We Know What America Looks Like Without Roe

A metal coat hanger can’t speak, but it can send a message. Long a symbol of the dangers faced by people seeking to end pregnancies in the years before Roe v. Wade, coat hangers stand in for a whole inventory of physical horrors, most of which never involved coat hangers, specifically. Over the past few weeks, protesters have mailed hangers to the Supreme Court in an effort to evoke that past era — from the so-called back-alley butchers who botched surgical procedures and sexually harassed patients, to the terrible lengths individuals went through to give themselves an abortion at home. The message is simple and brutal: Without safe and legal abortion, the protesters believe, people will die.

In the years since Roe became the law of the land, the medical landscape of abortion has changed drastically. Today, abortion is extremely safe — safer than birth. So safe, in fact, that it’s not always obvious what made illegal abortions unsafe. Or, for that matter, what the coat hangers were for.

And this is why those objects still have important stories to tell us, historians told me. Because while the most physically violent abortion methods of the past have become medically obsolete, the march of scientific progress hasn’t eliminated the shame, fear and hopelessness experienced by people who are pregnant, don’t want to be, and live in a society where there is no simple, legal access to abortion. Coat hangers don’t just tell us about the dangers of bad medicine, practiced shoddily, these historians said. Instead, the hangers also speak volumes about the desperation that can lead people to those dangerous procedures in the first place.

People who couldn’t find or afford an illegal abortion often tried to give one to themselves. It’s impossible to say how many of these happened every year, but there are records showing thousands of people coming into emergency rooms with septic infections of the uterus and reproductive organs in the 1960s, Reagan said. This is where the coat hangers come in, Joffe said, as one of many objects people would try to insert through their own cervical openings. The goal was not necessarily to complete an abortion at home but rather to induce enough bleeding and symptoms of miscarriage that the person could go to a hospital, say they were having a miscarriage naturally, and get a hospital D&C. But perforation, hemorrhage, and infection were all risks.