Coat hanger used to make dramatic point

U.S. Rep. Lois Frankel brought a striking visual aid — a wire coat hanger — to a briefing for reporters in Washington, D.C., as a way of dramatizing the importance of abortion rights in the debate over whether Brett Kavanaugh should be confirmed as a Supreme Court justice.

In the era before the Roe v. Wade opinion from the Supreme Court legalized abortion throughout the nation, some women would use wire coat hangers in an attempt to abort their fetuses.

It’s been used as a symbol of the threat to abortion rights, and that’s how Frankel used it Wednesday as she and U.S. Reps. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., and Linda Sanchez, D-Calif., were highlighting what they see as the threat to abortion rights from President Donald Trump’s nomination of Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

“When I was 15, I found a friend near death, bleeding to death from a back alley abortion,” Frankel said, according to the Washington Examiner, which reported she held up the hanger and tapped it on the table. “And when I was in college I can tell you that I encountered many, many, many young women who were desperate to find abortions — this was before Roe v. Wade.”

Later, in a statement provided by her office, Frankel said: “The alarming reality is that we are on the precipice of five men taking us back to the days of coathanger medicine, when women were maimed and killed as a result of back alley abortions. We must fight back against the dangerous nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh.”

At an abortion-rights rally in New York on Tuesday, candidate Cynthia Nixon described her mother’s illegal abortion, while she held up a coat hanger. Nixon, a political activist famous from her role as Miranda Hobbes in the HBO series “Sex and the City,” is challenging New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in that state’s Democratic primary.