Grow Abortion Power: Herbal Abortifacients and Abortion Storytelling

When writers use the names of specific herbal abortifacients in fiction, they conjure an imaginary in which abortion could be accessible and possible across genres, worlds, and time.  Likewise, when activist organizations use the images of specific herbal abortifacients, they invoke the history of herbal abortifacients used in defiance of unjust laws and practices. Yet these representations exist in a kind of tension with the actual practice of herbal abortion, which remains stuck in an uneasy legal limbo that Roe did not solve and Dobbs further obscures.

For centuries, herbal medicinal remedies administered by a midwife or healer were the primary method of abortion. When abortion was first criminalized in the United States in the late nineteenth century, herbal remedies were an important part of everyday life, and the Victorian "language of flowers" was a popular method of communicating that used plants as code for various meanings.1 This "language of flowers" has worked historically as a vocabulary for communicating about abortion, as the names of specific plants that induce abortion such as pennyroyal, tansy, motherwort, mugwort, cotton root bark, among others, stand in metonymically for the medical procedure.

These specific plant names offer flexible signifiers with which to refer to abortion as they also critique essentialist metaphorical connections between femininity, reproduction, and the natural world. Not incidentally, this rhetorical usage of plant names also calls into question the colonialist underpinnings of botanical collection, extraction, and exploitation. Despite and sometimes because of the legal threats to communicating about abortion, representations of herbal abortifacients as signifiers in both fiction and activist materials have evolved across environments and time while working alongside and adjacent to the absence of herbal abortion stories in mainstream activist abortion storytelling.2 While practitioners of herbal medicine continue to develop and hone their expertise in our present moment, the symbolic importance of the plants themselves obscures the historical context in which these plants are grown, cultivated, and harvested.

The language of abortifacient flowers remained legible in American fiction and the American marketplace well into the twentieth century as both a literary device and a marketing tool. For example, the pharmaceutical company Chichester's marketed its "Pennyroyal Pills" which offered "relief for ladies" in advertisements that coupled the plant name of noted abortifacient pennyroyal with a euphemism for reproductive medicinal care.3 Likewise, the "botanically specific" poet Edna St. Vincent Millay names the known abortifacient tansy in a 1921 poem published in the year between her two known abortions in 1920 and 1922.4 Millay's second abortion was an herbal abortion, managed with the help of her mother, who was trained as a nurse, and a copy of Culpeper's Herbal.5 By invoking the plant name in her poem, Millay offers a popular, canonical example of the widespread deployment of abortifacients as part of the "language of flowers." This "language" appears consistently throughout the American abortion storytelling imaginary.

Part of the reason why the "language of flowers" became such a popular technique for referring to abortion is due to the fact that abortion as a practice and a topic in print was criminalized by the same legislation, the Comstock Act of 1873. This legislation's focus on abortion as a practice and a subject reveals the degree to which knowledge production and circulation about abortion was viewed as a threat by conservative politicians and medical institutions invested in cornering profit margins. The goal of censorship legislation — then and now — is to foster shame, stigmas, and taboos, as Stephanie Peebles Tavera and others observe.  Writers and other cultural producers have navigated these constraints from 1873 well into the present, often by inventing coded language to refer to practices that became dangerous to discuss more openly.6

The Comstock Act has found renewed favor in the post-Dobbs moment with anti-abortion legislators seeking to further curb access to medication abortion and information about abortion in general, which is concerning and frightening on multiple fronts.7 It is significant that the Comstock Act's increasing relevance coincides also with a resurgence of interest in the narrative and visual trope of the herbal abortifacient. Given the Comstock Act's dual criminalization of abortion as both subject and practice, activists and authors alike are returning to the herbal abortifacient as a symbol of abortion and reproductive freedom. Reading herbal abortifacients as code requires approaching narrative and visual signifiers as a project of speculation, understanding how herbal abortifacients challenge us to recognize the encroachment of the threat of censorship's past while simultaneously pushing us to imagine worlds in which abortion is accessible via either herbal or other means.8

As the language of herbal abortifacients bloomed in pharmaceutical advertisements post-Comstock Act, so did fiction published in the context of various attempts to legislate reproductive rights engage plant knowledge for the purposes of abortion storytelling. Ntozake Shange's novel Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo is an important milestone in the post-Roe, pre-Casey publishing landscape, as it depicts the practice of midwifery and herbal medicine in the context of the home. Indigo's process of gaining knowledge and becoming a practitioner offers a model of activist potential, as recognized by Alexis Pauline Gumbs's theorization of "Indigo subjectivity." Named for Shange's character, Gumbs's formulation of "Indigo subjectivity" describes an approach to Black feminist praxis:

That Gumbs names her practice for Shange's character speaks to the facets of healing that Gumbs prioritizes, given Indigo's focus on recording recipes, cures, and herbal care for the people she loves. Gumbs locates Indigo's power in her ability to "materializ[e] a reality,"  transcending place and time in her attention to her living loved ones and her awareness of her ancestors' histories.

Shange's novel begins from the perspective of Indigo, the youngest of the three titular sisters, as a child. Shange's depiction of Indigo's knowledge relies on an accurate representation of the plants and herbs of the American South. Gumbs foregrounds how Indigo as a character is invested with "the power to heal," a power learned from Aunt Haydee, a practicing midwife.10 Gumbs pays particular attention to how Shange describes Indigo's knowledge of plant medicines and her ability to communicate with ancestral spirits, evidenced in Indigo's dolls:

Shange endows Indigo with an impressive knowledge of herbal remedies and medicines, not just those that control fertility, but also those plants that bring comfort and heal aches and pains.

Shange calls attention to the colonial and racist legacies of sexual violence while also depicting, through Indigo's handiwork, evidence of the continued circulation of herbal knowledge. Indigo knows not only the names and uses of the plants, but also the historical contexts in which these plants were used, which suggests that she has been given a comprehensive education on these plant knowledges that is circulated intergenerationally. As Anissa Wardi notes, the "'make believe' world that Indigo and her dolls occupy is a metaphor for ancestral epistemology."12 Shange's third-person narration and Indigo's family members refer to Indigo as being born with "the South in her," even as Indigo's name refers to a plant deeply connected to the transatlantic slave trade.13 Through her name and her body, Indigo maps a geography that is both earthly and regional to the plants available in the American South.14

Indigo understands the importance of herbal knowledge. Her dolls are created with plant materials that speak to and attempt to heal each doll's associated historical trauma. Indigo knows of the horrors of the slave episteme, but she is armed with remedies to guard against potential harm.15 The knowledge of these remedies cannot cure state-sanctioned violence, but it does enable Indigo to work towards healing. By the close of the novel, Indigo uses her skills as a midwife to aid in the birth of her sister's child. The novel doesn't say explicitly how Indigo learns about the specific plants she uses to create her dolls, but it suggests that she learns her midwifery practice from Aunt Haydee, and that her relationship to another woman, Sister Mary Louise, is rooted in her "garden of rose bushes and herbs."16

As Indigo listens to and learns from the elder Black women around her, she also records recipes in the text itself, recipes that bear names like "Moon Journeys, cartography by Indigo" and "Marvelous Menstruating Moments (As Told by Indigo to Her Dolls as She Made Each and Every One of Them a Personal Menstruation Pad of Velvet)."17 Shange demonstrates through implication (in terms of Indigo's plant-made dolls) or explicit plot detail (in regards to Indigo's midwifery training) that Indigo gains her knowledge from her elders, and that she then records this knowledge to make her practice knowable and legible, presumably to those who succeed her. Specifically, Indigo represents some of her recipes, her directions, as "cartographies," indicating that her work is invested in making sense of the environments — botanical and structural — around her.18

In Gumbs' outline of "Indigo Subjectivity," she foregrounds Indigo's capacity as a healer, her "blues ethic," and her unique offerings of recipes and self-healing rituals to the reader. Indigo serves as a powerful fictional model of manifesting community and healing, as Gumbs details the community activities and "Indigo manifestations" that she has organized in Indigo's name and spirit. Gumbs invokes Indigo as a fictional character to link models of reproductive justice rooted in herbal medicine — used both to end pregnancies, like cotton root bark, and to encourage healthy and safe births of children in midwifery practices — with the potential to effect material, physical change in the world. Indigo's actions and recipes offer Gumbs a story that serves as a model for Black feminist praxis and reproductive justice action. Indigo's knowledge moves beyond the page, as Gumbs uses Indigo as a touchpoint in her own lessons and community work. Shange's novel, then, becomes a precursor for the kind of fictional and activist work to follow in the next decades as abortion restrictions increased. And Shange's novel is but one of many that offer fictional representations of herbal medicinal knowledge production, representations that work in parallel to those that circulate visually in activist organizing materials.

Herbal abortions have not figured prominently in the abortion stories that contemporary activists tell, but abortion storytelling organizations have turned recently to herbal abortifacient imagery in their graphics and merchandise. This imagery clearly recalls the history of herbal abortifacients as a traditional method of managing and self-managing abortion, and it also recalls the use of the "language of flowers" as code to depict abortion in the wake of censorship legislation. This summer, the activist organization We Testify released its latest merchandise collaboration with the Outrage. The "Abortion Any Time Any Reason Anywhere" t-shirt features the attendant slogan on the front of the shirt, while the back of the shirt features six illustrated sketches of herbal abortifacients including peacock flower, chamomile, Queen Anne's lace, juniper, dittany, and anis. These plants, named in history of science scholarship including Londa Schiebinger's Plants and Empire and John Riddle's Eve's Herbs, offer a global bouquet of herbal abortion history. The peacock flower, native to the Caribbean, is discussed at length in Schiebinger's classic text.

The shirt is described as featuring "abortifacients: plants and herbs that have been used for centuries to self-manage abortions." We Testify's embrace of the history and imagery of herbal abortifacients shows how herbal abortifacients have evolved into newly prominent signifiers for activist abortion storytelling post-Dobbs. It is compelling that herbal abortifacients' most consistent role in this present moment is as a visual signifier, though We Testify does the important work of naming each plant instead of leaving the identities of these plants open to speculation or inference.

The very presence of some of these herbal abortifacients in the United States speaks to the role of colonialism and white supremacy in forming our current world, and these plants' stories can help to communicate the interconnected fights for reproductive and racial justice. Just as Shange's novel references the global routes of the plants that make up Indigo's dolls, the very inclusion of a global bouquet of herbal abortifacients on We Testify's shirt invokes a global critique of colonial botany and exploitation, gesturing towards an international solidarity for abortion rights.

Pennyroyal's signature purple blooms as well as yellow sprays of rue and yellow bulbs of tansy are among the plants included in the marketing campaign for Liberate Abortion, "an effort comprised of more than 150 reproductive justice and rights organizations, groups, and abortion providers working in coalition to fight for abortion that is available, affordable, accessible, and stigma-free for anyone who needs it."19 The various taglines that Liberate Abortion uses in its freely available graphics include phrases that appear frequently in the fight for reproductive freedom, but they also feature the phrase "Grow Abortion Power." This invocation of the natural world in the fight for abortion rights gains specificity with the inclusion of recognizable abortifacients.

That specificity underscores the organization's awareness of the history of abortion as a practice rooted in herbal medicine as well as the popular interest in herbal medicinal recipes and herbal abortion. Yet to an observer who cannot identify the specific plants pictured in the graphics, Liberate Abortion could appear to be using any array of plants. Liberate Abortion does not include any explanation or index of the plants used in its graphics — the ability to identify these plants by their appearance is required to understand their signification as abortifacients. In this way, Liberate Abortion invites those interested in the fight for abortion rights to learn more about the plants central to the long history of abortion rights by presenting a number of herbal abortifacients in their graphics and allowing curious observers to do the work of discovering just which plants are represented and why.

While we can read Liberate Abortion's inclusion of herbal abortifacients in this pedagogical vein, a more paranoid reading of the advertisements is possible, too. In this time of crisis for abortion access, Liberate Abortion might not want to include the names of specific herbal abortifacients. A national umbrella organization fighting for abortion access could invite legal liabilities or at least confusion in desperate moments by giving basic instructions for herbal abortions on its t-shirts. This concern extends a history where the practice of herbal abortion "exist[s] at the unfortunate intersection of social stigma and criminalization," as noted by a collective of American herbalists writing about herbal abortion post-Dobbs.20 Without the proper support and knowledge, herbal abortion can be toxic and deadly, as herbal abortifacients prepared incorrectly can become poison. Given the chaos, desperation, and uncertainty in the wake of the Dobbs decision, there persists a real fear that pregnant people could turn to herbal abortions without the proper knowledge and support and accidentally harm themselves.

 Such fears were covered in the mainstream press, including The New York Times' report on trending TikTok videos that named various herbal abortifacients.21 Interestingly, by referring to these plants — #pennyroyaltea, #mugwort — by name, the trends and videos mentioned in this press coverage echo the nineteenth-century advertisements that used plant names to code the nature of their products. Nineteenth-century advertisers sought to sell a product to make a profit, while present-day TikTokers seem to name herbal abortifacients to either offer well-meaning but perhaps incomplete alternatives to criminalized abortion as well as to gesture towards the long history of plants and herbs as tools of domestic medicine. While it remains a fact that herbal abortifacients can become poison if used or dosed incorrectly, these TikTok videos attempt to participate also in a centuries-long tradition of circulating knowledge about abortion and herbal medicine. That they are doing so imperfectly is also in keeping with the long history of abortion storytelling, as demonstrated by the way this cluster contends with any set or stable ideal of abortion storytelling.

The role of herbal abortion stories is complicated in the present, post-Dobbs moment, as evidenced by the seemingly mixed success of engaging with herbal abortifacients. They appear on the one hand as celebrated imagery in activist organizations' marketing materials and on the other as examples of reckless misinformation campaigns flagged by the mainstream media for ignoring possible dangers of misusing herbal abortifacients, as represented by the Times coverage. Writing for the Journal of the American Herbalists Guild, a collective of herbalists connected the stigma and fear of herbal abortions in the United States to the lack of "support and knowledge as to safe and effective practices" and "continued criminalization of non-clinical abortions in the United States."22 These authors describe the continued stigma and fear as frustrating given "the global practice of herbal abortion [and] its larger context in society."23 The authors also note that in the wake of Dobbs, "sweeping statements by herbalists . . . members of mainstream media . . . along with social media platforms . . . have perpetuated stigma and fear of herbal abortions," though the perpetuation of stigmas and fears seem to derive in part from a deficit of good, accessible, and reliable education about the history, risks, and correct preparations of herbal abortion.

What I find interesting about the tension between the Times piece in conversation with the herbalists' attempts to counter stigma is the question it raises for activists about the best ways to read and deploy herbal abortifacient imagery. How do we learn to assess or trust the information that circulates to us via code, wink, hint, or obfuscation? And alternatively, how do commentators, critics, journalists, and writers balance their responsibilities to tell abortion stories with trust for their audience? I am not advocating for misinformation or the desperate consumption of plants without knowledge of proper preparation or deep study — I am not a student of medicine, but a student of literature, and this essay is not a compilation of medical advice but the consideration of a pattern across time and texts.

Abortion stories demand trust — the storyteller's trust (or hope, expectation, demand) that their story be taken at their word. We trust Indigo when we read of her care for her dolls — we trust the knowledge she gains from Aunt Haydee, and the skill she acquires as she hones her craft of midwifery. We learn of her careful study and we trust that Indigo can care for her sister as she gives birth just as we trust that she used herbal abortifacients to make her dolls with the full knowledge of how and why the doll needed these plants. We trust Gumbs's invocation of Indigo's spirit as she imagines and deploys a Black feminist praxis to build community spaces and work towards a more just world. Similarly, the audience trusts the storyteller's depiction of events — as with any story, for the audience to read an abortion story from a place of paranoia, bad faith, or judgment would be to undermine the trust of the storytelling exchange.

The legal scholars Michelle Goodwin and Mary Zeigler note that  "abortion access has everything to do with access to information."24 In the post-Dobbs context of "zombie" Comstock Laws and renewed attempts to gag, censor, or otherwise limit the amount of information regarding abortion and reproductive health made available to patients and the public alike, herbal abortifacients serve as a symbol of reclaimed knowledge and an example of the ways in which Roe was never enough.25 Herbal abortifacients continue to operate in the activist and literary imaginations amidst the new reality in which abortion is once again a crime in some parts of America. The Times coverage is not wrong to identify the danger in consuming plants without knowledge about them — few of us have been taught to identify plants, let alone prepare these plants into remedies safe for consumption. As the potency of the herbal abortifacient as a symbol reaches a new height — from its continued reference in literature and its use in marketing imagery for reproductive freedom organizations to the widespread circulation of all kinds of information about it on the internet — the majority of the American public remains ignorant of the plant knowledge necessary to handle these plants safely. In this way, herbal abortifacients in the United States serve primarily as a symbol in image or in fiction. These symbols of resistance have become to some degree disassociated from their original utility, even as the power of these plants as symbols of resistance depends on a long and storied history of their practical use. 

---

Acknowledgments: This essay grows from my recently completed dissertation, and I would like to share my deepest thanks to those who helped me steward these ideas through the dissertation process, especially my co-advisors Christina Walter and Martha Nell Smith. Many thanks to Anissa Wardi for introducing me to Ntozake Shange's fiction as an undergraduate. This essay in the context of this cluster would not exist without the tireless work of two exceptional co-editors, Jena DiMaggio and Margaret Ronda, to whom I am endlessly grateful; likewise, many, many thanks to Gloria Fisk and Tyler A. Tennant of Post45 Contemporaries for your generosity, patience, and enthusiasm for this cluster.

---

Jeannette Schollaert recently graduated with her PhD in English from the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research explores herbal abortion stories and plant knowledge in American fiction to foreground the interconnections between reproductive justice and the environmental humanities. Her writing appears in The Palgrave Handbook of Reproductive Justice and Literature (2022), the Plant Humanities Lab, and the Dickinson Electronic Archives. Currently, she is the Project Manager of the Mellon-funded "Poetry as Activism" project at the University of Delaware Library, Museums and Press. More at https://www.jschollaert.com/.

---

References