r/HerbalMagic

TW: abortion

I need advice on what is the most natural / least harmful / least toxic abortion option esp. as I am still breast-feeding a 1.5 year old (who also eats solids but has breastmilk every 2-4 hours and overnight to comfort back to sleep). I don’t want to be talked out of this. I am already devastated that I need to do this, I cannot take more guilt, judgment, preaching, criticism, etc. I’m hard enough on myself about it.

I only now need to decide which is the most natural / least harmful of the following two abortion options available to me:

Option 1: medical abortion at home, where you take mifepristone and 24 to 48 hours later you take misoprostol and you basically bleed out the baby.

Option 2: in office option where you have to take antibiotics, pain medications, anti-anxiety relaxants like Ativan / lorexopan, then they put lidocaine on your cervix and put a tool through through, and suction all the tissue out.

The first one felt like a more natural option because women report that it feels more like a natural miscarriage and I don’t want anyone probing through my body and I certainly don’t want to take antibiotics that in the past messed up my microbiome, and most likely led to a very serious digestive issue which I suffered from for several years.

But these two pills may be disastrous and too systemic /unsafe for my nursing baby. Is there 100% proven evidence that this will not negatively harm my 1.5 year old who I am still breast-feeding? Of course the conventional medical system never wants to commit to that. Risk is on you!

I asked what type of antibiotic is given and at what dosage but I haven’t heard back yet. I asked if I can take natural antibiotics and apparently there is no flexibility on this.

I will only be about 6 weeks pregnant during the procedure so it’s just like a tadpole at this stage but I also wonder if there’s any possibility of pain and if so, which would be less for the embryo. Some research says I believe pain starts at 9 weeks, but really, how do they know? So I would want the method where their death is more instant.

I almost wish there was some kind of natural herbs I could take at home to just do this entirely on my own, which would also bypass the required ultrasound which I hate to do, but I don’t know if I want to mess with that when it comes to something this serious.

I also read that the chance of breast cancer goes up with abortions, but that could be because there’s extra breast cells created that don’t have a job anymore, I don’t think that applies in my case since I’m breast-feeding.

My friend said she did both options and that the first option was way more painful, like as if she was in actual labor for like four hours, but she thinks that her situation might be specific, like something getting stuck maybe. In general, it seems like a foreign object being inserted into your body unnaturally (like without a natural cervix dilation process) has a much higher risk, but I don’t know, I’m just confused at this point.

Thank you very much for the guidance.

(Does not seem to be against the rules, but if it is please remove and accept my apology)

Most resources treat that as a list. Four separate folk beliefs, vaguely related, filed under "rosemary correspondences." You memorize it, or you don't, and either way you don't really understand why.

That's the problem r/materiamagica is trying to solve.

The sub is built around a simple but underused idea: every magical ingredient has a Virtue, a single underlying power that explains everything it does. Rosemary's is Remembrance. Once you see that, the list stops being a list and starts being a logical system. It sharpens memory. It holds the identity of a space against intrusion. It anchors oaths in time. It carries grief across the boundary of death. Same power, different contexts.

There are many ways to pet a cat. Here's a simpler version of that idea: if you have a headache, you can take ibuprofen, drink a glass of water, put a cold cloth on your forehead, or sleep. All of them can work. But they work through completely different mechanisms. Ibuprofen reduces inflammation. Water fixes dehydration. Cold constricts blood vessels. Sleep resets your nervous system. Knowing how each one works tells you which one to reach for.

Materia magica works the same way. Multiple ingredients can protect a home. But salt does it through Extraction, drawing out and purging what doesn't belong. Rosemary does it through Remembrance, holding the identity of the space against what contradicts it. These aren't the same working in different wrappers. They're different tools that happen to overlap in one area of their range.

Understanding Virtues means you stop swapping ingredients randomly and start choosing intentionally. It also means you start noticing things: convergences across traditions, physical signatures that point toward function, the places where Roman herbalists and Appalachian root workers landed on identical conclusions from completely different directions.

That's what we're here to dig into. Come share what you know.