infrequency with which they are mentioned in ancient medical texts. An 8th-century Sanskrit text instructs women wishing to induce an abortion to sit over a pot of steam or stewed onions. The technique of massage abortion, involving the application of pressure to the pregnant abdomen, has been practiced in Southeast Asia for centuries. One of the bas reliefs decorating the temple of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, dated , depicts a demon performing such an abortion upon a woman who has been sent to the underworld. Japanese documents show records of induced abortion from as early as the 12th century. It became much more prevalent during the Edo period, especially among the peasant class, who were hit hardest by the recurrent famines and high taxation of the age. Statues of the Boddhisattva Jizo, erected in memory of an abortion, miscarriage, stillbirth, or young childhood death, began appearing at least as early as 1710 at a temple in Yokohama (see religion and abortion). The native Māori people of New Zealand colonisation terminated pregnancies via miscarriage-inducing drugs, ceremonial methods, and girding of the abdomen with a restrictive belt. Another source claims that the Māori people did not practice abortion, for fear of Makutu, but did attempt abortion through the artificial induction of premature labor. Greco-Roman world Much of what is known about the methods and practice of abortion in Greek and Roman history comes from early classical texts. Abortion, as a gynecological procedure, was primarily the province of women who were either midwives or well-informed laypeople. In his Theaetetus, Plato mentions a midwife's ability to induce abortion in the early stages of pregnancy. It is thought unlikely that abortion was punished in Ancient Greece. A fragment attributed to the poet Lysias "suggests that abortion was a crime in Athens against the husband, if his wife was pregnant when he died, since his unborn child could have claimed the estate." The ancient Greeks relied upon the herb silphium as an abortifacient and contraceptive. The plant, as the chief export of Cyrene, was driven to extinction; it is suggested that it might have possessed the same abortive properties, as some of its closest extant relatives in the family Apiaceae. Silphium was so central to the Cyrenian economy that most of its coins were embossed with an image of the plant. Pliny the Elder (23–79 CE) cited the refined oil of common rue as a potent