Dowie being obtuse shocker! The pharmaceuticals didn't exist until the 1970s. Lets face it, the barbarism of previous "solutions" would have put most women off before that.
You going to call the pharmaceutical method LARPing at abortion now?
The modern, safe pharmaceuticals didn't exist. Various herbs and plants were well known to cause an abortion though, and were used even though they were risky because to put it bluntly, it was still a lot safer than giving birth.
Abortifacients have been around for several thousand years, indeed the only reference to abortion in the Bible is an abortifacient to be administered by a priest if a man suspects his wife of being unfaithful and with child (so the priest forcing a woman to have an abortion as the husband is unhappy/insecure is fine according to the bible, which is a bit different to what the Right wing Christians seem to think, about the only thing in common is that in both cases the woman doesn't have a choice).
Even the old backstreet wire coat hanger type abortions which had a very high rate of serious injury and even death didn't put women off as for a lot of people it was still preferable to giving birth.
About all that making abortion legal did was make it safer, we can expect the maternal mortality rate in the "red" states that have banned abortion to rise a lot now, and due to the fact that those states were already making it extremely hard for women to get both abortions, and maternity care they already had very high death rates (IIRC the one of them already had around six times the death rate per capita of california, a state that made access to both abortions and maternity care far easier to access). IIRC America's overall maternal death rate before this change in the law was already the worst in the developed world, and worse than many much poorer and "less developed" countries.
It's also going to result in very large numbers of women, almost certainly poorer ones (as they always seem to get the worst of it as they can't afford good health care to help avoid it, or lawyers to help afterwards) getting prosecuted for miscarriages, which are extremely common regardless of how careful the woman is and how much they want the child. It already happens in some of the Republican states at times.
