No symbol more personifies the pro-choice movement than the coat hanger. In the wake of recent restrictive laws around abortion access, protesters picket with signs with coat hanger imagery, share coat hanger memes on social media, and encourage one another to send coat hangers to their local politicians. The image provokes a visceral physical reaction and evokes a societal remembering of times when women used desperate and dangerous measures to end pregnancies, and has become part of the standard vocabulary in the movement to promote access to clinic-based abortion. For, so goes the narrative, without access to abortion in a clinic, people will resort to these desperate measures once again.
But it’s time we dropped the symbol.
In choosing to elevate coat hanger symbolism to promote clinical abortion care, the movement effectively demonizes all forms of abortion care that do not take place in a doctor’s office or hospital. It promotes inaccurate historical references in order to distill a nuanced and complex history of community abortion care as generally dangerous. To promote clinical care, the movement decided to sacrifice all other kinds of care, with one horrific symbol.
The coat hanger has become a short hand symbol for the pre Roe v. Wade era in the US of abortion illegality. But it was never an accurate symbol in the first place. While a number of desperate women undeniably turned to unsafe measures to end their pregnancies, including inserting all manner of thin, sharp objects in the body, the actual incidence of coat hangers themselves as a method is largely sensationalized. Many doctors working during the time of illegal abortion care can describe harrowing individual stories and cases of abortion complications, but will admit the methods, success rates, complications, and consequences of unsafe abortion at the time were widely varied. While coat hangers may have been included amongst the possible instruments used, they were far from being the most common, the most dangerous, or even (at the time) the most widely known. What they have always been is a good, sensational story that has been oversimplified and overblown to support a particular narrative in the pro-choice movement: that when abortion is illegal, women die (at the hands of coat hangers, specifically).
This false narrative is damaging for a couple reasons:
First, it erases a rich history of safe home-based abortion methods that stretch back time immemorial. As long as people have been having babies, people have sought to end select pregnancies when it was not possible, convenient, or desirable to carry them to term. People have sought the help of friends, family members, midwives, herbalists, and other healers for help at ending pregnancies. We see written documentation of all kinds of abortion practices throughout the world dating back thousands of years, including various precautions, success rates, and advice on how to prevent future pregnancies. These include herbal, medicinal, and instrumental abortions performed widely, safely and successfully in community.
Even within the pro-choice movement itself, the Janes of the Abortion Counselling Service of the Women’s Liberation Union of Chicago are heralded as icons of the movement for taking control of abortion provision in their community despite illegality, and performing over 11,000 safe abortions through a variety of methods and trimesters, including instrumental abortions.
Safe, community-led abortion provision is the longest period of abortion history we have. It’s never just been clinical abortion and the infamous “back alley”. Bringing abortion into the doctor’s office is a blip on a recent timeline of abortion care. Simply saying “When Abortion is illegal, Women Die”, or “Keep Abortion Safe!” (in the context of keeping clinics open, i.e. clinics are our only safe options), we do history a disservice.
Perhaps the most common phrase associated with the coat hanger is "we won't go back!", but in over simplifying and reducing the complex history of abortion care to "before" and "after" in-clinic abortions were legalized in 1973, we dangerously limit our recollection of historical abortion methods and also our creative imagination for the future.
Limiting this historical recollection in this way can have serious consequences. On a very literal level, a few years ago a dear friend and colleague confided in me a story from her adolescence. As a teenager, a friend of hers had fallen pregnant and could not carry the pregnancy to term. Despite living in Canada where abortion is supposedly free and accessible, their rural location, lack of community support to divulge the situation, and inability to access timely transportation left clinical abortion care inaccessible. She helped her friend have an at-home abortion with a coat hanger because it was the only home-abortion method they could imagine. Raised by feminist parents, they had grown up with coat hanger symbolism as the only representation of non-clinical abortion in their young worlds. When you needed a non-clinical abortion, they guessed that meant you had to use a coat hanger.
On a societal level, the erasure of a rich history of varied, safe community-led abortion care creates some dysfunctional amnesia within the reproductive rights movement. It creates progressive organizations heavily pushing the use of medication abortion as a non-clinical option as if their promotion is modern and revolutionary in a singular way throughout history (it’s not). It creates “self-managed” abortion campaigns that promote medication abortion but demonize and stigmatize herbs, home remedies and medicines, culturally specific body work, and a whole host of other traditional methods as ineffective, completely, once again, discounting a rich and varied history of abortion care. It lets whole generations be raised thinking there are no safe home-based options for ending pregnancies. It leads to a generation of people out of touch with the physiologic process of ending and losing pregnancies and how to manage that safely and effectively, with and without the help of western medicine. It implores us to put total faith in clinical medicine and complete distrust in all other options for abortion care by whittling all other options down to a bloody coat hanger.
Abortion care does not have to be defined as before and after Roe v. Wade, or by good clinic abortions and bad back alley abortions. If we look at a larger history of millenia of abortion care, including modern and traditional methods, clinic-based care, herbal medicine, creative extraction methods, modern medical protocols, community support and community providers of all kinds we can see we already have the foundation to imagine a future for abortion care – a future that is community-driven and responding to the specific needs people have around their bodies and their abortions. We could have the comfort and support of home birth, or home hospice, or doula care with the knowledge of trusted doctors, healers, and community all around us. Abortion care could be empowering, holistic, and individualized. The coat hanger can take its rightful, proportionate place in history, as a specific cautionary tale, without overshadowing all other attempts at discussion of abortion care beyond the clinic.
The coat hanger has played a powerful role in the pro-choice movement, that has resulted in conflicting realities: successful, sensational campaigns for clinical abortion access, and a systematic oversimplification and erasure of non-clinical abortion methods in a time when clinical abortion care desperately needs to be reimagined. It is time abortion advocates let this symbol go and embraced a more complex, nuanced understanding of abortion throughout history and abortion needs and demands in society today. Our lives may be depending on it.
Further Reading:
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/03/health/views/03essa.html
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2791734/
https://dcabortionfund.org/2014/03/statement-from-val-vilott-president-of-the-dc-abortion-fund/
https://rewire.news/article/2010/09/07/4000-years-choicevisual-history-power-transform/
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/05/abortion-in-american-history/376851/
https://www.cwluherstory.org/jane-abortion-service
https://thinkprogress.org/the-coat-hanger-comes-of-age-c592682a987/