abortion underground prep for post-Roe world - pull out the old equipment, manual vac aspiration
JESSICA BRUDER: In a pretty backwards way. I was - during the pandemic, just doing a lot of poking around on the internet. And I was reading the conference schedule for something called HOPE - Hackers On Planet Earth - from 2020. And there was a session that wasn't like most of the other sessions. It wasn't about privacy. It wasn't about coding. It was called Hackers In A Post Roe v. Wade World. And I watched with rapt attention as a woman who went by the name Maggie Mayhem talked about parts of abortion history that I didn't know about, in particular, the invention of a device called the Del-Em 1971 that was used to help women safely get underground abortions before Roe legalized abortion. And just the fact that nowadays people were still talking about this really fascinated me. And for me, that was what cracked the door into a world that was much wider than what I knew.
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GROSS: So is that happening now? Are people, like, reviving that now in preparation for the possibility of abortion becoming illegal?
BRUDER: Yes and no. For a lot of people, it's totemic. It's a symbol that even when abortion was illegal last time, people found a workaround. There is a small number of people who are taking an interest in it and passing the knowledge around. There are other people who say, well, look, this is an early version of something called a manual vacuum aspiration kit, which is mass produced now and used by doctors and can be found and purchased. So why not just use that? The majority of people who are talking about self-managing abortion, they're referring to using abortion pills, which accounted for more than 50% of abortions last year.
So that's really the mainstream underground and aboveground tool for abortion in first trimester now. But some people are saying, look, we need to have all the tools on the table that we can possibly have. The pills will never be a one-size-fits-all solution for everyone, no procedure or drug ever is. So there are people and activists who want to teach manual vacuum aspiration and the Del-Em just so women have all the tools available if they lose the right to have an abortion.
GROSS: You attended a session in which you witnessed a demonstration of how this kind of device can be used to perform an abortion. So tell us a little bit about what your reaction was and how safe you thought this was for women to administer to other women.
https://www.npr.org/2022/04/07/1091422956/how-the-abortion-underground-is-prepping-for-a-post-roe-v-wade-world
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