraception was never regulated. But then, century by century, statute by statute, the screws tightened. Among the Romans, contraception was tolerated, but prescribing an abortifacient could get you exiled -- to the mines if you were poor, or to an island if you were rich.
By the early Middle Ages priests were asking women in confession, "Have you drunk any maleficium so that you could not have children? In the scriptural debates and witch-hunts that would follow one can see prefigured, as if in an allegorical painting, the Supreme Court decisions and clinic shootings of today. In Italy during the late Middle Ages members of a fertility sect known as I Benandanti, or the do-gooders, would stage symbolic duels in forest clearings with local witches, who probably practiced birth control and abortion.
For weapons, the Benandanti wielded stalks of fennel, which was thought to prevent abortions, whereas the witches had stalks of sorghum, which contains an abortifacient alkaloid. Exchange the plants for placards and you have a modern-day abortion fracas, pitched outside a family-planning center.
Both groups were eventually rooted out by the Inquisition, which had no tolerance for fertility cults of any stripe. But the true tragic figures of the period were the midwives and "wise women. Now they were caught in a pincer movement. On one side was the Roman Catholic Church, declaring ever more strictly in favor of procreation and fetal rights, until even sperm were suspected of having souls. On the other side was the medical establishment, which grew less tolerant as it grew more professional.
By the 14th century, Riddle writes, physicians, surgeons, apothecaries, and even barbers had to be licensed to practice. University degrees were a prerequisite, but women were not allowed to earn them and so were effectively shut out of medical practice. Wise women, once honored members of their communities, became vulgares or illiterati mulieres, their healing arts dismissed as mere folklore or, increasingly, witchcraft. Physicians had never learned much gynecology; now, with the church's help, they demonized what they did not know.
The people took the church at its word: of the half-million witches burned at the stake in western Europe between and , more than a third, in some areas, were midwives, and nearly all were women. King James I of England best conveyed the prevailing philosophy: "The more women, the more witches.
The result, in gynecological terms alone, was a disaster. The midwives' simple prescriptions, most of which could be filled in any herb garden, were gradually replaced by complicated concoctions with exotic ingredients -- the precursors of today's patented drugs.
One 16th-century "menstrual regulator" contained more than 25 ingredients. A medieval woman could still step into an apothecary and buy a decent contraceptive. And what of the women who never made it to an apothecary? Chances were they fell prey to the fabulous fictions in which medieval minds seemed to specialize.
Others put more stock in sapphire jewelry, rabbit stomachs, or mule uteruses as contraceptives; vulture feces, donkey dung, or the "oil of philosophers" as abortifacients.
Physicians and prelates, so intent on dispelling superstition, effectively conjured it up instead. It was to be more than years before medicine replaced what it had helped destroy.
As late as the 19th century, Riddle writes, physicians "were less aware of what women were doing, and women were themselves less knowledgeable, than their forebears thousands of years before. Yet any woman could have gotten more and better information at her local library from works by Hippocrates.
Thank goodness those days are over, one is tempted to say after reading Riddle's book. And in ways both tearful and encouraging, this is the true heyday of family planning. Nearly 40 years after the pill was invented, investigators are still perfecting ways to deliver hormones to the body, even as breakthroughs in biochemistry are pointing to entire new categories of contraceptives.
In the spring of , after a year search, molecular biologists identified the protein or proteins that sperm cells use to bind with eggs.
In fact, three separate teams identified three distinct proteins -- which one is the real McCoy remains to be seen. In addition, investigators have found ways to immobilize sperm; to "blind" them to the presence of an egg, and to induce men to produce antibodies that shut down sperm production.
Every new approach, in theory, could give birth to a revolutionary new drug. The Population Council alone has two in early clinical trials: a vaccine and a synthetic steroid, both of which have proved effective in male rats. Investigators in India, meanwhile, are preparing to test a vaccine for women in a massive human trial -- the final step before the vaccine can be sold to the public.
Yet for all the commotion on the frontier next contraceptives are likely to remain a distant murmur. Even their greatest boosters tend to sound like physicists discussing the future of fusion power: with any luck, they say, the new vaccines may be around "in the first third of the 21st century. The Middle Ages, in some ways, are still with us. In the past two decades, eight out of 12 major pharmaceutical companies have stopped developing new contraceptives.
The science is there, it seems, but the numbers are not. Contraceptives are powerful drugs, prone to side effects. Given that they are also designed for healthy users, who are likely to notice such side effects, they are natural targets for lawsuits. Copper intrauterine devices IUDs and the Norplant system, two long-term contraceptives, have both been crippled by litigation, though none of the charges has stuck. True, abortionists are no longer burned at the stake, but religious protests can still kill a new drug.
It has been nearly 10 years, for instance, since the abortion drug RU was approved in France. In that time French women have come to prefer it over surgical abortions two-to-one, and more than , women have used it safely. Yet RU still cannot be sold in the United States. President Clinton originally scheduled the drug for fast-track approval, but protests from Christian and pro-life groups soon stalled the process.
Last year the drug seemed ready for release at last. Then its Hungarian manufacturer, Gideon Richter, pulled out suddenly, consigning RU to limbo once again. The worst knock against the new drugs, ironically, is that they are too convenient. Pro-life groups object to RU mainly because it makes having an abortion too easy. And female vaccines have drawn the ire both of women's groups and Catholics no small feat precisely because they promise to be cheap and effective.
Red clover is a flower that can be taken as a supplement. C1 Red yeast rice is traditional Chinese food item that can also be taken as a supplement. Sage is an herb that may cause miscarriage in pregnant women when taken in large amounts.
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