Chapter 2 focuses on the praxis of birth control and abortion during the Republican era. Although sterilization and abortion were criminalized, contraception was neither explicitly endorsed nor banned. Yet, at times, local police cracked down on those who sold or consumed these products. In spite of the law, a wide range of contraceptive and abortive techniques were available to women in urban China. Grounded in folk practices, traditional Chinese healing, and Western medicine, abortion was the most prevalent form of fertility regulation that appeared in the historical record. Tiaojingyao – patent drugs and homemade herbal decoctions that blurred the line between abortifacients and emmenagogues designed to induce regular menses – were also particularly common, and by their nature, difficult to police.