A man of the nascent counterculture, (Harvey) Karman dabbled in experimental films and worked with juvenile delinquents and at Head Start, but abortion remained his consuming passion. A sympathetic doctor told him that if he could induce just a small bit of bleeding in a pregnant girl, she could be admitted to the hospital and her abortion could be completed legally, a technique he adopted. In fact, all around the world, in countries where abortion is restricted, that’s often how it’s done. According to Malcolm Potts, an Oxford-educated doctor who is one of the world’s leading authorities on abortion, the “extralegal person is usually trying to produce uterine bleeding that will take the woman to the public hospital where she will be cleaned up.”
He wanted a method that was as painless as possible, allowing a woman to get up and walk away as soon as it was over. So he started experimenting in his kitchen. Karman cut the end off a large, plastic, handheld syringe, attached some polyethylene tubing to it, and soon came up with the prototype for the manual vacuum aspiration (MVA) syringe, a simple, hand-operated device that today is used all over the developing world.
