Long before Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, desperate women sought solutions to seemingly impossible problems. And there have always been ways, especially for those with means. In the years before the landmark Supreme Court decision, the nation was a patchwork quilt of restrictive abortion laws that had an outsize impact on poor, disadvantaged women without the ability to travel. Those poor women, disproportionately women of color, also sought solutions, but with far more frightening and evocative results. To this day, though it was hardly the only sharp implement used, the coat hanger is symbolic of a long and bloody fight for freedom sometimes waged on the corpses of women whose self-inflicted or back-alley abortion took a deadly turn.

Those days are not over. Once again, the nation is fragmenting, with unequal abortion laws from state to state putting undue burdens on women who cannot drive or fly halfway across the country. Women from Texas were fleeing to Oklahoma, but now Oklahoma has shut its doors. Where will they go next? Here, to Kansas? Our rights, too, are in jeopardy.

Make no mistake: the coat hanger abortion is not a thing of the past. In 2015, a Tennessee woman, unable to obtain a safe, legal abortion due to her state’s restrictive laws, used a coat hanger on herself to terminate her pregnancy. She was jailed for more than a year before finally being released, all because she could not seek the medical care she required.

When JCDW chose the hanger and the slogan “Never Again” to put on our merchandise, it was intended to evoke a response, to remind us all of what’s at stake. Our freedoms, our health, our very lives are at risk.

But let’s not forget, too, that most of us at JCDW are privileged. Should this constitutional amendment pass and our access to abortion be denied, many of us can fly to New York or California or even Canada (assuming the need is non-urgent). What about our friends? What about our neighbors? What about the poor women, who are still disproportionately women of color? 

Protecting every woman’s rights is a central tenet of the National Federation of Democratic Women, the Kansas Federation of Democratic Women, and Johnson County Democratic Women. This is why we have taken up the Kansas Constitutional Amendment fight, and why you can count on us to have the health and well-being of every woman in Kansas at heart.