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Many doctors and abortion-rights groups consider her message irresponsible and menstrual extraction far too risky to contemplate. They stress the danger of infection, sterility or even deadly sepsis in the event of a puncture in the uterus. If menstrual extraction is attempted more than six weeks after a woman's last period, it can also lead to severe complications, including cramps, bleeding and blood clots.
Downer's critics also fear that poor women and teenagers -- the ones most likely to have trouble getting to states where abortion is legal -- are the ones least likely to master the procedures for performing an abortion safely. It is small comfort that hospital emergency rooms would be obliged to treat any woman who developed complications. "Abortion is minor surgery," says , Barbara Radford, the head of the National Abortion Federation, an association of abortion providers. "But you need backup, you need proper equipment, you need proper medication."
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. But the very fact that it's under discussion once more is a sign of the ways in which America is bracing itself for a partial return to the past. In the two decades since Roe was handed down, a generation has grown up that knows nothing of the days of illicit abortions conducted on kitchen tables, or in doctor's offices at night with the blinds drawn.
For the same two decades, while pro-lifers have waved pictures of the developing fetus, there were no more new images of women victimized by illegal abortions. In the years to come, those pictures, and the desolate realities they represent, are sure to reappear. It was harsh experience that led to the climate of opinion that welcomed Roe. Will it take harsh experience again to sort out the national will on abortion once and for all?