It’s not to hang their nice suit jackets, that’s for sure! Here’s some straight-to-the-point activism: a cell phone company, CREDO Mobile, is mailing coat hangers to all the democratic members of the House of Representatives who voted in support of the Stupak-Pitts Amendment in Obama’s health care reform bill. (CREDO must have read our piece, “How The Health Care Reform Bill Is Screwing Over Women With An Abortion Amendment”! Right?) The coat hangers are definitely a gruesome, but clear, reminder of what some women will do when their access to abortions is restricted. So far, over 116,000 have been sent.

But how come all of the 240 politicians who voted for Stupak-Pitts didn’t receive a coat hanger in the mail? After all, democrats aren’t the only ones who voted in favor of this amendment, just to pass the health care reform bill. [CREDO Action]

• One month before late-term abortion provider Dr. George Tiller was murdered by an anti-choice extremist, the FBI in Kansas City received an anonymous letter warning them that Scott Roeder posed a physical threat to abortion providers. The FBI said they didn’t heed the letter as a credible threat, apparently because the letter writer was involved in a custody battle with Roeder. [The Wichita Eagle]

The Republican National Committee’s health plan with the insurance company Cigna has covered abortion since 1991, according to an investigation by the online news site Politico. Cigna’s health coverage plan allows employers to opt out of coverage for specific items, but the RNC, which employs members of the Republican Party, did not opt out of abortion coverage. Politico broke this news story yesterday and noted that the Republican Party’s own platform refers to abortion as “a fundamental assault on innocent human life.” RNC’s leader, Michael Steele, quickly responded in a statement promising they would opt out of abortion coverage from their health insurer. 

• In this video clip, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) speaks out against the health care reform bill’s Stupak-Pitts Amendment, which limits how private insurance companies can offer coverage for abortion. More conservatively inclined Democrats voted for the House of Representative’s version of the health care bill this past Saturday night only after the Stupak-Pitts Amendment was included. The video is a little snoozy at first, but 45 seconds in, Sen. Gillibrand gets to the good stuff about why Stupak-Pitts isn’t good for our reproductive rights. [YouTube]
• Speaking of the Stupak-Pitts Amendment, Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) has said today that the Senate has the 60 votes needed to block the controversial bill when it makes its way to there. Let’s hope so. [Huffington Post]

A health care reform passed in the House of Representatives on Saturday night, but only after politicians included an anti-abortion amendment to the bill so it could gain more support. Called the Stupack Amendment, named for Sen. Bart Stupack (D-MI), it prohibits the use of federal subsidies for private insurance plans that cover abortion. In other words, if private insurance companies want to take money from individuals who are using federal dollars to pay for their health insurance, they cannot offer abortion coverage in their plans. Critics of the amendment say it’s a move by pro-lifers to encourage private health insurance companies to drop abortion coverage entirely. [The New York Times]

• Emma Thompson initially signed a petition calling for Roman Polanski’s freedom, but has she had a change of heart? A reader at the blog Shakesville may have convinced her to remove her name from his list of supporters. [Shakesville]
• An Illinois judge has blocked the enforcement of the state’s controversial parental notification law, which mandates that a physician inform a parent or guardian if a minor age 17 or younger seeks an abortion. The law was blocked through a temporary restraining order by the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois. [Chicago Breaking News]

Have you been following health care reform? Earlier this autumn, I was rushing home from work to watch Hardball every night. Then all those “town hall” people screaming about Nazism irritated me so much I’ve mostly tuned out. But there is one health care reform issue I’ve followed closely and that is abortion coverage under President Obama’s plan. Now, if you watched Obama’s big speech about health care reform, he stated loud-and-clear that abortion would not be funded under his public health care plan. Unfortunately, nothing in politics is ever that easily explained…

• Illinois’ controversial parental notification law for minors seeking an abortion has been delayed at least until Wednesday morning as officials meet to verify that girls can waive the notification process by petitioning a judge, who has 48 hours to rule on it. The parental notification law does not give parents consent, but requires that they be notified. An exemption is made in the case of a medical emergency or if a girl puts it in writing that she was sexually abused. [Chicago Tribune]

Irene Vilar rebelled against her “controlling” husband in the most unique of ways: by having abortions. Lots of ‘em. From ages 16 to 33, Vilar said she had 15 abortions and now calls herself a recovered “abortion addict” and mother of two.

Have you ever heard of “abortion addiction”? No, me neither. But Vilar has written about her “abortion addiction” in her new book, Impossible Motherhood: Testimony Of An Abortion Addict, which describes how when she was a young woman, Vilar said she married a 50-year-old man who jerked her around emotionally, so she would skip her birth control pills just to rebel against him. Discovering her pregnancies excited and scared her at the time, a rush Vilar likened to the same kind of “high” that a “druggie” feels. Vilar also tried to commit suicide several times.

Considering how ashamed and fearful many women are sharing they’ve had one abortion, it’s pretty annoying that a woman gets a book deal for telling everybody how she’s had over a dozen. Yes, it’s Vilar’s right to have as many abortions as she’d like, and it’s great Vilar is still pro-choice after all this. But everything about Impossible Motherhood is unrepresentative of what an average women’s experience with abortion is.

Unsafe abortions kill 70,000 women each year, according to a recent study of 197 countries by the pro-choice Guttmacher Institute. The three-year study also found abortions are happening in countries where they are legal just as often as in countries where they are illegal—despite the fact that 40 percent of the world’s women live in places were abortion laws are strict. Said Sharon Camp, Guttmacher’s president:

‘‘Legal restrictions do not stop abortion from happening. They just make the procedure dangerous. Too many women are maimed or killed each year because they lack legal abortion access.”

Cupcakes! Who doesn’t love cupcakes? Makes me think of Sex and the City ... birthday parties ... sugary frosting ... abortion.

Wait ... wha?! Unless this is a big joke and I am just very gullible, Cupcakes For Life is a website that’s celebrating National Pro-Life Cupcakes Day today by staging a birthday party for the unborn babies of abortion. Cupcakes For Life suggests you bring a tray of cupcakes in for a group of people who, naturally, will ask, “Cupcakes! Whose birthday is it?” Then you, the cupcake baker, are supposed to say, “It’s no one’s birthday. These cupcakes represent the 50,000,000 children who weren’t allowed to be born, who never had a birthday.” The helpful “cupcake ideas” page offers suggested frosting slogans, like “Thou shalt not murder” and “abortion kills.” 

Have you been keeping up with how the media’s all atwitter over a tweet sent by blogger and entrepreneur Penelope Trunk? She wrote a very strange message on her Twitter, essentially telling the world that she was in a board meeting and was having a miscarriage. The response to this 140-character blurb has been extreme, even in the lady blogosphere:

• Out of concern for their safety, young OB/GYN students admit to reconsidering whether or not they’ll do abortions after the recent murder of Dr. George Tiller, a physician in Kansas who terminated pregnancies. “Our doctors are graying and are not being replaced,” the president of the National Women’s Health Foundation has said. [Washington Post]
• Ex-schoolteacher Tiffany Sheperd, 31, has turned to porno after bikini pics got her fired from Port St. Lucie High School in Florida. Shepherd alleged she sent out 2,500 resumes after getting canned last April and has not been hired for a teaching position anywhere. In her new career, Shepherd’s stage name is Leah Lust and she has filmed five flicks, including one called “My First Sex Teacher.” [NY Daily News]
• The attorney for Rifqa Bary, the 17-year-old who ran away from home in Ohio to Florida because she fears her Muslim parents will kill her for converting to Christianity, filed a court memorandum requesting that the girl not be forced to go home. Bary has said her father threatened to kill her and her mother threatened to send her back to her home country of Sri Lanka after they discovered she is a Christian, although both her parents have denied the claims. Presently, the girl is living in foster care. [Fox News]

No reporter happened to be standing at abortion provider George Tiller‘s side on the Sunday morning in May when he was murdered at gunpoint, allegedly by an anti-choice extremist. But, like the famous newspaper article by journalist Jimmy Breslin that covered JFK’s assassination from the point of view of his grave digger, sometimes a reporter discovers the best way to tell a story lies someplace other than the obvious.

In “The Last Abortion Doctor, Esquire focuses on the Boulder Abortion Clinic in Colorado and Dr. Warren Hern, the last physician in the United States who can perform late-term abortions.

Last weekend, my friend (one of those types who’s an encyclopedia of random knowledge) dropped an interesting fact on me. She said that women who are on Medicaid, the government-issued insurance plan for people who can’t nearly afford medical care, are not covered if they would like to have an abortion. As someone who’s pro-choice, this kind of shocked me. First, because it feels a little bit Big Brother. And second, because if someone qualifies for the program they almost certainly will have a hard time coming up with the quarter-million dollars it takes to financially support a child through age 17. And they may be looking for other options than having a baby.

I had to get to the bottom of this. So I put in a call to my home county’s Medicaid office and after chit-chatting with some well-versed people on the subject in New York state, I’ve got some deplorable facts to report about abortion coverage. Err, termination coverage. The first thing I learned is that Medicaid workers don’t like the word “abortion.”

The Women on Waves boat, a vessel which sailed to international waters outside countries where abortion is illegal and terminated pregnancies, may be docking for good.

A little backstory: Founded in 1999, WoW is a Netherlands-based charity with a boat that docked 12 miles off the coast (which constitutes “international water”) of places like Ireland, Portugal, and Spain, where women must rely on illegal abortions to end their pregnancies. WoW provided contraceptives, pregnancy testing, information about STDs, and prescribed the abortion pill (RU-486) to women who came on board. (WoW never actually performed surgical abortions on the boat, although it has had permission since 2008 to use a converted vessel to terminate pregnancies up to 12 weeks.)