I sincerely do NOT mean this question to be insensitive or crass.
I know that during the 19th and early 20th centuries, illegal abortions were often performed in risky, unprofessional, and sometimes deadly circumstances, and involving various implements and substances.
Given how long there have been jokes about abortions and coat hangers, I'm genuinely curious if this was actually a tool commonly employed to that purpose, or where that morbid joke/trope originated.
Thank you!
Which is to say: yes. It's important to know, though, a wire hanger represented more than just a tool used to provide an abortion, it was used by activists to represent several of their core arguments for legalizing abortion: the desperation and risk created by anti-abortion laws. (I've used spoiler tags when quoting medical professionals or historians talking or writing about specific details related to illegal or unsafe abortions.)
##A Symbol of Desperation
In mid-century America, a wire coat hanger was an ubiquitous item, found in nearly every home, easily recognizable to people of all genders. It could also be easily transformed into a tool that could fulfill the basic function of an abortion - emptying the contents of a uterus. In effect, the image says, "imagine how desperate you'd have to be to put this inside your body?" The goal of this messaging was to make it plain that keeping abortion illegal didn't stop abortion - it just made desperate people more desperate. (More on the history of anti-abortion laws here in this Megathread we did in December.)
The humble wire hanger served as a physical representation of that desperation and was used in all sorts of ways, including as early clip art as seen in the header of this 1971 article about a planning meeting for a national women's conference later that year. One of the participants, a founding member of the Women vs. Connecticut project, Doctor Barbara Roberts, spoke about the desperation she saw:
I have seen atrocities during medical school and in hospitals. >!I have seen a woman with half her bowel hanging out of her vagina from a criminal abortion. I've seen women in hospitals drunk, drug addicted, suicidal. I've seen battered and burned babies in morgues and emergency rooms. I have seen hysterical women in my own office...!< we must fight the sanctimonious friends of the fetus... the only good abortion law is no abortion law.
This desperation, though, wasn't felt equally by everyone seeking an abortion. Those with social and economic capital could usually acquire a safe one. A trustworthy personal doctor might manufacturer a health risk and recommend a hospital abortion (where the pregnant person may or may not be turned away, usually depending on the person working the admissions desk) or the person could pay a provider who was known to be safe and trustworthy. By the mid-1950s, the phrase "wire/coat hanger abortion" was used as a rhetorical device to distinguish a safe, illegal abortion from an unsafe one. ("Back ally abortion" also became common. A legal, safe abortion was typically called a "therapeutic abortion" as it was only considered legal because a doctor or a panel at the hospital had determined the person seeking an abortion was entitled to one.)
Networks such as The Jane Collective were formed to connect as many people seeking abortions as possible with providers who followed medical sanitation practices and were discrete, but even though they worked to keep the costs affordable, such solutions had other costs - time away from work and family, possibility of others finding out, travel costs, etc. Meanwhile, even if someone could find a safe abortionist they could trust to be discrete, the illegal nature of the service meant there was a power imbalance. from Leslie Reagan's foundational book, When Abortion Was a Crime:
Some abortionists took advantage of their clients’ vulnerability in this increasingly secretive situation to sexually harass and exploit them. These men equated abortion with sexual availability and tried to turn their patients into prostitutes. >!One woman, who had an illegal abortion in the mid-1950s after being raped, recalled the humiliation she felt when the abortionist remarked, “ ‘You can take your pants down now, but you shoulda’—ha!ha!—kept’em on before.’ ” When he finished the abortion, for which he charged $1,000, he offered to return $20 if she would give him “a ‘quick blow job.’ ” Other abortionists insisted on a trade: sex for abortion. When one sixteen-year-old was propositioned, she walked out.!<
##A Symbol of Risk
The wire coat hanger is not surgical equipment. They're often made of bare metal - uncoated. People who could afford to pay someone else to perform the abortion might be able to reduce the amount of risk they faced, but not always. Those who couldn't , had to make do with whatever they had access to:
When domestic efforts to produce an abortion failed, pregnancies progressed and the danger of later instrumental abortions increased. Many women ended up in hospital emergency rooms. Some ended up in morgues. >!Dr. Maximillian Herzog, a professor of pathology at the Chicago Policlinic, asserted in 1900 that “by far the largest number of criminal abortions” were induced by women taking abortifacients, which caused hemorrhaging. Some women mixed their own home remedies.! One Chicago woman told of applying a mustard plaster to her abdomen to induce an abortion. Women employed a wide array of instruments found within their own homes to induce miscarriages, including knitting needles, crochet hooks, hairpins, scissors, and button hooks. One physician testified that patients at Cook County Hospital in Chicago used hairpins and cotton balls to irritate the cervix and induce abortions. A domestic servant resorted to using a bone stay out of her corset to induce a miscarriage. A farm woman used a chicken feather. Dr. G. D. Royston, who interviewed patients at a St. Louis dispensary in 1917, reported that “introduction of catheters, crochet needles, etc., by the patients themselves are first in frequency."... !<
Other medical providers reported that douching with soap or bleach was one common and frequently fatal method used by women trying to self-induce abortions. One man who worked at a hospital said he saw:
!... young women coming to the hospital who had taken pills or been “injected with lye” to induce abortions... Some aborted themselves with instruments found at home, including the now infamous coat hanger. One woman described taking ergotrate, then castor oil, then squatting in scalding hot water, then drinking Everclear alcohol. When these methods failed, she hammered at her stomach with a meat pulverizer before going to an illegal abortionist.!<
Finally, the wire coat hanger represented one of the central arguments behind anti-abortion laws: bodily autonomy. By using the coat hanger as a symbol, not only could activists speak to desperation and risk, they could represent the idea that regardless of the law or any possible punishment, people who are pregnant who do not want to be pregnant will do whatever it takes to end that pregnancy. This central idea, that we have the right to control how our body is used is reflected in the coat hanger as an activist symbol. That even when lawmakers and the government goes to great lengths to force a pregnant person to stay pregnant, they will do what they need to do to maintain control over how their body is used.
Modern day update: It's important, I think - especially this weekend, the 49th anniversary of Roe v. Wade - to dip a bit into modern politics. Reproductive justice advocates began moving away from the imagine of the wire hanger as a way to represent self-induced abortions in the early 2000s, as medical abortions became safer and more affordable. Currently, a pregnant person who no longer wants to be pregnant can safely self-induce a medical abortion by taking a combination of two commonly-available gynecological medications, provided they learn of the pregnancy early enough. More here on the medical science related to abortion.