In 1970--just before the case of Roe v. Wade granted women the right to choose--two feminist activists named Carol Downer and Lorraine Rothman developed a contraption called the Del Em that allowed women to extract the contents of their uterus through a syringe. Although the Del Em was used mainly to terminate early pregnancies, women could also use it to "skip" their periods. Downer and Rothman traveled across the country teaching women how to use menstrual extractors to abort unwanted pregnancies at home during a time when abortion was illegal in the United States.

A modified extractor patented in 1977 was meant exclusively to clean the blood from a woman's womb, and claimed to shorten a woman's period to less than a day. Other than a couple of diagrams, there isn't a whole lot of information about this DIY-style blood extractor. Most likely, it was either never manufactured or not widely distributed.

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