Abortion a thing of the Past?

On the travel channel there is a show called Living With the Tribes and it follows the Namal tribe who live on Tanna Island - a small island that is part of the Vanuatu Islands in the Pacific Ocean. These african people know of our modern would but like and feel stable with there practices from over a thousand years ago. Yet on the only episode i watched they were building a new canoe to go out in the ocean and fish and all the men in the tribe go and its a big deal but one man couldn't go because his wife was pregnant again with what would be their fourth child and they literally could not take care of this one child that they were about to have so the man went out deep into the jungle and cut down branches and squeezed this red juice out of its almost instinct bark and it would make the baby die and it was an old old method but to see that even a thousand years ago this tribe had a way for abortion and people still do that there and this couple had to keep it secret from the tribe because it was seen as bad luck to cut down these distinctive branches that grow in the forest. So it was interesting to me to see how it connects to our time and how if you get an abortion its all hush-hush but that a thousand years ago there was a way to get rid of a baby and it actually worked. SO i thought this realted to our class discussion recently on abortion and the media and just interesting of different contraceptive methods.

P.S. another american film where abortion is present is Dirty Dancing and when you think about it the film is almost centered around this girls need for an abortion.