Definition
In medical jurisprudence, emmenagogues are a class of substances believed to stimulate or promote menstrual discharge. The term appears in legal contexts almost exclusively in connection with abortion prosecutions, where emmenagogues were administered — or alleged to have been administered — for the purpose of inducing miscarriage rather than for any legitimate therapeutic use. The legal significance of the term is not pharmacological but evidentiary: identifying a substance as an emmenagogue was a step in establishing that a defendant possessed or administered something capable of procuring abortion, and that such was the likely intent.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Plural of emmenagogue — a substance that stimulates or increases menstrual flow.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Promoting the menstrual discharge" — used in medical and botanical contexts to describe herbs and drugs with this reputed property.
The gap between common and legal meaning is one of context and purpose, not definition. In ordinary medical usage, an emmenagogue was a recognized therapeutic category: regulating menstruation was considered a legitimate clinical aim, and these substances appeared in standard pharmacopoeias. In legal usage, the same term carries a different valence entirely. Courts and prosecutors encountered emmenagogues not in discussions of menstrual health but in criminal abortion cases, where the critical question was whether a substance was used with intent to destroy a pregnancy. The clinical category became a forensic one.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Historical medical and legal sources distinguished between degrees of potency and mechanism, though these distinctions were not formalized in law:
Direct emmenagogues: Substances believed to act directly on the uterus to stimulate contraction or discharge. More likely to be characterized as abortifacients when intent was in question.
Indirect emmenagogues: Substances thought to promote menstrual flow through general circulatory or systemic effects rather than direct uterine action. The distinction sometimes bore on prosecutorial theory but was not a settled legal classification.
Bouvier's Law Dictionary provides the most detailed historical enumeration of substances in this category, including savine (Juniperus Sabina), black hellebore, aloes, gamboge, rue, madder, stinking goosefoot, gin, parsley and its active principle apiol, permanganate of potassium, cantharides, and borax.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is almost entirely a creature of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century criminal law. Researchers will encounter it in two contexts: criminal abortion prosecutions and the medical jurisprudence treatises that courts and counsel relied upon to establish what these substances were and what they could do.
The critical research trap is reading emmenagogue as a purely neutral medical term in legal sources. It was not neutral. The invocation of the word in a criminal case almost always signals that the prosecution was framing a substance as an abortifacient. Defense arguments often turned on the alternative therapeutic interpretation — that the substance was administered to regulate menstruation, not to destroy a pregnancy — and the distinction could mean the difference between conviction and acquittal.
Researchers should note that the pharmacological consensus on which substances actually had abortifacient properties was contested even in the nineteenth century. Courts relied heavily on expert testimony from medical witnesses and on treatises such as Taylor's Medical Jurisprudence and Beck's Elements of Medical Jurisprudence, which attempted to classify these substances and assess their efficacy. The evidentiary weight given to such testimony varied considerably by jurisdiction and era.
The term drops out of legal usage in the twentieth century as abortion law was restructured, pharmacology professionalized, and the specific herbs and compounds at issue became legally and clinically obsolete. In modern legal contexts, the functional equivalent appears in statutes and cases discussing abortifacients, a term that carries no therapeutic ambiguity.
Corpus researchers working in abortion-related criminal law, medical jurisprudence, or pharmacy regulation before 1940 should treat emmenagogues as a keyword that opens onto questions of intent, expert testimony, and the boundary between medicine and criminal conduct.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (both the first and second editions) gives identical, compact definitions: emmenagogues are medicines supposed to promote menstrual discharge, sometimes used to procure abortion. The phrasing is careful — "supposed to have the property" — which accurately reflects that the pharmacological efficacy of these substances was not settled.
Bouvier's Law Dictionary goes further, providing an enumerated list of specific substances. This list is clinically useful for historical research because it identifies the actual compounds likely to appear in nineteenth-century case records. Researchers encountering references to savine, cantharides, or apiol in criminal abortion proceedings should understand these as substances that sat within the legal category of emmenagogues and were therefore presumptively capable of being characterized as abortifacients by expert witnesses.
All three source dictionaries locate the term within medical jurisprudence rather than substantive criminal law, which reflects how it actually functioned: as a term of art borrowed from medicine into the evidentiary framework of criminal prosecution. None of the sources addresses the contested efficacy question directly, and none anticipates how completely the term would fall from legal usage.
Jurisdictional Note
The legal relevance of emmenagogues was concentrated in American and English jurisdictions that criminalized abortion in the nineteenth century. Statutory language varied — some statutes specified "any medicine, drug, or substance" while others enumerated categories — but courts across common-law jurisdictions drew on the same medical jurisprudence literature to define and apply the concept.