This may be an odd question, but I can’t find an answer anywhere.
I keep hearing about illegal back-alley abortions using a wire hanger or something. What exactly is that?
Your response is appreciated.
Coat Hanger Abortion
Oops…I was trying to post a link to another thread about this topic but it didn’t work. Sooooo, find it yourself by doing a search with those words
Back in the bad old days, women would procure an abortion from ‘backyard’ practitioners. Sometimes drugs (like black cohosh or castor oil) were used to induce contractions of the uterus and this would lead to the expulsion of the fetus.
Othertimes it was necessary for the fetus to be removed manually and this involved inserting some sort of instrument through the cervix (which would be tightly closed of course). Because a long, narrow instrument was needed, wire just like that of coat hangers was used.
One of my most embarassing moments as a teen … having gone to Planned Parenthood with a friend so she could pick up her birth control pills, we returned to the car only to find she’d locked the keys inside.
We can’t call her dad to bring the spare set (he didn’t know daddy’s lil princess had any need of PP), so we decide to go back inside, and ask for a coat hanger since the window was slightly open and we could get in that way. It took us a few minutes to realise why everyone was looking at us strangely, and why they really didn’t want to give us the coat hanger.
Once upon a time, in a SDMB thread that ran a long long time ago, I got a post deleted and caused the thread to be killed on this very subject by being a little too specific about how they were done. For hopefully obvious reasons, I’m going to try to avoid doing that again, but the upshot is that a pregnant woman’s cervix is a muscular sphincter corked with a thickened mucus, and in a legitimate abortion it is gradually transformed into an open orifice though which things can be introduced into the uterus, usually with gradually larger thingies call “dilating rods”.
Now look at a coat hanger and visualize it straightened out and used as a really crappy dilating rod + uterine-wall assault mechanism. (Also highly likely to be a uterine-cavity infection-bringer – in the legitimate clinic they have tools and procedures that make it unlikely that dilating rods or subsequent tools will be nonsterile at the time they enter the uterus. The vagina you have to pass through to get past the cervix is not a sterile environment. Oh, and also likely to be a uterine-wall perforating mechanism. Can you say ow?)
Now, illegal abortions could and did sometimes involve considerably more sophisticated equipment than a flashlight and a straightened-out coathanger. Problem is, as with any illegal medical procedure, it wasn’t regulated, and like Forrest Gump would say, it was like a box of chocolates – no way of knowing what you were going to get. In addition to coat hanger techniques there were plain old fraudulent operators who would just take the money and administer a douche or something.
Wow. No wonder it’s illegal. I was kind of thinking that but I thought I must be wrong because it seems like the coat hanger would puncture internal things accidentally, especially in such a “tight” space.
Thank you all for your informative posts.
Very entertaining story, BethCro. 
That having been said, it’s worth noting that even when abortions were illegal in the U.S., the great majority of illegal abortions were still performed by medical doctors using proper instruments.
Surely the coat hanger would be folded in half in order to make a rounded end?
MaryEFoo, if it were folded in half the, umm, business end would be way too big (at least to start with). You would more likely snip off the coiled-up part where it had twisted up with the other end back in its life as a coat hanger, and file down the snipped end to end up with a smooth presenting surface the diameter of a coat hangers’ wire. Even that might be a big thick to start with.
And what Walloon said was correct. Even the portion of the black market occupied by people who had never trained as medical doctors (a minority) generally used better equipment than a straightened-out coat hanger. We’re talking low end of the black market here.