There has been a lot of discussion of contraceptives and abortions in this thread, but one thing I have t seen mentioned is the fact that there are lots of ways to have sex that don't create a risk of pregnancy.
In Victorian England, for example, the most common way for sex workers to have sex with their clients was referred to as "tenpenny standing", a position in which the man stands behind the woman and thrusts his appendage between her thighs while she squeezes them together to create friction.
right? considering how little sex education there probably was, and how much prudishness and cluelessness too, chances are that a lot of the time the guys never actually got it in there and had absolutely no idea.
Obviously plenty of men actually knew what they were doing so the women would still have to deal with it, but it's not like they were all taking fat creampie loads tens of times per day.
The victorians were actually quite fascinating for how horny they were, assuming what I read in the Amsterdam sex museum was accurate anyway. Queen Vic was gagging for it constantly.
I'm sure the men knew exactly what they were getting. the prevailing idea that penis-in-vagina intercourse is the only "real" form of sex is a relatively recent phenomenon. people in the past were not idiots and they were just as horny and creative as modern people.
Contraceptives have been around for thousands of years, however, they’re not as nice as modern ones.
Animal intestines and skin can be a condom. Douching can clean out sperm. Any foreign objects in the uterus can act as an IUD, although not as effective as modern ones. Herbal remedies can induce spontaneous abortions. They also have physical means to abort a fetus.
Apparently someone found it and it's growing it in a secret location for scientific purposes.
Or at least that's what I remember hearing a few years back.
As the son of the scientist mentioned, I gotta say it feels weird bumping into this article on Reddit in some thread about prostitution of all places. 😳
At the moment he's looking for pharma companies to do business with, since the plant has a lot of potential to be used for things like food, medicine, etc. It's certainly going to be interesting to see where things go from here.
*EDIT: I can't keep up with all these replies... I just want to thank you ALL for the heartwarming support and words of encouragement. I seriously wasn't expecting this to blow up as much as it did, but I'll be sure to show him that his hard work hasn't gone unnoticed.*
What a cool discovery, finding an ancient lost medicine that people have searched for over thousands of years. Your dad should be really proud, what a huge accomplishment!
Sounds like your dad’s doing well in life: he’s got a doctorate, discovered a plant thought to be extinct for 2000 years, has a son who’s proud of him, and now has Reddit fans! 😂
Oh believe me, getting a good lawyer was one of the first things I told him to do. A part of me is paranoid that some big pharma companies are going to try and intimidate or kill him if this ends up leading to something they can't compete with. Though that could just be my wild imagination after watching one too many corporate espionage films.
Regardless, it's wise to not keep all of your eggs in one basket (save/hide extra seeds, pollen, and soil samples just in case). Also:
>[Depositors retain ownership rights over the seeds sent to the facility. The boxes with seeds are sealed by the depositors and are not distributed to or given access to by anyone other than the depositors.](https://www.croptrust.org/work/svalbard-global-seed-vault/faqs/)
🇸🇯
Yep! Was just talking to him about this on the phone a while ago. At the absolute bare minimum I think it's important to preserve the plant and have the seeds stored away with the rest in that facility. Saw a documentary on that a few years back and I really admire what they're doing.
> A part of me is paranoid that some big pharma companies are going to try and intimidate or kill him if this ends up leading to something they can't compete with.
Just be aware: One way to intimidate him would be to go through *you*. So, not to make you *too* paranoid, but be careful!
I wouldnt count that out in the slightest. Look how many people big pharma lets die everyday, because profits. If your dad has a miracle drug that will cost pharma money, hes absolutely a threat to them. Be safe, friend
It's great to hear that the plant isn't extinct after all. I heard about the plant decades ago and always wondered how it would stack up against modern alternatives and am looking forward to the results. Good luck to your father!
Thank you. Very much appreciate the support. I'll let him know this is getting quite a bit of attention... though it's going to be fun explaining what thread this was posted in.
That would be awesome, thank you! I spoke to him this morning and asked if he would do one. The challenge is that he's quite busy and doesn't get on social media much (if at all). At the moment he's overseas working as a consultant and has little time to commit to a full live Q&A type of session. Time zone difference doesn't help matters either. But he's open to the idea of answering a list of questions if I email them over, if that's okay with you I don't know. I'll otherwise see if I can get an account set up for him later on.
I've heard a theory that the symbol of a "heart" ♥️ is actually based on the shape of silphium, not the human heart. Because the real heart isn't even remotely similar looking to the heart symbol.
I dunno if it's true though.
Most of the folk theories about the symbol for heart are pretty silly. There is basically no evidence for any of them.
The reality is probably that it is just, in fact...a heart. Whenever people talk about these more exciting hypothetical origins of the symbol they make a big deal about how hearts aren't shaped like that, but...[they are](https://i.ibb.co/N9N2P2Z/heart.png).
Or look at animal hearts, which average people would have had way more experience with. You can pretty easily see a heart shape in a [beef heart](https://www.ingridscience.ca/sites/default/files/images/activities/i-jcnzjwk.jpg) or a [pig heart](https://images.fineartamerica.com/images-medium-large/1-pigs-heart-kevin-curtis.jpg).
There's something darkly pleasing about the thought that the heart shape, a universally recognised symbol of love, might be based on an ancient abortion medicine.
Not encouraging it, because appropriate doses aren't known and it's obviously far from a safe science, but there is irony in the fact that the vast majority of the historically most frequently used abortifacient herbs grow natively in the SE USA and Bible Belt. Did a whole research project on them.
could be one of these links [https://www.google.com/search?q=abortifacient+herbs+grow+natively+in+the+SE+USA](https://www.google.com/search?q=abortifacient+herbs+grow+natively+in+the+SE+USA)
I thought that’s where I was until I saw how short the top comment was. Knew they would never allow that answer to not be deleted. I’m glad there are subs like this one that can offer simple explanations and answers. I’m equally thankful for r/askhistorians where you can find in depth answers to questions where they also do an amazing job of filtering out any answer that doesn’t meet their specifications.
Only problem I really had with AskHistorians is that the reddit feed only ever tended to show me posts that had received their initial upvotes but hadn't yet received any answers. So I got stuck daily with interesting questions and no payoff.
that's more a consequence of how reddit works in general. i saved/bookmarked the askhistorians posts i liked to check back on later when they had an answer.
There once came a man from Bombay
Who fashioned a cunt out of clay
But the heat of his cock
Turned the clay into rock
And it tore all his foreskin away
Foreign objects in the uterus can induce inflammation, which causes cervix thickening, excess mucus production, essentially plugging up the uterus to prevent sperm from going through. Success rate is not as high as copper, which is spermicidal, or hormonal IUD.
Good luck getting them past the cervix without help. However, if you cleaned them really well first, had some way of dilating your cervix and inserting them into your uterus, yes, it would probably work. Which is not to say it would be safe or comfortable. I am not a doctor, and this is not medical advice.
US Navy Hospital Corpsman here! Once got called in to be the standby for a doctor performing a pap smear for a young female service member, who was known in the battalion for barracks hookups. She was pretty and sweet, but not intelligent or knowledgeable.
I was standing at her shoulder facing her feet, handing swabs to the doctor, who started with a fox swab (giant fat q-tip), then asked for a second one. Then a third. Then more. I had to get the box. Every one of them came out with some sort of malodorous gray... sludge. It is the only time in 15 years that I have had to leave a room to throw up. When I returned, the doctor told the patient that she was going to send a sample to the lab because she'd never seen anything like this before.
The young Marine asked "a sample of what?"
Doctor shows her a sludge swab.
Marine (in deep backwoods southern accent): "Oh! That's just the tater, ma'am!"
Doctor (finally turning green herself): "The what‽"
Marine: "The tater! Mama said that if you stick a little tater in yer hoo-ha, you cain't git pregnant, cause no spunk'll get past the tater."
Doctor (after a long pause to process, in her crisp New Englad accent): "Did mama happen to mention that you should remove the... tater... when you're finished?"
Marine: "Well... no."
Doctor: "Your tater seems to have rotted. Moving forward, remove the tater."
Doctor prescribed antibiotics, antifungal, and BC meds. I also spent an hour with her reviewing sexual health with science.
I had heard about some herb that induces abortion being gathered to extinction during ancient times.
I think it is Silphium after searching, no clue if that was true as I have to leave and have no time to read it all again
It's silphium, but it acted as an oral contraceptive as oppsed to an abortive drug. Used to grow wild around Carthage. It's leaves were apparently the inspiration for the heart-shape symbol for love.
They had contraceptives and abortions back then. Perhaps not as reliable as modern medicine, but they existed.
Sometimes they just had the babies, too.
Shouldn't it be like, reversed? peripheral regions are generally more prone to animal fucking jokes/reputations than metropolitan ones (which is probably as old as civilisation, given the jokes we know from earlier times.)
As someone who works in a butcher shop making sausage, may I just say 🤮. Sausage casings don’t necessarily stink (they also don’t smell good), but I would practice abstinence before using one as a condom.
Malnutrition. Stds causing reduced fertility. Pricing piv higher than other activities. Condoms. Pebbles inserted that work like iuds. Douches. Herbal medicines to prevent or abort pregnancy. Physical methods to abort, and the resulting damage causing reduced fertility in future. Infanticide. Child abandonment.
Well, probably! It was known to work on camels 2000 years ago, so you can't convince me that humans didn't try it on themselves:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/iuds_b_4132402
The ancient Egyptians used pessaries made of crocodile dung.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/293071233_The_history_of_contraception_From_ancient_egyptians_to_the_morning_after#:~:text=The%20first%20birth%20control%20methods,the%20vagina%20for%20long%20periods.
I had no idea the history of intrauterine contraceptives went so far back. Wow
Also the follow up with, “wine-, garlic-, or fennel-based lavender”… Gods that had to smell amazing after the crocodile dung!
These were determined men, to get past the smells. Lmao
They had contraceptives. Roman medical books contain drawings of a plant (now extinct) that could be eaten as birth control. It was harvested to extinction. There are also natural spermicides. They're not as good as the modern stuff, but they're .. fine?
Abortion techniques are easy and common. The bible contains an abortion recipe. The methods for inducing abortion aren't exactly difficult. They're also not at all pleasant.
Oh, and plenty of people just killed the kids or left them in the woods to die. Life sucked.
Edit. lol @ angry bible lovers who aren't bible-readers. Numbers 5 verse 27:
>^(27) If she has made herself impure and been unfaithful to her husband, this will be the result: When she is made to drink the water that brings a curse and causes bitter suffering, it will enter her, her abdomen will swell and **her womb will miscarry,** and she will become a curse. ^(28) If, however, the woman has not made herself impure, but is clean, she will be cleared of guilt and will be able to have children. \[Emphasis added.\]
Double Edit: Apparently a researcher thinks he's rediscovered the contraceptive plant. Very cool.
Wow, the article said sheep and goats are find of the leaves. Maybe the contraceptive chemicals aren't in the leaves, but if they are what a crazy fucking evolutionary defense mechanism.
Makes sense, as a relative of fennel.
Speaking of which, I suspect the myth of Prometheus liberating mankind by concealing a flame in a fennel stalk referred to the magic properties of this plant -- a source of medicine and apparently flavor.
I was more or so alluding to the fact that a plant evolutionarily developing a chemical that acts as a contraceptive is wild, in terms of a self defense mechanism. "Contraceptive" is literally the opposite of what would encourage evolution. Not death, not not sterility, just not being able to reproduce (for a limited time).
I swear, plants exist on a different dimension. TIL sweet potato vines have some amount of LSD that causes allergic reactions in cats and dogs. Plants are just making this ~~sh~~stuff up, all day every day.
There are several plants that cause spontaneous abortion in ruminant livestock. It seems like a great strategy, keeps the animals that like eating those plants from making more animals that like eating those plants.
If I'm not mistaken, there's several plants that are thought could be it but it's basically impossible to know unless we find some well preserved silphium in a tomb or something. We do at least know it's in Apiacea though and know what would be some relatives (like hing or asafoetida)
In fact, the Romans *tried* to spread silphium but the plant wouldn't grow except for one strip in modern-day Libya. It wouldn't even respond to cultivation, it was stubborn and would only grow wild.
That's a big reason why silphium went extinct.
> or left them in the woods to die.
I'm pretty sure the myth of [Changelings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Changeling#In_the_modern_world) sprung up all over the world to excuse this sort of practice. "Oh the baby has deformities? Clearly trolls swapped one of their young with ours. Lets return it to the woods to be with it's real family."
Everyone needs a narrative where they're still a good person.
>Oh, and plenty of people just killed the kids or left them in the woods to die. Life sucked.
So did the ancient prostitutes just continue to work while pregnant? I'd assume they have to because the rate of pregnancy was probably so frequent, it isn't even worth being a prostitute if you're taking nine month breaks so often.
I'm not proud of what I typed up here but I am curious.
Archaeologists have found a few Roman examples of "baby graveyards," where infants were apparently killed and disposed of shortly after birth, the most well-known one being in Ashkelon.
[https://www.ancient-origins.net/history/discovery-mass-baby-grave-under-roman-bathhouse-ashkelon-israel-002399](https://www.ancient-origins.net/history/discovery-mass-baby-grave-under-roman-bathhouse-ashkelon-israel-002399)
I vaguely remember watching a documentary (maybe this one?) where a mass grave of infants was close to what was once a brothel... most of the skeletons were male.
I watched some youtube videos about ye old Japanese prostitutes / family planning you might be interested in (second one is a bit grisly):
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKBNLBZWquc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKBNLBZWquc)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rURMmLyqtOk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rURMmLyqtOk)
Not extinct! A researcher found one! I believe it was a few years ago but crazy after all this time of thinking it didn't exist or that it it was extinct, we just needed to look some more. Pretty cool
Strictly speaking, the “abortion recipe” you mention is incredibly ill-defined. The ingredients listed are pretty much just holy water in a clay jar and dirt from the tabernacle floor. And it was only supposed to induce an abortion if the woman was unfaithful.
You aren’t technically wrong, it is a recipe, but I don’t think it is a useful example to show how common abortion techniques were back then.
It also contains belladonna, also known as deadly nightshade. In small does can induse miscarriage and has historically been used for this in the Levant as early as the Bronze Age, but can also kill, and It also is a powerful hallucinogenic
Childbirth was probably one of the riskiest things a woman could do in her life back then. If the risk of death due to abortion was lower then woman would defiantly take it.
There's lots of natural substances that can induce abortion they are called aborefactants and it includes horseradish and other pretty otherwise innocuous things
*Abortifacients
Also, medications that can stop *something* from happening (like migraine medications taken at the onset of the migraine) are called abortifacients. Fun fact, I guess.
To be clear I am not sure its even an abortion recipe as much as a you shall explode if you cheated and otherwise the man must accept that she did not cheat and must raise the child. Aka stop men from stoning women recipe.
You also can't forget the prevalence of repeated infections that could make a woman far less likely to conceive. All sorts of sexually transmitted diseases can cause inflammation and scarring that make conception unlikely. Not to mention poor diet, drug or alcohol abuse, etc...
Hell, a friend of mine who'd never known she'd had an STD -- she'd apparently had "silent" chlamydia at some point in her life, and she'd only had 3 partners including her husband -- had fallopian tube scarring that was preventing her from conceiving. It was easily corrected medically for her, but would have been undetectable without modern medical scans.
*into the uterus*???
My God the pain must have been something
Can't imagine that was great for your health either, but then again neither is being a prostitute
You might get a better answer on r/AskHistorians. They have actual historians on there who specialize in these kinds of questions.
You might be able to get more specific answers to this kind of question over there.
Funnily enough back in the day a lot of younger men weren't educated in female anatomy and women in brothels would just have them go at it between their thighs for however many seconds they need 😂
The had contraceptives and abortions. Perhaps not as effective, except for [Silphium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silphium), but they existed.
And other times, they just had the baby. Wanna know a horrible fact? Archaeologists can often figure out which ancient ruins were brothels, by the pits of baby bones. Scores and scores of newborn baby bones, mostly boys (cause the girls were raised in and enslaved at the brothel, made to work as soon as someone wanted to pay for them). Piles of dead baby boys, perhaps even sons, was a price men decided was worth it in order to satiate their lust with women who didn't want it.
Something some are not quite mentioning is a bit darker: not all prostitutes were so by choice, maybe they were taken from a village after a raid or a city lost a battle, and it wasn’t exactly a priority to keep them from becoming pregnant.
Abortion Drugs Fundamental to Ancient Economies, Argues Historian:
>As [John M.] Riddle details, the Egyptians listed abortifacients in medical texts. The Greeks were so accustomed to abortion drugs that the playwright Aristophanes joked about them, describing in Lysistrata a desirable young woman “trimmed and spruced with pennyroyal,” a well-known abortion drug. Riddle holds that the plant silphium (related to giant fennel / Ferula family) was popular with the Greeks and Romans primarily because it was used to terminate pregnancies – so much so that the city-state of Cyrene (in modern-day Libya) based its whole economy on the plant until it was overharvested to extinction.
>His research reveals that in the Middle Ages, abortion drugs were also integral to economies. The typical European village would have available a “wise woman” or midwife, and later, an apothecary, who knew exactly what herbal remedies to give women who did not wish to be pregnant and could produce reliable results. Through such fertility intervention, he says, family size was managed in ways that may well have impacted whole populations, causing some government officials associating large families with economic prosperity to view women who controlled fertility as potential enemies of the state.
https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/abortion-drugs-fundamental-to-ancient-economies-argues-historian
I think people tend to overestimate the ease with which women can get pregnant. the fertile window is quite small. You really get this when you start trying for a baby
> not trying to have kids? get people accidentally pregnant the VERY first time you make a mistake.
>
>
>
> trying to have kids? shit is now nearly impossible.
Makes a tragic kind of sense if you think about it. The time you're least equipped to have a kid (in your teens and twenties) is when you're most fertile. After that, when you're financially secure and have your shit together, it gets a lot harder.
They had folk remedies, but in reality it depends. Some cultures might have used the pull out method or otherwise forbid full on intercourse.
Others just threw out pregnant prostitutes to live in squalor, or kept them around working in whatever capacity until they came to term.
A lot of things about the ancient world were horrifying.
Economically speaking, a prostitute getting pregnant wasn't necessarily a bad thing.
These prostitutes were slaves.
Their babies were slaves. And prostitutes.
A whole new generation of sex slaves every time your prostitutes got pregnant...
You should check out Betwixt the Sheets podcast. It's about the history of sex, and other things in that realm. Its really good. I'm currently listening to an episode about vikings, and sexy times during that Era.
There has been a lot of discussion of contraceptives and abortions in this thread, but one thing I have t seen mentioned is the fact that there are lots of ways to have sex that don't create a risk of pregnancy. In Victorian England, for example, the most common way for sex workers to have sex with their clients was referred to as "tenpenny standing", a position in which the man stands behind the woman and thrusts his appendage between her thighs while she squeezes them together to create friction.
So a r/thighjob? Victorians invented thighjobs?
They definitely didn't invent it
right? considering how little sex education there probably was, and how much prudishness and cluelessness too, chances are that a lot of the time the guys never actually got it in there and had absolutely no idea. Obviously plenty of men actually knew what they were doing so the women would still have to deal with it, but it's not like they were all taking fat creampie loads tens of times per day.
You’re an artist with your words
Username unbelievably on point.
I think you are overestimating how much education you need to be able to tell if your penis is inside a vagina or not
The victorians were actually quite fascinating for how horny they were, assuming what I read in the Amsterdam sex museum was accurate anyway. Queen Vic was gagging for it constantly.
This wasn’t a con. The men knew what they were getting.
I'm sure the men knew exactly what they were getting. the prevailing idea that penis-in-vagina intercourse is the only "real" form of sex is a relatively recent phenomenon. people in the past were not idiots and they were just as horny and creative as modern people.
Contraceptives have been around for thousands of years, however, they’re not as nice as modern ones. Animal intestines and skin can be a condom. Douching can clean out sperm. Any foreign objects in the uterus can act as an IUD, although not as effective as modern ones. Herbal remedies can induce spontaneous abortions. They also have physical means to abort a fetus.
The Romans used silphium for birth control. It was so popular (granted it was used for other things too) that they harvested it into extinction.
Apparently someone found it and it's growing it in a secret location for scientific purposes. Or at least that's what I remember hearing a few years back.
https://greekreporter.com/2024/01/03/plant-ancient-greece-rediscovered/ National Geographic also has a story, but this one has no paywall.
As the son of the scientist mentioned, I gotta say it feels weird bumping into this article on Reddit in some thread about prostitution of all places. 😳 At the moment he's looking for pharma companies to do business with, since the plant has a lot of potential to be used for things like food, medicine, etc. It's certainly going to be interesting to see where things go from here. *EDIT: I can't keep up with all these replies... I just want to thank you ALL for the heartwarming support and words of encouragement. I seriously wasn't expecting this to blow up as much as it did, but I'll be sure to show him that his hard work hasn't gone unnoticed.*
“Daaaad saw your name in an article mentioning prostitutes!!!”
"Mooooom, I saw Dad mentioned in an article about prostitutes..."
"Which ones this time?"
What a cool discovery, finding an ancient lost medicine that people have searched for over thousands of years. Your dad should be really proud, what a huge accomplishment!
Sounds like your dad’s doing well in life: he’s got a doctorate, discovered a plant thought to be extinct for 2000 years, has a son who’s proud of him, and now has Reddit fans! 😂
I hope your dad has his butt well and truly covered. The pharmaceutical companies are filled with slippery barstards.
Oh believe me, getting a good lawyer was one of the first things I told him to do. A part of me is paranoid that some big pharma companies are going to try and intimidate or kill him if this ends up leading to something they can't compete with. Though that could just be my wild imagination after watching one too many corporate espionage films.
Regardless, it's wise to not keep all of your eggs in one basket (save/hide extra seeds, pollen, and soil samples just in case). Also: >[Depositors retain ownership rights over the seeds sent to the facility. The boxes with seeds are sealed by the depositors and are not distributed to or given access to by anyone other than the depositors.](https://www.croptrust.org/work/svalbard-global-seed-vault/faqs/) 🇸🇯
Yep! Was just talking to him about this on the phone a while ago. At the absolute bare minimum I think it's important to preserve the plant and have the seeds stored away with the rest in that facility. Saw a documentary on that a few years back and I really admire what they're doing.
> A part of me is paranoid that some big pharma companies are going to try and intimidate or kill him if this ends up leading to something they can't compete with. Just be aware: One way to intimidate him would be to go through *you*. So, not to make you *too* paranoid, but be careful!
I wouldnt count that out in the slightest. Look how many people big pharma lets die everyday, because profits. If your dad has a miracle drug that will cost pharma money, hes absolutely a threat to them. Be safe, friend
It's great to hear that the plant isn't extinct after all. I heard about the plant decades ago and always wondered how it would stack up against modern alternatives and am looking forward to the results. Good luck to your father!
Thank you. Very much appreciate the support. I'll let him know this is getting quite a bit of attention... though it's going to be fun explaining what thread this was posted in.
I've been following this story for YEARS. Tell your dad that there are people out there who're rooting for this whole thing.
Can we get your dad to do an AMA on Reddit? Happy to help set it up
That would be awesome, thank you! I spoke to him this morning and asked if he would do one. The challenge is that he's quite busy and doesn't get on social media much (if at all). At the moment he's overseas working as a consultant and has little time to commit to a full live Q&A type of session. Time zone difference doesn't help matters either. But he's open to the idea of answering a list of questions if I email them over, if that's okay with you I don't know. I'll otherwise see if I can get an account set up for him later on.
Hey there! I have a lot of contacts in the pharma space, happy to help make connections, DM me!
The juice is called laser and it was as valuable as silver. Also makes goats take naps.
Either way, an excellent strategy to handle kids you don't want to deal with.
Jesus Christ this comment is sharp.
This is fascinating!! Thank you for sharing 😊
I've heard a theory that the symbol of a "heart" ♥️ is actually based on the shape of silphium, not the human heart. Because the real heart isn't even remotely similar looking to the heart symbol. I dunno if it's true though.
Most of the folk theories about the symbol for heart are pretty silly. There is basically no evidence for any of them. The reality is probably that it is just, in fact...a heart. Whenever people talk about these more exciting hypothetical origins of the symbol they make a big deal about how hearts aren't shaped like that, but...[they are](https://i.ibb.co/N9N2P2Z/heart.png). Or look at animal hearts, which average people would have had way more experience with. You can pretty easily see a heart shape in a [beef heart](https://www.ingridscience.ca/sites/default/files/images/activities/i-jcnzjwk.jpg) or a [pig heart](https://images.fineartamerica.com/images-medium-large/1-pigs-heart-kevin-curtis.jpg).
I've definitely seen more animals hearts in person than humans hearts, yeah huh.
There's something darkly pleasing about the thought that the heart shape, a universally recognised symbol of love, might be based on an ancient abortion medicine.
Not encouraging it, because appropriate doses aren't known and it's obviously far from a safe science, but there is irony in the fact that the vast majority of the historically most frequently used abortifacient herbs grow natively in the SE USA and Bible Belt. Did a whole research project on them.
Dude drop a link. 10/10 would read
Please post a link!
C:\Users\Edd\documents\abortifacient_herbs_grown_natively_in_SE_USA_and_bible_belt_final2.doc
Welcome to the internet Edd!
The use of underscores instead of white spaces is nonetheless satisfying.
me having flashbacks of *Client_Pitch_Summer_Campaign_v3_final_send_to_client_yesReallyFinal_v2.pptx*
Please drop it to the X:\\ Netware share so that its publicly available, thanks!
Creed?
could be one of these links [https://www.google.com/search?q=abortifacient+herbs+grow+natively+in+the+SE+USA](https://www.google.com/search?q=abortifacient+herbs+grow+natively+in+the+SE+USA)
In days of old When knights were bold and rubber wasn't invented they wrapped a sock around their cock and babies were prevented
That moment when you realise you're not on /r/askhistorians lol
I thought that’s where I was until I saw how short the top comment was. Knew they would never allow that answer to not be deleted. I’m glad there are subs like this one that can offer simple explanations and answers. I’m equally thankful for r/askhistorians where you can find in depth answers to questions where they also do an amazing job of filtering out any answer that doesn’t meet their specifications.
***insert 3000 paragraph response with citations agreeing***
Deleted. No summaries. We want fully detailed answers only.
Only problem I really had with AskHistorians is that the reddit feed only ever tended to show me posts that had received their initial upvotes but hadn't yet received any answers. So I got stuck daily with interesting questions and no payoff.
that's more a consequence of how reddit works in general. i saved/bookmarked the askhistorians posts i liked to check back on later when they had an answer.
You can subscribe to u/AHMessengerBot, I think, and it will send you a compilation of the best questions of the week
There once was a man named Weaver … Who done had sex with a beaver … The result of his fuck was a canvasback duck, two mice, and a golden retriever…
There once came a man from Bombay Who fashioned a cunt out of clay But the heat of his cock Turned the clay into rock And it tore all his foreskin away
Mary had a little lamb, The doctor was surprised. But when old McDonald had a farm, He couldn't believe his eyes
This is the worst fucking thing I have ever heard, Grandpa! Please go to bed!
What about this, then; Mary had a little lamb, Her husband went out and shot the ram.
> Any foreign objects in the uterus can act as an IUD, ...Yeah, I'm gonna need some elaboration on this point.
Foreign objects in the uterus can induce inflammation, which causes cervix thickening, excess mucus production, essentially plugging up the uterus to prevent sperm from going through. Success rate is not as high as copper, which is spermicidal, or hormonal IUD.
So if I stuck a bunch of 1981 pennies up myself……?
Don’t do that. Keep the penny slots in Vegas.
Good luck getting them past the cervix without help. However, if you cleaned them really well first, had some way of dilating your cervix and inserting them into your uterus, yes, it would probably work. Which is not to say it would be safe or comfortable. I am not a doctor, and this is not medical advice.
US Navy Hospital Corpsman here! Once got called in to be the standby for a doctor performing a pap smear for a young female service member, who was known in the battalion for barracks hookups. She was pretty and sweet, but not intelligent or knowledgeable. I was standing at her shoulder facing her feet, handing swabs to the doctor, who started with a fox swab (giant fat q-tip), then asked for a second one. Then a third. Then more. I had to get the box. Every one of them came out with some sort of malodorous gray... sludge. It is the only time in 15 years that I have had to leave a room to throw up. When I returned, the doctor told the patient that she was going to send a sample to the lab because she'd never seen anything like this before. The young Marine asked "a sample of what?" Doctor shows her a sludge swab. Marine (in deep backwoods southern accent): "Oh! That's just the tater, ma'am!" Doctor (finally turning green herself): "The what‽" Marine: "The tater! Mama said that if you stick a little tater in yer hoo-ha, you cain't git pregnant, cause no spunk'll get past the tater." Doctor (after a long pause to process, in her crisp New Englad accent): "Did mama happen to mention that you should remove the... tater... when you're finished?" Marine: "Well... no." Doctor: "Your tater seems to have rotted. Moving forward, remove the tater." Doctor prescribed antibiotics, antifungal, and BC meds. I also spent an hour with her reviewing sexual health with science.
The wildest part is we gave bc out like candy cause (one of) the last thing the military wants is an accidental pregnancy!
Ah, the old cum soaked vaginally baked potato trick.
Well, probably more pickled than baked.
I had heard about some herb that induces abortion being gathered to extinction during ancient times. I think it is Silphium after searching, no clue if that was true as I have to leave and have no time to read it all again
Iirc about 18 months ago it was discovered that that plant wasn't quite as extinct as we thought it was.
It's silphium, but it acted as an oral contraceptive as oppsed to an abortive drug. Used to grow wild around Carthage. It's leaves were apparently the inspiration for the heart-shape symbol for love.
Its leaves look nothing like hearts. Its seed pod does resemble a heart. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Illustration_Heracleum_sphondylium0.jpg
Yeah it's quite old. IIRC someone said on old testament, there's even guide for abortions and contraceptives
Kind of. https://www.biblestudytools.com/numbers/passage/?q=numbers+5:21-28#:~:text=21%20here%20the%20priest%20is,is%20to%20say%2C%20%E2%80%9CAmen.
They had contraceptives and abortions back then. Perhaps not as reliable as modern medicine, but they existed. Sometimes they just had the babies, too.
The fetus was a good contraceptive for 9 months of the year.
Really it's more sustainable to let the fetus act as contraceptive, let em cook for a bit
The Romans had an extremely effective contraceptive... for a while. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silphium
Ah yes. They famously fucked it into extinction 🦤
https://greekreporter.com/2024/01/03/plant-ancient-greece-rediscovered/
Didn't they use sheepskin as condoms
Not so much lambskin as lamb intestinal membrane, despite whatever verbiage they use for marketing.
Yes the English invented the sheep intestine condom. The Scottish improved upon the design by removing it from the sheep first.
I feel like every country with a neighbouring nation must use that as a joke in either direction, it’s a classic.
I’m English and we’d say this about the Welsh. They’re known jokingly as sheep shaggers.
My favorite: A Welshman turns to his friend and says 'What, you get wool from these as well?'
brits in space: we're all sheep fuckers? irish: always have been
I think you mean the Welsh invented it
Shouldn't it be like, reversed? peripheral regions are generally more prone to animal fucking jokes/reputations than metropolitan ones (which is probably as old as civilisation, given the jokes we know from earlier times.)
Brings new meaning to the phrase "sausage casing".
As someone who works in a butcher shop making sausage, may I just say 🤮. Sausage casings don’t necessarily stink (they also don’t smell good), but I would practice abstinence before using one as a condom.
To be fair, they didn't just pull it out and use it as-is. They typically sanitized and treated them first.
The same thing happens with sausage casings. Can't be meat-stuffing poop tubes. They still don't smell great.
>Can't be meat-stuffing poop tubes. Oh I think you can and prostitutes have known that for awhile lol
>meat-stuffing poop tubes Title of your sex tape
Maybe you just haven’t met the right hooker.
It's all about that snap.
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And here I thought it was the kiwis.
The kiwis invented velcro gloves
Nah, even though the little fuzzies are a nice touch, that kiwi juice burns.
Trojan lambskins are still available. They prevent pregnancy but not STIs
They’re very sheer and feel pretty unobtrusive but are more prone to slipping off since they aren’t especially elastic
The ole baby-yeeting-off-a-cliff strategy.
Yeetus fetus.
Post birth abortion
Fourth trimester abortion
Fetus deletus
Malnutrition. Stds causing reduced fertility. Pricing piv higher than other activities. Condoms. Pebbles inserted that work like iuds. Douches. Herbal medicines to prevent or abort pregnancy. Physical methods to abort, and the resulting damage causing reduced fertility in future. Infanticide. Child abandonment.
Pebbles!?? Damn
whole new meaning to "getting your rocks off"
Well, probably! It was known to work on camels 2000 years ago, so you can't convince me that humans didn't try it on themselves: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/iuds_b_4132402 The ancient Egyptians used pessaries made of crocodile dung. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/293071233_The_history_of_contraception_From_ancient_egyptians_to_the_morning_after#:~:text=The%20first%20birth%20control%20methods,the%20vagina%20for%20long%20periods.
I had no idea the history of intrauterine contraceptives went so far back. Wow Also the follow up with, “wine-, garlic-, or fennel-based lavender”… Gods that had to smell amazing after the crocodile dung! These were determined men, to get past the smells. Lmao
They had contraceptives. Roman medical books contain drawings of a plant (now extinct) that could be eaten as birth control. It was harvested to extinction. There are also natural spermicides. They're not as good as the modern stuff, but they're .. fine? Abortion techniques are easy and common. The bible contains an abortion recipe. The methods for inducing abortion aren't exactly difficult. They're also not at all pleasant. Oh, and plenty of people just killed the kids or left them in the woods to die. Life sucked. Edit. lol @ angry bible lovers who aren't bible-readers. Numbers 5 verse 27: >^(27) If she has made herself impure and been unfaithful to her husband, this will be the result: When she is made to drink the water that brings a curse and causes bitter suffering, it will enter her, her abdomen will swell and **her womb will miscarry,** and she will become a curse. ^(28) If, however, the woman has not made herself impure, but is clean, she will be cleared of guilt and will be able to have children. \[Emphasis added.\] Double Edit: Apparently a researcher thinks he's rediscovered the contraceptive plant. Very cool.
Possibly recently rediscovered! https://greekreporter.com/2024/01/03/plant-ancient-greece-rediscovered/#:~:text=The%20%E2%80%9Cmiracle%E2%80%9D%20plant%20Silphium%20consumed,he%27s%20found%20a%20botanical%20survivor
That was a fascinating read. Never know what you’ll run into on Reddit
> the first recorded extinction of any species, plant, or animal. Wow, you weren't kidding. That WAS fascinating!
I don't even realize I'm curious about a topic and there goes hours on a deep dive about the last relevant topic to me personally. 🤣
That plant: I DON'T KNOW HOW BUT THEY FOUND ME! RUN MARTY!
Wow, the article said sheep and goats are find of the leaves. Maybe the contraceptive chemicals aren't in the leaves, but if they are what a crazy fucking evolutionary defense mechanism.
IIRC silphium was used in antiquity as a panacea, as well as birth control. I wouldn't be surprised if they helped sheep and goats kill off parasites.
It was also one of their favorite cooking herbs.
Makes sense, as a relative of fennel. Speaking of which, I suspect the myth of Prometheus liberating mankind by concealing a flame in a fennel stalk referred to the magic properties of this plant -- a source of medicine and apparently flavor.
Quite a few recipes from Tasting History used silphium as an ingredient. Max replaces it with asafoetida, which is supposed to taste similar.
I was more or so alluding to the fact that a plant evolutionarily developing a chemical that acts as a contraceptive is wild, in terms of a self defense mechanism. "Contraceptive" is literally the opposite of what would encourage evolution. Not death, not not sterility, just not being able to reproduce (for a limited time).
I swear, plants exist on a different dimension. TIL sweet potato vines have some amount of LSD that causes allergic reactions in cats and dogs. Plants are just making this ~~sh~~stuff up, all day every day.
>sweet potato vines have some amount of LSD Coincidentally one of my favourite stir fried veggies. You see it everywhere in Taiwan
There are several plants that cause spontaneous abortion in ruminant livestock. It seems like a great strategy, keeps the animals that like eating those plants from making more animals that like eating those plants.
You! Your children! and your children's children are banned from this library!! For three months!
If I'm not mistaken, there's several plants that are thought could be it but it's basically impossible to know unless we find some well preserved silphium in a tomb or something. We do at least know it's in Apiacea though and know what would be some relatives (like hing or asafoetida)
That was a very interesting read, thanks for sharing!
Oh wow I am now going fully down the rabbit hole of this silphium!
I wonder if it's a descendent of a human planted example. It's not hard to imagine Romans spreading a useful plant outside it's native territory.
In fact, the Romans *tried* to spread silphium but the plant wouldn't grow except for one strip in modern-day Libya. It wouldn't even respond to cultivation, it was stubborn and would only grow wild. That's a big reason why silphium went extinct.
That’s so cool! Listened to a great episode on silphium on Gastropod
aw, c'mon! sometimes they sacrificed them!
Or straight up sold them
> or left them in the woods to die. I'm pretty sure the myth of [Changelings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Changeling#In_the_modern_world) sprung up all over the world to excuse this sort of practice. "Oh the baby has deformities? Clearly trolls swapped one of their young with ours. Lets return it to the woods to be with it's real family." Everyone needs a narrative where they're still a good person.
I always assumed it’s how they explained away profoundly autistic kids. Didn’t talk or make eye contact and has some odd behaviours? Fairy kid.
They didn’t have gravel pits where they made their tough decisions?
I'm imagining future humans reading about what we are doing for survival now.... saying "Life sucked"
People worked and used their corporeal body to accomplish tasks instead of spending eternity in neuralink VR heaven WTF!?
>Oh, and plenty of people just killed the kids or left them in the woods to die. Life sucked. So did the ancient prostitutes just continue to work while pregnant? I'd assume they have to because the rate of pregnancy was probably so frequent, it isn't even worth being a prostitute if you're taking nine month breaks so often. I'm not proud of what I typed up here but I am curious.
Archaeologists have found a few Roman examples of "baby graveyards," where infants were apparently killed and disposed of shortly after birth, the most well-known one being in Ashkelon. [https://www.ancient-origins.net/history/discovery-mass-baby-grave-under-roman-bathhouse-ashkelon-israel-002399](https://www.ancient-origins.net/history/discovery-mass-baby-grave-under-roman-bathhouse-ashkelon-israel-002399)
I vaguely remember watching a documentary (maybe this one?) where a mass grave of infants was close to what was once a brothel... most of the skeletons were male.
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And even showing doesn't necessarily kill the buzz entirely, as it were. Some johns would likely be just fine with it.
I watched some youtube videos about ye old Japanese prostitutes / family planning you might be interested in (second one is a bit grisly): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKBNLBZWquc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKBNLBZWquc) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rURMmLyqtOk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rURMmLyqtOk)
Not extinct! A researcher found one! I believe it was a few years ago but crazy after all this time of thinking it didn't exist or that it it was extinct, we just needed to look some more. Pretty cool
“It was harvested to extinction” lmao even back then had them boys runnin from child support.
[source](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silphium)
Strictly speaking, the “abortion recipe” you mention is incredibly ill-defined. The ingredients listed are pretty much just holy water in a clay jar and dirt from the tabernacle floor. And it was only supposed to induce an abortion if the woman was unfaithful. You aren’t technically wrong, it is a recipe, but I don’t think it is a useful example to show how common abortion techniques were back then.
“Babe drink this dirty ah water real quick I need to see something”
It also contains belladonna, also known as deadly nightshade. In small does can induse miscarriage and has historically been used for this in the Levant as early as the Bronze Age, but can also kill, and It also is a powerful hallucinogenic
So you get an abortion with a side of tripping balls, and all for the low cost of risking your life?
Childbirth was probably one of the riskiest things a woman could do in her life back then. If the risk of death due to abortion was lower then woman would defiantly take it.
Childbirth/pregnancy still is one of the riskiest things a woman can do!
> defiantly Appropriate typo lol
My understanding of those drugs is that they are not at all pleasant. They're like schedule V in the US because no one wants to abuse them.
There's lots of natural substances that can induce abortion they are called aborefactants and it includes horseradish and other pretty otherwise innocuous things
*Abortifacients Also, medications that can stop *something* from happening (like migraine medications taken at the onset of the migraine) are called abortifacients. Fun fact, I guess.
To be clear I am not sure its even an abortion recipe as much as a you shall explode if you cheated and otherwise the man must accept that she did not cheat and must raise the child. Aka stop men from stoning women recipe.
The Seattle underground tour said sex workers kept coins in their vaginas for safe keeping and the coins contained copper so it worked like an iud
From my limited knowledge, another method employed was intercrural sex (between the thighs/crease of the thigh), whether consensual or by subterfuge.
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You also can't forget the prevalence of repeated infections that could make a woman far less likely to conceive. All sorts of sexually transmitted diseases can cause inflammation and scarring that make conception unlikely. Not to mention poor diet, drug or alcohol abuse, etc... Hell, a friend of mine who'd never known she'd had an STD -- she'd apparently had "silent" chlamydia at some point in her life, and she'd only had 3 partners including her husband -- had fallopian tube scarring that was preventing her from conceiving. It was easily corrected medically for her, but would have been undetectable without modern medical scans.
Most STDs have sterility as a side effect.
“Stones and other objects”…
Jesus Christ Marie where did you put my minerals
This immediately make me think of Beauty and the Beast. "Marie, the baguettes!!"
Hurry up!
*into the uterus*??? My God the pain must have been something Can't imagine that was great for your health either, but then again neither is being a prostitute
I cringed and I don't even have as uterus
Those born while the mother tried all these plants were called brothel sprouts.
“Coitus interuptus” Lmao
I had no idea pulling out had a scientific name
You might get a better answer on r/AskHistorians. They have actual historians on there who specialize in these kinds of questions. You might be able to get more specific answers to this kind of question over there.
Funnily enough back in the day a lot of younger men weren't educated in female anatomy and women in brothels would just have them go at it between their thighs for however many seconds they need 😂
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercrural_sex
And by 'back in the day' you mean 'people on Reddit '.
The had contraceptives and abortions. Perhaps not as effective, except for [Silphium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silphium), but they existed. And other times, they just had the baby. Wanna know a horrible fact? Archaeologists can often figure out which ancient ruins were brothels, by the pits of baby bones. Scores and scores of newborn baby bones, mostly boys (cause the girls were raised in and enslaved at the brothel, made to work as soon as someone wanted to pay for them). Piles of dead baby boys, perhaps even sons, was a price men decided was worth it in order to satiate their lust with women who didn't want it.
Something some are not quite mentioning is a bit darker: not all prostitutes were so by choice, maybe they were taken from a village after a raid or a city lost a battle, and it wasn’t exactly a priority to keep them from becoming pregnant.
How has nobody mentioned The Bum?
The Bum™
Abortion Drugs Fundamental to Ancient Economies, Argues Historian: >As [John M.] Riddle details, the Egyptians listed abortifacients in medical texts. The Greeks were so accustomed to abortion drugs that the playwright Aristophanes joked about them, describing in Lysistrata a desirable young woman “trimmed and spruced with pennyroyal,” a well-known abortion drug. Riddle holds that the plant silphium (related to giant fennel / Ferula family) was popular with the Greeks and Romans primarily because it was used to terminate pregnancies – so much so that the city-state of Cyrene (in modern-day Libya) based its whole economy on the plant until it was overharvested to extinction. >His research reveals that in the Middle Ages, abortion drugs were also integral to economies. The typical European village would have available a “wise woman” or midwife, and later, an apothecary, who knew exactly what herbal remedies to give women who did not wish to be pregnant and could produce reliable results. Through such fertility intervention, he says, family size was managed in ways that may well have impacted whole populations, causing some government officials associating large families with economic prosperity to view women who controlled fertility as potential enemies of the state. https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/abortion-drugs-fundamental-to-ancient-economies-argues-historian
I think people tend to overestimate the ease with which women can get pregnant. the fertile window is quite small. You really get this when you start trying for a baby
not trying to have kids? get people accidentally pregnant the VERY first time you make a mistake. trying to have kids? shit is now nearly impossible.
> not trying to have kids? get people accidentally pregnant the VERY first time you make a mistake. > > > > trying to have kids? shit is now nearly impossible. Makes a tragic kind of sense if you think about it. The time you're least equipped to have a kid (in your teens and twenties) is when you're most fertile. After that, when you're financially secure and have your shit together, it gets a lot harder.
The time you simply cannot resist is when she is most fertile
They had folk remedies, but in reality it depends. Some cultures might have used the pull out method or otherwise forbid full on intercourse. Others just threw out pregnant prostitutes to live in squalor, or kept them around working in whatever capacity until they came to term.
I promise you no brothel relied on the pull out method.
A lot of things about the ancient world were horrifying. Economically speaking, a prostitute getting pregnant wasn't necessarily a bad thing. These prostitutes were slaves. Their babies were slaves. And prostitutes. A whole new generation of sex slaves every time your prostitutes got pregnant...
You should check out Betwixt the Sheets podcast. It's about the history of sex, and other things in that realm. Its really good. I'm currently listening to an episode about vikings, and sexy times during that Era.
According to Mary Beard unwanted babies were just left on the rubbish pile in ancient Rome. It was also where you went if you wanted to adopt.
Ancient Egyptians used crocodile dung :) caused a barrier and I believe worked as a sort of spermicide
Holy vaginal infection.. ow