Abortions using pills aka medication abortions can be a workaround
If you’re not allowed to control your own reproduction, there’s a word for you. Livestock.
However, even though Alito and Thomas and their helper goons haven’t noticed, women are not livestock. We’ll be using everything we have to dodge their bullets and branding irons.
There are two big differences to my high school days when fellow 15 year-olds desperately tried to scrounge up money to go to New York, where they hoped they could find somebody who wouldn’t kill them, while trying to look totally normal and carefree so nobody found out.
One is that information is much more accessible. Two is that we have abortion pills now. So, in the interests of both, here’s some information about medication abortions.
Legal disclaimers: I am not a doctor or a pharmacist. None of this is medical advice. For informational purposes only.
Another important warning: The info applies to morning-after situations or ordinary missed-period pregnancies. If there’s very heavy bleeding or exceptional pain, it could be life-threatening. Medical help is needed immediately. It’s unnecessary to discuss abortion or abortion pills with doctors or nurses. The symptoms are the same as a miscarriage, and the treatment is the same. All that need be said is “I don’t know what’s happening,” which is true.
Clicking on the headings below links to more detail further down.
Resources. PlanCPills This site has excellent, detailed, practical information. There are also links to other abortion services. Under Support and Resources > Other Options there’s information pointing to surgical abortion providers. Medication (pill) abortions are effective only up to 11 weeks pregnancy, which is 7 weeks after a missed period. [Edited to add:] AidAccess, also an excellent resource.
Regular Medication Abortion. Uses mifepristone + misoprostol, sometimes shortened to mife-miso. Also known as RU486.
Morning After pills These prevent a pregnancy (i.e. prevent implantation). They don’t stop an established pregnancy. So they’re only effective within 5 days of having sex. These pills have been available over the counter (known as Plan B and other trade names), but anti-women states are working to stop that. Obviously, given the time frame, if they have to be ordered, it has to be done ahead of time. A table from 2012 is included below that gives dosages of birth control pills that can act as morning after pills.
Make your own misoprostol tablets. Edgelord stuff….
Resources
Getting pills in an anti-women state is not very difficult, but it does take a couple of weeks at least, some money (on the order of a couple of hundred dollars), and some fiddly filling out of forms. This page for specific states goes over the exact procedures. If possible, look it over and be clear on all the steps ahead of time.
Abortion pills only work up to 11 weeks pregnancy. That means 7 weeks past a missed period. Or five weeks after you’re likely to have a reliable pregnancy test. Plus the pills work best the earlier they’re taken. So there’s not a lot of time. The more that’s sorted out ahead of time, the less franticness.
More information available at: Planned Parenthood. Mayo Clinic.
Scams: It’s a sad fact of life that as soon as people are facing any kind of emergency, there are too many slimeweasels trying to make a buck off it. Do not assume links you see on social media are legitimate, even when they come from friends. Friends can forward bad information without meaning to. Search for reviews or more information on any site before using it. One example: Mayday Health which was getting a lot of mentions for a while. They may be legit, they may not be. They came out of nowhere about a month ago, after the leak of the draft Roe decision. That’s a red flag. Use PlanCPills instead.
Medical abortion drugs
Mifepristone + misoprostol combinations. 95% to 98% effective. Taken earlier works better than later.
Or misoprostol alone, which is about 85% effective. Still better than nothing. These are drugs with powerful effects, so dosages must be followed. Overdosing is a bad idea.
Medical abortion drugs ONLY WORK IN THE EARLY STAGES OF PREGNANCY. They won’t work if a period is more than about 7 weeks late.
(Obgyns count from the start of the last actual period. So 7 weeks after a missed period counts as the 11th week of pregnancy, assuming 28-day cycles. It’s likely to take another two weeks for a definite pregnancy test. At that point there’s maximum 5 weeks left to get a medication abortion. The reason obgyns count that way is because the first day of the last actual period is not ambiguous. It’s a specific day you can write down without guesswork.)
If it’s too late for medication, a surgical abortion is needed. PlanCPills has links under Support > Other Options.
Since abortion using pills induces heavy flow, it’s not used for women with blood clotting disorders that could make bleeding dangerous. IUDs need to be removed before a medication abortion. It is very important to be sure the pregnancy is NOT ectopic. The telehealth consultation in the process of getting the pills will go through all these issues. They’re important to continued health, so it’s important not to cut corners on this part of the process.
There is some talk floating around the web that mife-miso works best in women weighing less than about 165 lb / 75 kg. From what I see of actual medical data, that’s not true. There is always individual variation in anything to do with biology. Mife-miso will be somewhat less effective in a few individuals because of their specific hormonal situation.
Edited to add: an article about weight effect on morning after pills, see next heading, in today’s NY Times. (Paywalled unless you turn off all scripts.) Some studies have seen a slight weight effect for levonorgestrel, others have not. That is a progesterone-like drug, unlike mife-miso. Mife-miso have prostaglandin-related effects, which is a very different hormone, and not a sex hormone. Morning after pills have much lower doses of hormones and could be expected to be more sensitive to an individual’s hormonal situation.
Morning After pills
If it’s still possible to get a supply of these pills at your local pharmacy, you may want to do that ahead of time. Morning-after pills don’t cause an abortion. They prevent pregnancy by stopping a fertilized egg from implanting. So they have to be taken within 5 days (120 hours) of the sex you’re worried about and weeks before you know whether you’re pregnant.
If morning-after pills are no longer available, some birth control pills contain the same hormones in lower doses.
The following table is copied from The Emergency Contraception Website, post dated 2012 (some of it will be out of date). The link is to the archived website which is likely to stay up. The site was originally at Princeton. It has more information about usage and is worth reading.
| Brand | Company | First Doseb | Second Doseb (12 hours later) |
Ulipristal Acetate per Dose (mg) | Ethinyl Estradiol per Dose (µg) |
Levonorgestrel per Dose (mg)c |
| Ulipristal acetate pills | ||||||
| ella |
Watson | 1 white pill | Noneb | 30 | – | – |
| Progestin-only pills | ||||||
| Levonorgestrel Tablets | Perrigo | 2 white pills | Noneb | – | – | 1.5 |
| Next Choice |
Watson | 2 peach pills | Noneb | – | – | 1.5 |
| Plan B One-Step |
Teva | 1 whilte pill | None | – | – | 1.5 |
| Combined progestin and estrogen pills | ||||||
| Aviane | Teva | 5 orange pills | 5 orange pills | – | 100 | 0.50 |
| Cryselle | Teva | 4 white pills | 4 white pills | – | 120 | 0.60 |
| Enpresse | Teva | 4 orange pills | 4 orange pills | – | 120 | 0.50 |
| Jolessa | Teva | 4 pink pills | 4 pink pills | – | 120 | 0.60 |
| Lessina | Teva | 5 pink pills | 5 pink pills | – | 100 | 0.50 |
| Levora | Watson | 4 white pills | 4 white pills | – | 120 | 0.60 |
| Lo/Ovral | Akrimax | 4 white pills | 4 white pills | – | 120 | 0.60 |
| LoSeasonique | Teva | 5 orange pills | 5 orange pills | – | 100 | 0.50 |
| Low-Ogestrel | Watson | 4 white pills | 4 white pills | – | 120 | 0.60 |
| Lutera | Watson | 5 white pills | 5 white pills | – | 100 | 0.50 |
| Lybrel | Wyeth | 6 yellow pills | 6 yellow pills | – | 120 | 0.54 |
| Nordette | Teva | 4 light-orange pills | 4 light-orange pills | – | 120 | 0.60 |
| Ogestrel | Watson | 2 white pills | 2 white pills | – | 100 | 0.50 |
| Portia | Teva | 4 pink pills | 4 pink pills | – | 120 | 0.60 |
| Quasense | Watson | 4 white pills | 4 white pills | – | 120 | 0.60 |
| Seasonale | Teva | 4 pink pills | 4 pink pills | – | 120 | 0.60 |
| Seasonique | Teva | 4 light-blue-green pills | 4 light-blue-green pills | – | 120 | 0.60 |
| Sronyx | Watson | 5 white pills | 5 while pills | – | 100 | 0.50 |
| Trivora | Watson | 4 pink pills | 4 pink pills | – | 120 | 0.50 |
a
ella, Plan B One-Step,
Next Choice
and Levonorgestrel Tablets
are the only dedicated product specifically marketed for emergency contraception. Aviane, Cryselle, Enpresse, Jolessa, Lessina, Levora, Lo/Ovral, LoSeasonique, Low-Ogestrel, Lutera, Lybrel, Nordette, Ogestrel, Portia, Quasense, Seasonale, Seasonique, Sronyx and Trivora have been declared safe and effective for use as ECPs by the United States Food and Drug Administration. Outside the United States, about 100 emergency contraceptive products are specifically packaged, labeled, and marketed. Levonorgestrel-only ECPs are available either over-the-counter or from a pharmacist without having to see a clinician in 60 countries. In the U.S.,
Plan B One-Step
and Next Choice
are available over-the counter to women and men aged 17 and older. You can buy these pills by prescription if you are younger.
ella
is available by prescription only.
The labels for Next Choice and
Levonorgestrel Tablets
say to take one pill within 72 hours after unprotected intercourse, and another pill 12 hours later. However, recent research has found that both pills can be taken at the same time. Research has also shown that that all of the brands listed here are effective when used within 120 hours after unprotected sex.
The progestin in Cryselle, Lo/Ovral, Low-Ogestrel and Ogestrel is norgestrel, which contains two isomers, only one of which (levonorgestrel) is bioactive; the amount of norgestrel in each tablet is twice the amount of levonorgestrel.
Table.
Do-it-yourself
Misoprostol
This is, obviously, not the best route. As a last resort, it’s better than coathangers. It involves only one of the mife-miso pair, only misoprostol, so is less effective than the “real thing” (85% vs 95%+).
It’s possible because misoprostol is used as an ulcer medication for horses in veterinary medicine. Transforming that into human-usable doses requires careful attention to detail and ability to weigh powders precisely and handle them correctly. It’s to be expected that anti-woman states will try to make veterinary misoprostol inaccessible as well, but at least initially use your money for stocking up on the real thing rather than this, if you can. It’s also a complex enough process that anyone who expects to need to do this should make it ahead of time.
A video by Mixael Laufer of the Four Thieves Vinegar Collective has a slow and careful explanation of how to make the pills. The archive.org link should stay up. It’s a 16 minute video, and it takes several minutes to start getting down to business. Vice magazine had an article discussing the project.
In brief, one orders the powdered misoprostol for horses on the web, being careful to get one that does NOT have other active ingredients. One then carefully weighs it out (need an *accurate* scale for milligram quantities) to get the right dosage for humans, and, at least per Mixael, one uses one’s handy pollen press (no, I didn’t know what that was either) to make tablets using cornstarch for buffer and binder, confectioner’s sugar, and the actual misoprostol powder. (For diabetics, I’m not sure you absolutely need sugar. I think it merely provides a bit of stickiness to bind the ingredients into a tablet. Possibly a bit of milk would work for that too.)
In his example, the product has 2mg (milligrams) per scoop and 60 total scoops. If you know the total weight of the powder in the tub, you can work out how much weight (which he calls mass) of powder you need to get 800 micrograms (800 mcg, which is the same as 0.8 milligrams, 0.8 mg). That is the dose we’re aiming for per pill. Oddly enough, the total weight isn’t obvious in the video, but a web search says you’re getting 213.6 grams in that tub.
–2 mg active ingredient per scoop, and 60 scoops total per tub, means there is a total of 120 mg (2 x 60) of misoprostol per a full tub of 213.6 grams.
–The number of human doses (0.8mg) in 120 mg is 150 doses (120mg/0.8mg).
–So 213.6 gm / 150 = 1.424 gm of powder provides the right amount of active ingredient for a tablet to be used by a human.
–A full course for misoprostol-only is 3 doses of 800 micrograms spaced out by 12 hours, ie all 3 doses would be over 36 hours. Looking around the web, there are also other timings, such as 800 mcg spaced 3 hours apart. This will mean a bigger dose all at once in the body and would, I expect, lead to stronger cramping and bleeding.
You can plug in the amount of misoprostol per scoop, the total number of scoops, and the total weight of the tub based on your specific item.
Method of taking is to dissolve the tablet slowly, during about half an hour, in the cheek, under your tongue, or inside the vagina. The reason for this is that if it’s not swallowed and is not in the stomach and digestive system, the liver can’t try to process the misoprostol. Which it will do, and therefore reduce the effectiveness.
A web search for “equine misoprostol” returns quite a few results with 200 microgram pills. I’m not sure why one wouldn’t use four of these for each of the three doses. Possibly the way the tablets are made up is not suitable for people.
Menstrual extraction. This is definitely not for amateurs. Some of the equipment needs to be sterile and a good bit of manual skill is involved. In Ye Olden Times women used to learn the skills in self-help groups and pass them on to each other. It takes months of practice. But it is quite doable, given time and knowledge and skill, and is something women might want to consider learning if all other avenues are closed.
Last Word
My prayer is that this inhuman treatment of women turns out to be a short-lived aberration. I know the Democrats tend to do one-tenth of what they’d hoped, but that’s still a lot better than thugs who like to reclassify us as service animals. So we need to pack the House and the Senate with Democrats who pledge to get rid of the filibuster, expand the Supreme Court so that it follows the law again, and recognize women’s inalienable right to body autonomy in law. And make Manchin and Sinema irrelevant.
If we can do that, which depends on all of us, then by next February this whole post might be wonderfully useless.
Setting perhaps a bad example and going quite off-topic here, the Jan6 hearing is driving me more nuts than I already am.
I mean it’s GOOD they’re proving that the Dump is a barking mad treasonous seditionist who was trying to murder his veep. It needs to be done. It’s good.
But jeezuseverlovinchrist, people. We KNOW all this. It’s been obvious for so long I can’t even remember anymore when it wasn’t obvious.
Meanwhile, Garland the Legal Roomba continues trundling on his cleanup program while the house burns down.
These people do realize that if they don’t get this done in time to stop the so-called Repubs from regaining power, the next Prez will just pardon everybody while deeply investigating Hunter Biden’s laptop? They know that, right? Right?
quixote on June 28th, 2022 at 13:39
Speaking from personal experience in two different coasts, the people in the U.S. who make the laws are never going to get it with respect to women.
The male controlled media drowned all of us trying to give the U.S. the reality of abortion in the 1980’s – they published that infamous “Silent Scream” but would not air the factual documentary (of which I still have a copy) that pro-women media produced. U.S. media actually refused to give it space but the women I knew then didn’t care – they were concerned with ‘larger issues’.
Those women, who had their voice thanks to their male affiliations, dismissed the issue as trivial. In North Carolina, two decades later, there was a “right to life’ takeover of on campus space at UNC. I called to ask about counter demonstrations, in particular I wanted to show that compelling picture of a woman dead from a septic abortion from “Our Bodies, Ourselves”, and UNC’s admins told me that counter demonstrations were not allowed. They gave some mellifluous ‘can’t upset people’ reason, when the lying male supremacists were parading false pictures of what they called aborted fetuses.
Too many women stand alone in the U.S and are silenced by the indifference of the vast majority of women who coast on the comfort of being associated with men. The woman I knew best at UNC had long since abandoned her youthful integrity and would never had dreamed of embarassing her department head husband by standing with me at that demonstration.
I stood on the streets and faced horrific anti-women hatred in Oregon in the 1980’s as a clinic escort and was ridiculed by the comfortable women who were associated with men I knew. (the men ignored all of this). I volunteered a decade later to sit in a clinic in Alaska when the murderers were out on January 19th (those peaceful and competent women thanked me and said they were okay *that year*).
The feminist women’s clinic where I had the first health care that showed what male doctors had been fleecing women for ever since I’d been born – uniary tests, prescriptions, etc – on 14th street in fkn *Alanta* fkn *Georgia* also gave classes in vacuum aspirated abortions. Every single bit of this was legal in 1978. My sellout lawyer sister had two safe quiet unpicketed abortions there in the early 1980s. That clinic didn’t need escorts when I was there because the Catholic priests who founded ‘Right to Life’ hadn’t yet got going. That clinic, like Oregon’s, first cut the ‘feminist’ part out of their name, then gave up two decades later.
In Oregon, outside of Kate Brownesque affulent counties, women have no income and no rights that do not depend on a biological connection – either sexual or maternal – with the class with rights. In these counties, race doesn’t matter, as the vast majority of people are white. Sex is the class that rules everything. Only men have the right to the jobs that pay a living wage. Girls are raised from infancy in religions like the Catholic and Mormon churches to accept men as their superiors. They have no legal recourse to speak of in non-Kate-Brown counties – the ruling bodies of these counties are all men, their attorneys general are all men, their courts are all men or one or two women with no other choice but male identification.
In Oregon, a froth of not-women-identified XXers have been free for decades to ignore what the lack of rights on the ground does to women. Women who have no biological connection to higher earning males are left to twist in the wind and face poverty and exclusion if they don’t do what their male identified community tells them to do. No one, certainly not the sub-tier of adequately paid women in male headed agencies, cares about the lives and rights of these women. They have the same “OMG, *I’m* not like *them*” phosphorescent avoidance the women I knew in the North Carolina liberal college town where I lived had with respect to the omnipresent racism there.
Except in Oregon, it’s 100% sex based: men pay other men enough to hold their economic heads high, women can’t do that. Every small town reflects this, right down to a $4000 simple fishing boat that the man at that address bought, owns and controls and the women goes out in when her man wants a sandwich.
I’m not joining the chorus of “White women are raaaaacists” in this – I’m trying to do what I can (hopeless dream, I know) to sever the cord that ties women’s whole consciousness to men’s interests. Ignoring women’s economic and community reality is part of that. But I expect it’ll fall into the same silence that brought us all here in the first place.
Earlynerd on July 8th, 2022 at 02:41
Yeah. The complicit women worrying about which side their bread is buttered on are a) depressing as hell, and b) a large factor in keeping the whole damn wheel turning.
The thing I find the worst is the refusal to see it’s slavery. Owning bodies is slavery. Women don’t own their bodies. That’s directly related to extracting a *lot* of unpaid labor from them. It’s enforced with hideous violence at the margins, which keeps the entire center subdued. That. is. slavery.
Even the well-meaning keep talking about “health.” The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals also worries about physical pain and damage. Sure, you want to stop all that. But it says nothing about the human status of the women being trashed.
Anyway. You know all this. Just venting.
quixote on July 10th, 2022 at 23:58
Yep – been saying that about self-ownership for decades. Though I’d use the term ‘complicit’ more for women who have decent economic and social choices and still keep silent, not the wives, daughters and other appendages of men in areas where only men are allowed the right to earn their own living. There are a lot of those places in Oregon and Washington.
I was glad to see this decades-old wrong is -finally- getting some national media attention:
Catholic hospitals’ growth impacts reproductive health care
It is outrageous that PeaceHealth, a huge Catholic ‘health care’ system in Oregon, is the official health care provider for World-22. That event, going on this week, is advertised as bringing together the best track and field athletes in the world to compete at University of Oregon’s facilities.
There’s no mention in any of the Oregon media announcing this that PeaceHealth is a Catholic system, much less that its staff will murder women if they think it is necessary to please the childless, (ostensibly) celibate, woman-free U.S. Catholic Council of Bishops.
There were no organized protests that I could find ahead of the event and I’ve learned the cost of standing up alone, to be mown down while other women look on tsking at my bad choices. I won’t be anywhere near this thing.
But it will be interesting if the U.S. replicates Ireland’s experience: murder a non-citizen in the name of male supremacy and the world might just notice enough to help get the Catholic church out of your laws.
Earlynerd on July 24th, 2022 at 16:28
Catholic hospitals, in my experience, have been either mediocre or downright awful. And that’s not even for reproductive care.
(My guess founded on nothing but feeling is that they probably expect to get away with grossly underpaying their low-level nursing staff. The miserable morale, and underpayment?, propagates up the chain.)
I hate to even think about what their reproductive care is like.
University teaching hospitals or hospitals started by Jewish philanthropy are the ones I try to find.
quixote on July 24th, 2022 at 20:16
Thanks for the link repair, Q. It’s just what I wanted.
RE: Catholic hospitals and other health centers, my own experience was like yours the few times I couldn’t avoid going to one. Substandard care, with the added twist of that patronizing/hostile attitude towards me as a female I remembered too well from school days. I ran across a link recently but can’t find it now, that showed they weren’t much cheaper than for-profit centers either.
As far as reproductive care, there simply isn’t any. At all. This is the thing that makes me go red in the face having to state over and over to people here: the ‘Catholic Directive’, usually buried in the fine print, but there for all Catholic owned systems, is horrific and enforced.
It’s explicit about choosing to kill women, not only by refusing anything remotely resembling abortion but even by actually killing a woman if some administrator thinks it might make harvesting the fetus easier. It denies anyone birth control, including sterilization, denies raped women emergency contraception, the list goes on. There’s a good article that lays out the 2018 Directive and its effects on mergers here:
https://healthlaw.org/resource/the-ethical-religious-directives-what-the-2018-update-means-for-catholic-hospital-mergers/
Another horrifying article here gathers together all the accelerating harm done to women as subhuman containers for the only real humans involved, the ‘unborn child’:
https://www.aclu.org/other/coercive-and-punitive-governmental-responses-womens-conduct-during-pregnancy
It’s undated, but the confidence of the authors that these things would not be repeated and the rights won were secure makes it obvious it’s from some time ago.
I was aware of many of those events at the time, and was trying to get the women I knew to care but could not. Now this is what’s in store for their daughters, daughters-in-law, nieces, granddaughters.
With respect to alternatives, I agree about university hospitals – when I had decent health insurance, they were my first choice. The municipal hospitals of larger cities were also quite good (when not Catholic affiliated). I haven’t come across any with a Jewish affiliation, but expect they’d be as rational and supportive of women as most modern versions of Judaism are.
Earlynerd on July 25th, 2022 at 01:18
Q, thanks for the post fix. Please do delete the Arrrgh comment. My earlier reply saying this disappeared.
It was probably due to two links in the same comment. One was a fairly recent one from a site that keeps track of hospital mergers. They did a good job of laying out the Catholic Directive and the consequences of that. The Catholic Council of Bishops (obligatory reminder: all men, not one woman among them) got worse, not better, in 2018.
They spelled out that Catholic ‘care’ facilities have not just the right, but the duty to murder women by refusing abortion in all circumstances. Also the duty to refuse contraception in all circumstances, including emergency contraception for a rape victim, to refuse sterilization in all circumstances, including post-delivery when its often easiest on women…the list goes on.
The other link was from the ACLU. It was a history of the cases they took on behalf of pregnant women, when government entities and hospitals tried to treat a fetus as a legal entity with equal and competing rights to a woman’s body.
I’m no fan of the ACLU – they’re too often blind to the effects absolute freedom for white men has on any other demographic – but they did a good job of standing up for women in these cases. It’s chilling that the tone of the article is something like “Well, we did that and won and -that- takeover of women’s freedom is settled and gone” when those cases are now or soon to become women’s reality again.
If the disappeared post is too wordy (can’t be!), it’s fine if you don’t bring it back.
Earlynerd on July 25th, 2022 at 13:24
(Sometimes wp drives me nuts. a) not letting two links through for a regular commenter (idiots) and b) fussing about deleting my fix-it comment and c) me not having the time right now to figure out why. Grrr. Anyway. Onward and upward.)
quixote on July 25th, 2022 at 13:38
Thank you again for rescuing my comment, and also for all your work on this blog.
I’ll try very hard to go back to just lurking. If I can’t manage that, I’ll at least be more careful with formatting and links.
Earlynerd on July 25th, 2022 at 23:17
You don’t have to go back to lurking for my sake! If it’s what you want, well, self-determination and all that good stuff 😀 . But I’m happy to have you comment.
quixote on July 27th, 2022 at 23:28