Intimate Wars

by Merle Hoffman

  Ironically, the New Right and Moral Majority were as in touch with the fact that abortion empowers women as women’s rights activists. The antis clearly understood that to keep women in the traditional roles of wife and mother—and thus prevent wholesale societal upheaval—they had to remove a woman’s power to choose.

  And so the American right-to-life movement, with the help of “pro-family” activists like Phyllis Schlafly, Christian fundamentalist preachers, and right-wing politicians, unabashedly touted the Bible-rooted construct of the “good woman” as a selfless mother above all else. They encouraged women to take their place in the “natural order” of the world—a hierarchy with god at the top, then men, then women, whose duty it was to have children. Terminating pregnancy was an assault on the very will of god. Fetuses were people and abortionists were killing them. The language of the debate was growing ever more heated and violent, and it was only a matter of time before actions would begin living up to the rhetoric.

  In 1979, in what was said to be the first terrorist attack against an abortion clinic in the US, a firebomb destroyed Bill Baird’s abortion clinic in Hempstead, Long Island. Of all the providers I’d met through NAAF, I was closest to Bill, and the news that his clinic had been bombed was incredibly upsetting. A man seen picketing the week before had walked into the clinic, screamed that everyone would burn in hell, poured gasoline across the lobby, and lit it with a torch. Thanks to Bill’s careful preparation for such an attack, the only person injured had been the bomber. He was caught by the clinic’s staff and sentenced to two years in a mental institution.

  The case was viewed as tragic, but ultimately seen as an aberration—after all, how could “right to life” believers be capable of killing people? The claim was made that anyone who would commit such an act must be mentally ill, but time would reveal anti-abortion violence to be a serious existential threat.

  I felt the severity of this war beginning to hit very close to home. In response to the escalating anti-abortion tension, I held an open house at Choices, inviting local politicians and interested parties to help me spread awareness about the city’s newly declared Abortion Rights Week. I became a regular representative of the pro-choice position on radio and television programs covering abortion. As the issue became hotter, diplomatic discussions morphed into gladiatorial games, and before long I was routinely pitted against antis in heated debates.

  MEANWHILE I BEGAN paying careful attention to the band of dedicated protesters who regularly picketed Choices. They were out there rain or shine. Every Saturday a priest and a group of his parishioners, mainly older women, bore signs, rosaries, and pictures of aborted fetuses to influence the young women who hurried past them into the clinic.

  There was one woman in particular who hardly ever missed a Saturday. One morning I watched her as she stood just outside the clinic doors at her usual post.

  She stopped a young black woman, touching her shoulder, her voice insisting, “There is another way. Choose life, let your baby live. Don’t murder your own child!” The girl, shaken and frightened, pulled away and walked quickly into Choices to resolve her already difficult decision.

  A man and a woman approached the doors. This time the faithful protester stood squarely in front of them, eyes blazing, fingers furiously working her rosary. “Your baby must live. How can you murder your own child?”

  “Get out of my way, lady! I have a nine-year-old at home who drives me crazy. You want to take her?”

  They brushed her aside. She moved on to tug at another woman’s sleeve, physically trying to prevent her from entering the clinic. It was time to intervene. A Choices staff member dialed 911. A young Irish cop showed up and informed the woman that she was not to physically harass patients, that her expression of political and religious passions were limited by law.

  The cop turned to the protester. “You should see them the way I have, the kids who no one wants . . . burned, scalded with boiling water, thrown out of windows.”

  But that reality never touched this protester or the millions like her, the people who, in turning toward the rights of fetuses, turned against the mothers who carried them.

  The indefatigability of the antis has always impressed me. I cannot dismiss the passion, persistence, and power of the members of their movement. Many of the anti-choice women I have encountered over the years have been intelligent, serious activists. Many have made sacrifices to continue their activism. In light of their belief that fetuses are babies and abortionists are killing them—abortion is murder—their actions and activities are understandable. What person of conscience would not fight against the wholesale slaughter of innocents? They want to convince the world of the righteousness of their position, and they see themselves as warriors in a transcendent battle.

  That is exactly how I have always felt.

  On some very basic level, I understand those antis who protest outside Choices. And I respect them for acting on their beliefs—even if I will do everything in my power, and put my life on the line, to ensure that they are defeated.

  IN 1980 the anti-choice movement elected one of their own to the White House to inspire, encourage, and solidify their position. With Ronald Reagan’s election there was a collective joy in the air, an expression of unity and expectation among conservatives not unlike the early days of Obama’s presidency. Reagan was outspokenly allied with the Moral Majority.

  A year later, another Human Life amendment was introduced: the Hatch amendment, an attempt to overturn Roe as a federal protection and send the power to legislate abortion back to the states. With Reagan in office and a Republican majority in the Senate, the amendment posed a real threat to reproductive freedom.

  I wrote a letter to Senator Hatch outlining why I was opposed. “Any federal ‘human life’ legislation that throws control of these issues back to the states is tantamount to a states’ rights ‘emancipation proclamation,’ giving the states the power to decide who should be free and who should not,” I wrote. “Freedom and liberty should have no boundaries. No woman should have to travel from one state to another to seek adequate medical care.... There is only one State—the United States—and its history and constitution cannot be prostituted.”

  Although the Hatch amendment did not pass, “choice,” a word made dirty in the mouths of Reagan and his Moral Majority talking heads, was being attacked from all sides. As usual, the poor and those with the least access to the medical system were the first casualties. The billion dollar over-the-counter birth control industry began running misleading ads for sponges and spermicides, implying that these products were just as effective as the Pill and other prescription birth control. The companies advertised lower costs and greater ease of use without the risk of any side effects.12 It was an egregious case of false advertising. Every day at Choices women and young girls waiting to have their abortions would earnestly insist, “But I did use something!” Poor women who could not access doctors as easily to receive prescription birth control were quick to buy these inexpensive sponges and spermicides. Many women were also turning to over-the-counter contraceptives because of heightened public concern about the side effects of the pill and IUDs.

  I lodged complaints with members of Congress and went to work publicly accusing the drug companies of forcing women to play Russian roulette with their birth control. The American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Women Wise, and the Los Angeles Times published my concerns, and I had high hopes when the Food and Drug Administration finally issued a report stating that the labeling of over-the-counter products was misleading and dangerous. A bill stipulating that every over-the-counter device would have to carry labels describing how effective they were was introduced in Congress.

  It didn’t pass, of course; it seemed Congress wasn’t keen on regulating the drug companies. Still, the defeat was baffling. Better birth control meant fewer abortions—why couldn’t Republicans see that? No matter how much people disagreed about abortion, everyone should have been able to
agree on the urgent need for accurate labeling and promotion of all devices that could keep women from getting pregnant against their wishes.

  It was clear that with Reagan’s election we had entered a new social era. Women’s issues were losing popularity, while family values, American supremacy, and a unified expression of the American dream had taken center stage in public consciousness. The pro-choice movement was losing ground, and Reagan was leading the attack.

  I had to find a way to fight back with something more potent than my articles and letters. In the months since my first television appearances I’d honed my natural talent for going head to head with formidable opponents. I was fascinated by the preachers on the Sunday morning shows—Jimmy Swaggart, the Church of Truth, Jerry Falwell—and I practiced debating by talking back to the television. Marty would go crazy and demand that I “turn that shit off,” but I loved listening to their theatrics, especially Swaggart’s. His preaching was so musical, so sensual, especially when he started speaking in tongues. I was interested in what these shows could teach me about “the enemy,” but there were also points of congruence. I could relate to the preachers’ overriding desire to be good, to be worthy, and I agreed with their attacks on consumerism and materialism. In fact, I even concurred with some of their diagnoses of societal problems; it was the etiology and the treatment that was at issue.

  I went to see Swaggart in person once when he appeared at Madison Square Garden. A religious Jew who sat near me told me he had begun to see the light after listening to him preach. Swaggart didn’t manage to “save” me, but I learned something about myself that day. I had a message as well, and it was time to begin my odyssey to spread it.

  Early in 1981 I began to travel the country on a debate circuit to share my perceptions of Reagan with others who were also out in the cold. With the help of my public relations agent I arranged my own tour, traveling from the small towns in the Midwest, to the wine counties of Southern California, to industrial, forbidding Detroit, and home to Philadelphia to bring my messages regarding women, abortion, pluralism, and civil rights to any place willing to put me on the air or give me a debate. At that time I was one of the very few pro-choice activists debating the leaders of the anti-choice movement: Joe Riley, Jeanne Head, Reverend Dan Fore, Beverly LaRossa, and Kathy Quinn, among others.

  I had recently conducted a two-year study at Choices in conjunction with HIP and Adelphi University, in which my patients were asked to give their reasons for having abortions. Fifty-three percent said financial reasons were the most important factor, up thirteen percentage points from a similar study done the previous year.

  I called the study “Abortionomics” and publicized it widely. I wanted these findings to hit home with worshipers of Reagan, that champion of the unborn who was clearly swelling the ranks of the aborted with his economic policies. The study showed that under the influence of the Reaganomics cult, which preached and reinforced individualism, careerism, and material benefit, women were choosing mortgage payments and second cars over second babies. Women may not have seen any connection between their choice of abortion and the economic policies that led them to it, but the specter of the “Welfare Queen” planted dread in the hearts of many who might otherwise have chosen to have more children. Reagan had successfully managed to address issues of personal pain with a fluency of script that enabled people to believe that their problems were a result of misplaced “liberal values” instead of a symptom of general social and political decline.

  The New York Times published a letter I wrote in 1984 when a seventeen-year-old student in Pennsylvania chose to have her baby and was dismissed from the National Honor Society as a consequence. Had she had an abortion, she would have been able to remain in the society. “What a set of circumstances in a country which gives lip service to the concept that it is a good thing for women to have children, yet punishes some of them so severely when they choose to do so,” I wrote. “The time is long past for women to stop being victimized by a society whose double messages place them in the position of always being wrong. One wonders, too, about the male involved in this pregnancy. Will he be allowed his ‘honors’?”

  My study also revealed a powerful contradiction: the majority of women who came to the clinic for the purpose of having an abortion did not consider themselves to be pro-choice. They had never imagined themselves in a position where they would decide to have an abortion, an act they considered morally reprehensible even as they waited their turns to be called into the operating rooms. Many shunned the pro-choice movement and distanced themselves from other women who had gone through the same thing. Colleagues told me of women who picketed their clinics, came inside for abortions, then went right back to the picket lines.

  As long as women judged themselves by Reagan’s vision of a “good mother,” they would also judge one another. It was a defense mechanism, a way to protect themselves against the shame and guilt they had internalized. In a heightened state of self-preservation they created a wall between individual experience and collective understanding. Many politely shook their heads when I asked them to sign petitions, come to rallies, or participate in meetings. Some women, faced with the challenge of being harassed on their way into the clinic, became briefly politicized as a way to express their anger, but few actively joined the pro-choice movement. After their abortions, most women just wanted to leave it all behind.

  Yet despite this desire for distance, women demonstrated a quiet solidarity with the cause through the simple act of having them. They referred their friends and family to Choices for abortions and came back to the clinic every time they needed counseling or care. Women were silently, undeniably connected to each other by the necessity of making reproductive choices. Every woman who chose abortion took part in an ongoing struggle toward a “reluctant epiphany,” a realization that not politics, but necessity drives women’s choices—and thus, there is an inherent morality in having the power to choose.

  There were some women who did have the courage to vocalize their experiences and take action, however small. I remember one woman in particular who I met on my debate tour that year. She had been a prostitute on welfare, using sex to get by after her second marriage. She said she was forty, but she looked much older. As we walked through the quiet campus where I was scheduled to speak that day, she told me that her abortions had been an expected occupational hazard. Now she sat on several boards of directors, a pillar of her community. Listening to her, I felt a sense of awe and wonder. So many activists are made, not born, radicalized by life, not theory.

  On a trip to Todos Santos, California, I was to be the keynote speaker at a professional women’s conference. These women were hungry for inspiration. They came to their activism the hard way, not on college campuses or in consciousness-raising groups, but through marriages. Most of them were divorced. When I finished my talk, a woman got up and began, “I’ve never told anyone about it, but five years ago I got pregnant and I had an abortion . . .” With that, she had joined the movement. She’d found her voice and reached out to her sisters.

  That was what I lived for, the small awakenings and profound beginnings. And I finally had enough psychological distance to recognize the phenomenon and call myself a feminist.

  I RETURNED TO NEW YORK that summer for a nationally televised debate with a prominent anti-choice leader. I was anxious and tremendously concerned that I should win. I understood that one could never really convert the other side. Debates merely served to rearticulate the issues on an ever higher and more conscious level so that those already converted became disciples.

  My debate was taped on a Friday. I had taken a pregnancy test that morning, leaving my urine at Choices. My period was a couple of weeks late, and I was worried. I was always so careful, almost obsessive, but no method of birth control is perfect.

  As the debate progressed, I experienced an odd sort of splitting off. I responded to the gibes and questions of my opponent, all the while thinking that I could
be pregnant. I felt removed enough to appreciate the irony of the situation, a battle being waged on multiple tracks. I was performing politically for the cameras and debating emotionally with myself. My opponent asked me how I could call myself a feminist and support abortion rights when half the fetuses being aborted were female. It was not a new argument. None of it was, but this time it made me think of my mother. My mother, with dreams deferred and denied.

  In the closing argument I made a passionate plea for the importance of women’s lives, for remembering that the abortion “issue” was ultimately about that. Thousands of individual stories, thousands of different reasons, all culminating in one shared ambiguous reality—a reality I was beginning to enter.

  I finished the taping and asked to use the studio phone to call my office. The assistant stood next to me, engaging me in conversation; I was talking, laughing. Then I got on the phone, spoke to my secretary, and found out that the pregnancy test was positive. It took my breath away.

  Sweating profusely, I wondered whether I had stained the outfit I was wearing for the debate. I called a cab, flattened my back against the seat, and took slow, deep breaths, trying to keep from feeling suffocated. The idea of abortion was a valve, an opening, a way to breathe. There was no question of whether I would have one. As we crossed the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge, I held my stomach and said aloud, “Sorry little one, it’s just not time.”

  My diary entry from that night reads, “For one night I am a mother.” I don’t remember whether or not I slept. I only remember my exhaustion and an overriding sense of inevitability. The next morning I dressed carefully in a red-and-white suit. What does one wear to an abortion? There are no traditional costumes like those for funerals or weddings. There is no ritual from one generation of women to another to look to as a guide. There are only functional considerations; you wear something that comes on and off quickly and easily.