There's always more that can be said but you may find an older answer I wrote useful. The relevant content:
And when contraception failed, enslaved women would take abortifacients. Our understanding of the conception process is very different in the modern era (more on that in this Roe v. Wade thread than it was then and some of their solutions did little more than sicken the person ingesting the mixture. Such remedies existed on a continuum; there were those that were safer - those that were often available to white women and girls with the means to access trustworthy medical care - and those that were unsafe. Among the unsafe options was consuming turpentine. According to Perrin's study of the WPA slave narratives:
Lu Lee, an ex-slave and midwife, from Texas, described how pregnant women "unfixed" themselves by taking calomel and turpentine, and explained that, when the turpentine manufacturers became aware of this practice, they changed the recipe, thus rendering turpentine useless as an abortifacient.
There's evidence that people saw turpentine as a way to bring on a miscarriage in the 20th century so it's difficult to confirm if the recipe for turpentine was changed to limit its abortifacient properties but if such a thing did occur, it speaks to the efforts to limit Black women and girls' access to ways to end a pregnancy. Meanwhile, doctors who worked on Southern plantations wrote about clusters of women and girls who failed to get pregnant and shared their suspicions about how they were controlling their fertility, suggesting things the enslavers should note or look out for.
There's always more than can be said, but you may find my answer to this question relevant:
And when contraception failed, enslaved women would take abortifacients. Our understanding of the conception process is very different in the modern era (more on that in this Roe v. Wade thread than it was then and some of their solutions did little more than sicken the person ingesting the mixture. Such remedies existed on a continuum; there were those that were safer - those that were often available to white women and girls with the means to access trustworthy medical care - and those that were unsafe. Among the unsafe options was consuming turpentine. According to Perrin's study of the WPA slave narratives:
Lu Lee, an ex-slave and midwife, from Texas, described how pregnant women "unfixed" themselves by taking calomel and turpentine, and explained that, when the turpentine manufacturers became aware of this practice, they changed the recipe, thus rendering turpentine useless as an abortifacient.
There's evidence that people saw turpentine as a way to bring on a miscarriage in the 20th century so it's difficult to confirm if the recipe for turpentine was changed to limit its abortifacient properties but if such a thing did occur, it speaks to the efforts to limit Black women and girls' access to ways to end a pregnancy. Meanwhile, doctors who worked on Southern plantations wrote about clusters of women and girls who failed to get pregnant and shared their suspicions about how they were controlling their fertility, suggesting things the enslavers should note or look out for.
You may also find this post on the history of abortion in America useful.