COLUMN: Viewpoint – A Mennonite recipe for abortion

Last month I went to see the play The Recipe at Winnipeg’s Warehouse Theatre. The script was the work of well-known Manitoba Mennonite writer Armin Wiebe. It featured characters Wiebe developed for his highly successful 1984 novel The Salvation of Yasch Siemens and its sequels all set in the fictional community of Gutenthal.

The recipe referenced in the title of Wiebe’s drama was, to the surprise of some theatre goers, actually a home remedy for bringing on a woman’s period. It was, in essence, a natural medicinal alternative to a clinical abortion.

The Recipe is set on the prairies in the 1960s at a time when abortion was still a crime in Canada. An unmarried young girl, named Sadie Nickel finds out she is pregnant and goes to a slightly older and more experienced woman Oata Needarp to ask for help. Oata has found a traditional Mennonite recipe for inducing an abortion. She mixes up the ingredients. Sadie downs the concoction and it has the desired effect.

In interviews about the play Armin Wiebe said although his script was fictional the idea of an old recipe for inducing an abortion came from an academic paper by Mennonite historian Conrad Stoesz. Wiebe had heard it presented at a conference in 2016.

I looked Stoesz’s paper up online and read it. He begins his essay with a note found on the inside cover of a diary kept by a Russian Mennonite man named Jacob Wall in the 1800s. It contains the ingredients for a remedy prescribed by a Dr. Wilhelm Toews of Rosenthal. The recipe is designated for use by women when their monthly period does not occur.

Stoez’s further research has led him to believe that Mennonite midwives both in Ukraine and Canada routinely used a similar recipe to help women abort foetuses less than three months old. In particular, Stoesz references another paper done by University of Waterloo professor Marlene Epp in 2012 about the diary of a Mennonite midwife named Sarah Dekker Thielman. Sarah writes about dealing with the loss of some 78 pregnancies either through miscarriage or abortion.

I was very interested in those findings because it corroborated something I’d overheard my grandmother talking about many years ago. In a discussion about whether abortion was ethical Grandma sought to set straight a man voicing his strong opinion on the matter. She told him unless he’d been a woman in need of an abortion he didn’t have a right to speak about its morality.

She proceeded to talk about the rapes that had occurred when Russian bandits raided Mennonite villages in Ukraine, like the one she lived in, during the Revolution. After the marauders left, midwives would go from house to house performing routine abortions on the women who had become pregnant due to a sexual assault they’d experienced. No one questioned whether this was right or wrong.

Dr. Toews’ recipe quoted in Conrad Stoesz’s paper has some pretty scary ingredients, never mind the fact that it is recommended the whole concoction be buried in horse manure for 24 hours before being consumed. Women are also advised to down it with several glasses of whiskey. Sounds dangerous but perhaps no more dangerous than the ways women used to try to have abortions before they became a legal and safe medical procedure in Canada.

The Recipe was humorous and entertaining, like Armin Wiebe’s popular books. But the play also reminded viewers that we certainly don’t want to go back to a time when desperate women had to seek out all kinds of suspect methods in order to have an abortion.