Self-managed abortion (SMA) emerges from new technologies while building on previous feminist strategies to enable women to safely end pregnancies outside the medical system. The most direct predecessor to 21st century SMA was the Jane Collective in Chicago, a direct-action group that formed in the late 1960s to provide abortions to any woman who needed one, and which continued its work until the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. Jane initially connected women to a man who claimed to be a doctor, but when they found out he wasn’t one they quickly learned how to do it themselves and began to operate their own abortion service out of a series of Chicago apartments. In a 21st century parallel, a group of feminists in Mexico brought women to a local gynaecologist but over time, by listening to the doctor’s instructions, they learned how to safely do a medication abortion. (…)

In the early 1970s, there was no safe, reliable, easily taught method through which a woman could directly abort her own pregnancy, but towards the end of the 20th century, new medications opened up fundamentally new possibilities. The standard medical protocol for medication abortion involves two drugs, mifepristone and misoprostol.