Following the wake of an abortion ban in South Dakota, a woman has posted an abortion manual online for women, including various methodologies for performing the procedure at home or at any sterile clinical environment.

They were deceived — much like you have probably been deceived. An abortion, especially for an early pregnancy, is a relatively easy procedure to perform. And while I know, women of South Dakota, that you never asked for this, now is the time to learn how it is done. There is no reason you should be beholden to doctors — especially in a state where doctors have been refusing to perform them, forcing the state’s only abortion clinic to fly doctors in from elsewhere.

Boy, does this have lawsuit written all over it. What an interesting tact to take. We can’t get abortions legally in this state, so instead, I’ll tell you how to perform one, since it requires little, if any, medical training, and is safer than actual pregnancy (according to some vague, non-cited statistic from the 1960′s). Let’s dissect this a bit, shall we?
As I understand it, abortion advocates claim that if abortion is outlawed, women will turn to “back-alley” procedures which endanger their lives due to unsafe and unsanitary conditions, increasing the chances of toxic shock, vaginal infections, excessive bleeding, etc. Now, just so you know, the inflated numbers used by abortion advocates to prove this was the case pre-Roe have been debunked, which makes publication (even on the Internet) of the manual and the author’s reasons for doing so somewhat spurious.
But imagine, if you will, the author’s good intention of writing a self-help abortion manual because she cares deeply about the rights of women to know about and have easy access to procedures that directly affect their rights as women.

DISCLAIMER: I am posting this as information only. Whether anyone chooses to act upon this information is their own concern. I believe in the free exchange of information and ideas. I believe this information has been kept from women for too long, and there is no reason they should not know about a procedure being performed on their own body, and no reason women should be kept in the dark about how to perform it — especially if someone they know is having their health jeopardized by this law.

This is apparently intended to be a panacea for any wrongful death lawsuits that result from a teenage girl reading this and taking matters into her own hands. But I wonder, if a woman having surgery for a cancerous tumor would demand to know specific details about the procedure being performed on her. What makes abortion, as a medical procedure, different from any other that it doesn’t require a medical license to perform? Does having someone scrape placenta from your uterine walls somehow make them a skilled medical technician or surgeon? I simply have trouble imagining how women can think an abortion self-help guide is any better than visiting a back alley doctor with rusty instruments and an old Hoover vacuum.

The first step is to break the membrane holding the fetus inside. You can feel around with the forceps for it. To get an idea of what each part looks like — and to see the texture so that you understand better how it will feel — I recommend looking at books with photographs of first trimester fetuses (personal recommendation for its astonishing photographs: A Child is Born).

I think the author misses the irony of using a book about children being born to aid in performing an abortion. Or perhaps not.

Save the material until the end of the procedure on a piece of plastic, so that you can be sure the entire fetus has been removed. If doing this sounds too ethically challenging, remember that fetuses do not have the capacity to feel actual pain until the third trimester. You are not “hurting” it, and it has no awareness, nor the capacity for awareness, that you are extracting it.

This is, in fact, a total fabrication. Fetal tests indicate that at eight weeks, fetuses are capable of responses to external stimuli, including pain, sunlight, touch, even sound. Whatever manner professional abortionists perform their procedures, it would be a safe bet to assume that anything done in an illegal clinic or house would be equally, if not more painful to the fetus. The unprofessional status of the operation, and the manual’s blatant disregard for the facts, indicates that the abortionist is in no way qualified to perform such a procedure. If the abortionist is aware of the facts regarding fetal pain, it in no way ameliorates his or her responsibility toward both the woman and her unborn child. After all, according to the manual, HONESTY is vitally important to the health of the patient.