Tightening restrictions around abortion

It's a scary time to be a person who can get pregnant in the United States. At the state level, legislatures are pushing through increasingly restrictive abortion bans, including one in Iowa that would make abortions illegal so early that most people don't even realize they're pregnant, and one in Ohio that not only prohibits all abortions under all circumstances, but could punish them with life in prison or even the death penalty.

Meanwhile, at the national level, a proposed domestic "gag rule" would deny Title X funding — which supports clinics that serve low-income populations — to any health care facility that so much as mentions abortion or tells patients where they can get one. That would make reproductive health care in general even harder to get. And yet the Department of Health and Human Services, which is supposed to promote science-based best practices for health, is pushing health care providers to recommend abstinence and unreliable "fertility awareness" instead of more effective birth control methods for women who don't want to get pregnant in the first place.

It's almost as if they just don't want women to have bodies at all.

But we do. And expecting us to remain celibate our entire lives unless and until we want to be a parent isn't reasonable or even possible — so it's good to know about our options, and DIY abortion is one of them. You can get accurate, up-to-date information about safe self-managed abortion with pills at abortionpillinfo.org.