menstrual extraction

A 1972 article in Time noted that the procedure, then referred to as “menstrual extraction,” was “becoming medically respectable.”

Carol Downer, director of the Federation of Feminist Women's Health Centers, based in Los Angeles, travels widely to talk to women's groups about "menstrual extraction," a home-abortion procedure she co-developed in the early 1970s.

Downer insists that women without medical training can learn to perform menstrual extraction on other women safely.

Many doctors and abortion-rights groups consider her message irresponsible and menstrual extraction far too risky to contemplate.

So long as women can get to any state where abortion is legal, menstrual extraction is unlikely to become a real alternative to physician-provided abortions.