In April 1969, less than four years before the Supreme Court would hand down a ruling that would make abortion legal in every state in the country, more than 300,000 protesters marched through the streets of Washington, D.C. Around their necks were coat hangers, and they bore signs that read "Never Again."

Sadly, they were wrong.

In September of this year, Anna Yocca, 31, allegedly attempted to perform an abortion on herself by untwisting a wire coat hanger and inserting it into her vagina in order to induce her own miscarriage. She was 24 weeks pregnant. It was apparently the amount of blood in the water that caused the Murfreesboro, Tennessee, woman to go to a hospital, in fear for her life. Eventually, she gave birth to a severely premature infant who will likely survive but may have permanent medical issues.

"Even though the baby survived the trauma, physicians said the boy's quality of life 'will be forever harmed,'" reports the Murfreesboro Post. "He will need a medically-experienced foster parent, remain on oxygen and take medication daily because of problems with his eyes, lungs and heart stemming from damage caused by the coat hanger. Medical staff also said other physical problems will arise when the child grows older."

Yocca is scheduled to appear in court to face charges of attempted murder, and if the police response is any indication, there is little sympathy for her plight. "The whole time she was concerned for her health, her safety and never gave any attention to the health and safety of the unborn child," Sergeant Kyle Evans said, according to local News Channel 5. "Those injuries will affect this child for the rest of his life, all caused at the hands of his own mother."

For decades, the coat hanger has been the symbol of illegal abortion, even as the landscape around such activity has changed. It's estimated that there were between 200,000 and 1.2 million illegal abortions per year in the 1950s and '60s. During the 1960s, poor women were far more likely to try to induce an abortion by themselves using sharp objects or by taking herbs, poisons, or other caustic or dangerous substances rather than seeking out someone who could perform the procedure illegally. Before 1973, when Roe v. Wade was decided, law enforcement officials attempting to crack down on back-door abortions focused on finding the doctors, medical professionals, or others who were providing the termination itself. Prosecuting or punishing the person who had the abortion was mostly unheard of.

Even today, abortion opponents claim that they have no interest in prosecuting those who attempt to self-abort. Yet charges against those who either attempted an abortion or are suspected of attempting an abortion are being reported across the country. The case of Purvi Patel, the Indiana woman who was convicted of feticide for allegedly inducing her own miscarriage, is the most recent and well-known, but she is just one of many women who have been charged in the past few years, although most have either been given lesser sentences or had the charges dismissed altogether, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

But while some (but not all) abortion opponents say they don't have any desire to put a pregnant person in jail for seeking an illegal abortion, the actions of politicians say otherwise. In the last five years, they have introduced and voted in favor of hundreds of state and federal restrictions that chip away at access to legal abortion, leaving illegal procedures the only option for women who desire one.

Restricting access to legal abortions isn't the only way a pregnant person can find herself facing criminal charges either. In Tennessee, reproductive rights activists express concern that implementation of a "fetal assault" law in July of 2014 — a law apparently meant to stop pregnant people from using drugs by deeming it "misdemeanor assault" to give birth to a child that shows physical effects from its mother's drug use — could serve as a precedent for prosecuting Yocca or others who are found trying to self-induce an abortion should other criminal charges fall through.

"I never in a million years thought that in my adult lifetime I would witness a coat-hanger abortion," Cherisse Scott, founder and CEO of SisterReach, a Reproductive Justice organization based in Memphis, Tennessee, told Cosmopolitan.com. "But here we are."

Ironically, in the case of Yocca, the medical issues that may plague her newborn — and which local police suggest were caused by Yocca's own selfishness and lack of compassion for her child's health — were not likely caused by her use of a coat hanger. The same medical issues that have police condemning Yocca are those common for any micro preemie born in the second trimester of pregnancy.

"Of premature babies born at 24 weeks, only about half survive at all," Cheryl Chastine, a family doctor and abortion provider in the Midwest region told Cosmopolitan.com. "Of the survivors, around half are severely or moderately disabled." While she was clear that she could only work off of media reports of the situation, Dr. Chastine pointed out that heart, lung, eye, and other defects are common among extremely premature births and that early labor, rather than fetal demise, is the usual result of an attempted early self-induced home abortion with a "sharp implement."

"A major tragedy here is that we had eliminated coat-hanger abortions in the United States — by making safe, legal, affordable abortion services widely available," said Dr. Chastine. "Now, Tennessee is just one of many states in a race to reverse that, making legal abortion harder and harder to access and afford. So instead, we have a dangerous self-induced abortion attempt, an injured woman, a broken family, and a damaged baby."

Tennessee has seven abortion clinics in just four cities, the closest of which is still 40 miles away from Murfreesboro, and providers can only offer terminations up to 16 weeks. A new law that went into effect July 1 requires anyone who needs an abortion to make two separate trips to a clinic 48 hours apart in order to meet the state's new waiting period requirements. At this point, we have no idea what made Yocca decide to attempt an abortion on her own. We do not know if she considered going to a clinic or if she didn't have the funds to be able to obtain a termination legally.

What we do know is that there is a certain desperation that is required to insert a coat hanger into a vagina to induce an abortion, and that bleeding to death or facing prison is a choice no woman should ever be forced to make.

We know all of this, and yet that is exactly what people are now facing. So much for "never again."

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