humanlifereview.com
2026-05-01
For decades, the most potent image deployed in favor of legalized abortion has been the coat hanger. The message has always been blunt: If abortion is not provided by licensed physicians using sanitized instruments, women will resort to desperate and dangerous methods on their own. The image is deliberately visceral--an unwound wire hanger, a woman attempting to induce an abortion herself, risking hemorrhage or death. For many, this visual horror has been emotionally persuasive, serving as a justification for legal, surgical abortion as a lesser evil.
This never worked at persuading me; sanitized instruments and a medical license can't rid the procedure of its disgusting end result: dead baby parts. Where the self-administered hanger always stunned me for how it resembled a violent murder-suicide standoff--if you don't give me what I want, I'll kill us both!--to me, the abortion lobby's attempts to brand abortion as a legitimate medical procedure just made it sound more like a systematized effort to obscure the scale and nature of what is being done.
Still, by and large, the coat-hanger image worked, both on individual and societal levels. Men involved in abortion decisions have reported supporting abortion out of fear that their partners might pursue unsafe alternatives, and organizations such as Planned Parenthood have long relied on this emphasis on "safety" to attract supporters.1 It is far more palatable to claim that one is preventing women from bleeding to death than to acknowledge participation in the routine killing of unborn children.
State Litigation Seeks to Curb Mail-Order Abortion by Jacqueline O'Hara
To Kill or Not to Kill by Donald DeMarco