Posted on 03/23/2014 4:15:31 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Val Vilott, president of the DC Abortion Fund, has responded to “ignorant” conservatives who have recently voiced outrage over the organization’s controversial coat hanger pendants.
Before the passage of Roe v Wade (1973), some women seeking illegal abortions resorted to terminating their own pregnancies with coat hangers.
While conservatives claim that reproductive rights advocates are insensitive and disgusting for making the horrors of illegal abortion a fashion statement, they apparently fail to realize that the policies they want to put in place may lead some women down that very path.
Vilott writes:
The coat hanger is a symbol of the reproductive justice movement because lack of access to abortion causes women to go to desperate lengths to terminate a pregnancy, similar to those undertaken in the pre-Roe vs Wade era. At that time, consuming Lysol and household poisons was not uncommon to instigate abortion. Nor was inserting knitting needles, Coke bottles, and – yes – wire coat hangers into their cervices.
It might make you cringe to imagine just how desperate one must be to go to these lengths. But we don’t have to imagine. We hear from women every day who are that desperate, with no one else to turn to. With our help, they access quality, safe abortion care – no wire coat hangers needed.
The coat hanger is a reminder of women’s suffering when abortion is placed out of reach. It is a promise from reproductive justice advocates to never go back to the grotesque world our anti-choice opponents are striving for: a world WITHOUT safe access to abortion, where women might have to resort to horrific alternatives like a coat hanger. That’s why our supporters love the pendants and wear them as a point of pride.
While we were surprised by the conservative media’s ignorance of the history of the coat hanger’s symbolism, we certainly welcome the spotlight on our efforts to help women. … In short: the coat hangers are not going anywhere, and neither are we.
Read Vilott’s full statement here.
In a 2008 New York Times op-ed, retired OB-GYN Dr. Waldo L. Fielding confirmed that the horror stories about illegal abortions are very real:
In my years in New York, several women arrived with a hanger still in place. Whoever put it in — perhaps the patient herself — found it trapped in the cervix and could not remove it. … However, not simply coat hangers were used.
Almost any implement you can imagine had been and was used to start an abortion — darning needles, crochet hooks, cut-glass salt shakers, soda bottles, sometimes intact, sometimes with the top broken off.
Another method that I did not encounter, but heard about from colleagues in other hospitals, was a soap solution forced through the cervical canal with a syringe. This could cause almost immediate death if a bubble in the solution entered a blood vessel and was transported to the heart.
The worst case I saw, and one I hope no one else will ever have to face, was that of a nurse who was admitted with what looked like a partly delivered umbilical cord. Yet as soon as we examined her, we realized that what we thought was the cord was in fact part of her intestine, which had been hooked and torn by whatever implement had been used in the abortion. It took six hours of surgery to remove the infected uterus and ovaries and repair the part of the bowel that was still functional.
While it is certainly uncomfortable to imagine the horrors that these women were forced to go through, perhaps conservatives should rethink their allegiance to polices that lead to coat hangers being used.
Perhaps they could wear aborted fetuses around their necks. That should illustrate it better to their supporters and the public at large.
Abortion has become a birth control method. Disgusting.
No, it’s a painful reminder of reality for some women. 31.25%
No, trying to overturn Roe v. Wade is in bad taste. 28.91%
Yes. I get the point. But abortion is a painful topic, not a fashion statement. 20.31%
Absolutely, it’s disgusting! 19.53%
How PROUD these beotches must be to advertise the fact that they can, have and WILL kill their offspring in a much more HUMANE and EFFICIENT manner!
Look for FLOTUS to be sportin’ one any day now. *SPIT*
But seriously, and with coat ganders through their little heads. Their message is, if you don’t keep abortion legal, we’ll kill them with coathangers.
To stop this crass campaign and spread some truth at the same time, put up some photos
Forget it, too easy
Pro-lifers should take to wearing a pair of scissors on a necklace to represent the deadly instruments used to puncture the skulls of babies sometimes heard screaming as they are killed in late term abortions.
People only think about themselves now days and buy into that lie that a fetus isn't a baby so they can sleep at night after aborting their child.
May God have mercy on us.
“...the policies they want to put in place may lead some women down that very path.”
Utter rot. 90% illegal abortions were preformed by doctors in offices before ROE vs. WADE.
>Abortion has become a birth control method.
I think that’s one of the big arguments to make contraception convenient, easy to obtain and cost next to nothing.
Preventing unwanted pregnancies is certainly preferable to abortion.
Yes, actually, it is. But, to quote Inigo Montoya, I don't think it means what they think it means.
Murder. That is what it is, murder of an innocent baby. I don’t see those that would do this sort of thing as desperate so much as disturbed. Disturbed people do commit murder in many ways, but to sanction it? So do they glorify those that murder others? How about necklaces with different things used to murder people as a reminder that we don’t have a law that it is ok to murder people so they have to do it in horrific ways?
DC Abortion Fund Defends Controversial Coat Hanger Pendants
FMCDH(BITS)
i think we need to ban coat hangars. with the same zeal the left has to ban law-abiding citizens’ guns.
the gal’s statement also shows that if abortion is banned she believes her own leftists will continue to seek and do illegal abortions. even more reason to ban coat hangars.
Just disgusting, and serves to perpetuate the myth peddled by radical feminists that thousands of women were dying from self-induced and ‘back alley’ abortions, and that they HAD to have legal and ‘safe’ abortion.
good, let them mark themselves as something to avoid at all costs... fore warned is forearmed
fine....buy your own contraceptives. Why should I pay for any part of it.
Val Vilott, president of the DC Abortion Fund, has responded to “ignorant” conservatives who have recently voiced outrage over the organization’s controversial coat hanger pendants
As a human being. One that was born and then adopted instead of being killed, I think you and you pendant are the ones that are ignorant.......
Just become homosexuals, then you don’t need coat hangers or anything. Have sex day and night, no pregnancies. Well you might need treatment for STD’s or AIDS.
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