Ovid and the Knitting Kneedles (Lad)

Dear Lad,
° As I have asked you so many times,

uestra quid effoditis subiectis uiscera telis
et nondum natis dira venena datis?

° And as you have so many times retorted,

Say what?

§

° Vera Drake finally wended her way to Colliverdi Cinema. Just on the off chance that Miss Staunton would win a gold plastic Osgood, and on the off chance that some judaeochristianislamist or paganovidian zelotes wouldn’t bomb the cineplex.
° So that’s how it was done. Vera, in her desire to "help young girls out," uses a tinnedmetal grater (I still have one, I still use one), coarse cheddarcheese side, to shave carbolic soap (this was before my time, but it sounds potent) into teakettleboiled water. She uses a gassiphoning rubber pump (at least I don’t know what else it could’ve been designed for) to introduce the fragrant, foamy liquid into the younggirlinneedofhelp’s uterus, tells her to wait a day or two till she feels a right sharp pain "down there," then go to the toilet and expect a bleeding during which "it will all come away."
° Her success rate is 100%, her complication rate about the same as commercial abortiondoctors’ nowadays. That is, next to 0%.
° And anyhow, it sure beats the dogdoody out of knitting needles or--well I don’t rightly know what the "or" would be.

§

° Ovid’s "dira venena"? Old Pliny prescribes juniper oil as a spermicide; and since juniper oil would undoubtedly remove the soles of a barefoot savage’s leathery feet, with one light application, I daresay it would do the trick. Inside the uterus, I mean to say.
° No rubber siphons back then, but nice goatskin pastrybags, I shouldn’t wonder.
° As for the effodere, to excavate a ditch in the uterus . . . .

§

° Colette, writing for a far more repressed and censored literature, seems to know of the "dira venena," (ingested, I perhaps misthought). She chooses to depict the backalley consequences of the nasty, reused, rusty coat hanger.

° Poor little vaudeville girl, twice victim to censorship . . . .

§§§§§

° But the question is, what did I know? What did we know, back in the Good Old Days?
° We knew (at 10) why the neighbourhood girl had to go up north for a few weeks. We lightly tut-tutted her for her disgusting ways (cioè, for having dogpee buttsex in the first place), but never gave a moment’s thought to illegalities or chooselife moralities.
° And we approved her fastidiousness in going off among strangers, for we were perfectly informed of every last miscarriage of every last woman in Kosciusko, and were perfectly aware that most of them were what would nowadays be called "abortions," performed as a golfingbuddy favour by the family doctor.
° What poor women did, nobody knew.
° Or, of course, cared.
° Poverty, after all, we (at 10) well understood was God’s just punishment for any married couple so sexcrazed as to perpetrate dogpee buttsex more than twice.
° For as the Gospel does say,

Marat, we’re poor, and the Poor stay poor . . . .

° No, that’s the French, here’s the Latin:

Semper enim pauperes habetis vobiscum; et cum volueritis, potestis illis benefacere.

° Or, as English Vera phrases it,

I help poor girls out of trouble.

° Affectionately, visceribus numquam effossis, Giac.