I've been doing a lot of traveling this past semester and even the summer appears to have more travel than usual built in to the schedule. During these travels I've spent a number of nights in hotel rooms, and in two or three different cities I noticed what I assumed to be evidence of abortion-rights activism. Specifically, what I saw was a "No-Coathanger" sticker placed high up and out of the way on a wall of my hotel room.

The first time I noticed this I was touched and thought it very clever that the person who'd put it there had wondered how long it would go unnoticed by housekeeping staff, how long it would remain, and I wished I could find a way to telepathically let that person know that her symbolic gesture had been noticed.

The second time I noticed it I thought it a remarkable coincidence that twice I should find myself in rooms where some abortion-rights activist had left a message behind.

Then in a hotel room in Fort Wayne, Indiana, just a few days ago, I saw it again, and I noticed something I had not noticed before. The sticker was placed beside a sprinkler head, part of the hotel's fire-fighting system. I climbed up on to the bed to read the text at the bottom of the sticker and indeed it warned that contact with the sprinkler head could cause it to flood the room.

What a let down.

But I'm left with this observation: Whether or not the coat hanger emblem has become cliche for some, in my mind it is still vividly associated with urgently needed activism to protect access to abortion. I cannot see a coat hanger with a line through it and think anything else first. It will always, for me, symbolize the horrors of what women have been forced to do to their bodies when abortion services have been illegal or unavailable or too stigmatized to use and the urgent need to prevent those horrors today and in the future.

...because public space really matters!

Elizabeth