Intimate Wars

by Merle Hoffman

  I was sued again soon afterward by a pro-life doctor, Cordelia Beverly, in what turned out to be a major commercial free speech case. Choices had been publishing and freely distributing calendars celebrating reproductive rights since 1980. In 1988 we illustrated the month of June with a picture taken at the Third Regional Conference of Women in Medicine that depicted Dr. Cordelia Beverly posing with Dr. Lena Edwards, an award-winning physician, both in attendance there. The inclusion of Dr. Beverly’s picture was meant to be an honor, but she felt we had put her life at risk by publicly associating her with an abortion clinic. She held that Choices had illegally used her image as an advertisement.

  By vote of 3–1 the court affirmed partial summary judgment on Dr. Beverly’s claim under Civil Rights Law 51. The case, which centered on whether my giving out free calendars nationally was advertising or education, made the front page of the Law Journal. After that I was very careful to get appropriate consent before I printed anyone’s photos, especially if it pertained to Choices.

  DEALING WITH THESE ANXIETIES and obstacles made me more sensitive than ever to the discrimination and pain that marked so many of my patient’s lives. The little girls and adolescents with wide eyes expressing what could not be spoken still got to me the most. I wanted to protect them, to give them their own defense mechanisms that would enable them to move through these difficult years without becoming casualties of the sexual culture. Parental consent was a hot topic at the time, thanks to Reagan’s attempt to pass a law that would require federally funded programs to notify parents when their children requested services. When I first opened my clinic I supported parental consent, thinking it best to have the support of a committed adult when making such a hard decision. But the 1988 case of Becky Bell, an Indiana teenager who died as a result of an illegal abortion she had sought rather than tell her parents she was pregnant, showed what could go wrong if minors were prohibited from making their own choices.

  When I was asked to give the first family planning and birth control talk (called “What Will Mama Say?”) to the Girl Scouts of the USA chapter in New York City, I was excited to have the opportunity to reach girls before they were faced with such a life-altering choice. I was amazed at how ignorant the girls were about their bodies and sex. They were so open and trusting, sharing with us their questions and fears. One girl revealed that she’d been sexually abused by a relative. Another asked the question, “Can you get pregnant from kissing?” Later the PCC sponsored a well-advertised Teen Speakout on Choice, at which I hosted a panel of experts who could answer the teenagers’ questions about their reproductive rights: whether they wanted to have an abortion, keep the baby, or give it up for adoption.

  The Creedmoor Mental Health Players, a group of talented staff from Creedmoor State Hospital, heard about my program with the Girl Scouts and asked if I’d be interested in collaborating with them to hold a workshop series at Rikers Island Prison. As we talked with the male and female inmates on subjects like battered women, rape, alcoholism, depression, and sexual issues, I found that I had a connection to the prisoners. I was interested in women who were in prison for crossing boundaries, women who killed their abusers, or women behind bars for political reasons.

  Meanwhile I noticed another underserved, shamed group that was being overlooked and discriminated against when it came to health care. Lesbians tended to visit their gynecologists much less frequently then heterosexual women, unwilling because of the medical assumption of heterosexuality. They were given medical forms questioning their use of birth control, their “marital status,” and so on; there was absolutely no conception of the need for sex education and health care directed toward women without men.

  I made sure that my staff knew how to be sensitive to the needs of lesbians so that Choices would be a safe space for them to seek care. But the obstacles homosexuals faced extended far beyond the boundaries of the clinic, so when I heard about the story of Karen Thompson, a lesbian whose lover, Sharon Kowalski, was in a car accident that left her a quadriplegic and unable to speak, I knew I had to help publicize it. Because Sharon’s parents refused to recognize the fact that their daughter was a lesbian, they barred Karen from visiting Sharon’s treatment facility. Karen was traveling the country, trying to set up interviews and give speeches to enlist support for what had become her crusade. She was fighting for the rights of all LGBT individuals. When I broke her story in On the Issues in 1987, Karen hadn’t seen her partner in two years.

  Gay men were dealing with a new health crisis around this time. I had covered AIDS in the first issue of my magazine in 1982 when it was an inchoate threat; by 1986, it was exploding like the abortion issue had ten years before. And like abortion, it was controversial, dangerous, and profound. AIDS had become the gay man’s unwanted pregnancy. For the first time since penicillin eliminated the fear of venereal disease, men were facing potentially life-threatening results from sex, an issue with which women had always had to grapple.

  When I visited the AIDS ward at San Francisco General, I saw that the disease had galvanized the gay community and changed the conventional avenues of medical treatment. I thought of my beginnings at Choices in the early seventies, before abortion had been legalized nationally, when we still dealt with all the shame, guilt, fear, and stigma. I remembered how the community of women had reached out—how they referred, educated, counseled, and supported women seeking abortions. In the case of AIDS, where medical technology had not been able to develop a definitive test to diagnose, let alone treat the disease, physicians so used to playing god had to face the reality of limited answers. Now, as then, the medical community had out of necessity stepped aside for love, for another definition of healing. This was Patient Power.

  Pregnant teens, women in prison, lesbians, gays—they were all pariahs, and they were all suffering, even dying, from the resulting guilt and shame that status produced. Shame was used as a defense by some to not seek services, and by others to block out possible help from the outside. And as with abortion, situations branded as transgressive or even illegal prevented many people from forming connections and political coalitions to address their rights. Many cast-outs experienced a kind of existential disgust that caused them to deny or ignore their reality. But the battle cry of the AIDS movement—that Silence=Death—said it all.

  IN THE LATE 1980S, another front opened in the war against women. In 1986 Randall Terry had founded Operation Rescue, an organization whose initial tactics involved peaceful sit-in demonstrations at abortion clinics inspired by the civil rights demonstrations led by Dr. King in the 1960s. But soon Terry and his protesters progressed to more violent tactics, shutting down a clinic in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. Operation Rescue sprang to prominence as a national organization during the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, Georgia, where hundreds of demonstrators were arrested, capturing national attention. By then they had adopted a slogan to fit the times: “If you believe abortion is murder, act like it’s murder.” That year, Reagan gave a speech to more than fifty thousand pro-life supporters gathered in Washington to mourn fifteen years of Roe v. Wade. “We’re told about a woman’s right to control her own body, but doesn’t an unborn child have a higher right, and that is to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?” he asked.

  In April of 1988, Operation Rescue summoned its ranks to New York City to begin what they called “a righteous, peaceful uprising of god-fearing people across the country that will ‘inspire’ politicians to correct man’s law, and make child-killing illegal again.... If we don’t end this holocaust very soon, the judgment of god is going to fall on this nation.” Hundreds came to New York with the intention of gathering in large numbers to blockade abortion clinics across New York City over the course of several days. Their goal was to get favorable media coverage and project the image of a groundswell of pious people against abortion while preventing women from exercising their reproductive rights.

  I led the PCC on the offensive. We declared a Reproduc
tive Freedom Week that would kick off with a march and rally on Friday, April 29, the day before Operation Rescue arrived in New York City. Approximately fifteen hundred people participated in our march, the largest pro-choice event in New York in ten years. Leading the way, I walked up to the right-to-life office clutching a “Support Operation Rescue” placard in my hands. I held it up to the crowd and tore it to pieces, declaring my action a symbol of how women were going fight back against the terrorists in Operation Rescue.

  Marches were always an important public statement of support. They gave people who otherwise would not get involved an opportunity to get into the streets and show their support for choice. Women could bring their mothers, daughters, and friends to bond over the issues in the exhilarating, almost celebratory atmosphere created by thousands of people coming together for a common cause. But it was the persistent, grueling, day-to-day activism that was necessary to resist the conservative and oppressive forces of the Right. We had to make sure a band of soldiers was present at every clinic, every day, to physically ensure that women’s rights weren’t blocked by the antis.

  The PCC meeting space turned into a war room. We began by writing and distributing a pamphlet called “The Battle to Defend Abortion Clinics,” the only strategic military pamphlet of the pro-choice movement. It detailed the politics of the battle and included concrete tactical suggestions for organizing against planned and unplanned pro-life demonstrations and actions. The week before Operation Rescue’s demonstration we held a training session on how to protect and defend the clinics. People living near the hotels where Operation Rescue activists planned to stay were leafleted and encouraged to give Operation Rescue a “fitting welcome.”

  For the next week we organized clinic watches and phone trees, dispatching people to the sights Operation Rescue was targeting. We secretly followed Operation Rescue members to find out which clinic they would target next, communicating the information to each other using walkie-talkies. Emergency announcements were made on a radio station (WBAI), giving the location of the facility being attacked and calling on people to come and defend it. Despite our efforts, Operation Rescue succeeded in closing facilities three out of the four days it staged blockades.

  So began a long year of defending abortion rights against Operation Rescue.

  Many of my mornings in 1988 began at dawn, when the lights of the city mingled with the sunrise. On one such morning I waited with other pro-choice warriors in front of the Carter Hotel, where the troops of Operation Rescue were gathering to begin their terror tactics against a local abortion clinic. Someone handed me a token for the subway, and before I knew it I was swept underground. Then we were running down Twenty-Third Street next to Randall Terry and his cohorts, determined to beat them to the clinic so we could keep those doors open. Terry and I locked eyes and gave each other a nonverbal acknowledgement of our competition as we raced each other down the street.

  We did manage to get to those doors, but Terry controlled all the outside traffic. No one could enter or leave, and seeing patients that day was impossible. But by 11 a.m. we were still there, refusing to surrender the clinic to Operation Rescue. Surrounded by their voices singing “Amazing Grace,” we chanted, “Not the Church, not the State, women must decide their fate,” and “Operation Rescue your name’s a lie, you don’t care if women die!” I can say them in my sleep even now.

  Another day, I was called to assist Eastern Women’s Center in the middle of an attack by Operation Rescue. The antis were lying on the floor forming a “Kryptonite Block,” a madly creative device that allowed a group of protesters to attach themselves to specially designed bicycle locks that defied police attempts to free them. By the time I arrived at the clinic, five Operation Rescue participants had been in the same positions, leg to neck to ankle to thigh, for approximately three hours; it would be at least another two before the police could dismantle them. One Catholic priest, attached to five women, was sitting with his neck chained like a dog, screaming to the women in the waiting room, “Go home, go home. There’ll be no baby killing here today. You will not be killing your babies this Saturday.”

  They held their biggest action yet on our turf on January 15, 1989. Defying a federal judge’s orders to stop blocking clinic entrances, eight hundred Operation Rescue members were arrested during protests at abortion clinics in New York, New Orleans, and Cincinnati. Demonstrators chained themselves together and to fences in front of the clinics, halted elevators, triggered fire alarms, and lay in front of police buses attempting to carry them away. They began their demonstration just as the US Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal that would have made the fetus a constitutional person with rights and privileges. New York City, the abortion capital of the United States, was to be the place where their national revolution would begin.

  In reaction, I arranged for the PCC to hold a “back alley” press conference in an alley between Broadway and Lafayette Streets in Manhattan to emphasize what women would face if the antis were successful in making abortions illegal. I held up my hanger and declared, “As I stand here in this alley among this garbage, this graffiti, this filth and debris, I know that I am possibly standing in and looking at my future—the future of millions of American women.... Making abortion illegal will not stop abortion. What it will do is send women by the hundreds of thousands into alleys just like this one. When that time comes there will be not enough alleys, not enough hospital emergency rooms, and not enough coffins to hold them.”

  WE FEMINISTS were encouraging the formation of new coalitions and inspiring others to act, or at least think about action. We never let an attack go unanswered, a clinic undefended. But what I wanted was for the entire pro-choice silent majority of the country to stand up and say, women’s rights are human rights! We will not allow any of these terrorists to stop our mothers, daughters, sisters, and friends from being able to exercise their moral and constitutional rights. I wanted mass mobilization. A girl can dream, can’t she?

  This frustration was occupying my mind when an Operation Rescue activist asked, “Where are your troops, Hoffman?” on yet another rainy, cold morning of protesting.

  I turned to face my questioner. Middle-aged, white, male, polyester suit, fetal feet button—in all, a good soldier of the Lord.

  “Where are your troops?”

  I looked past him to our small band of about fifty feminist activists, chanting and intense; beyond the five hundred or so kneeling, praying “rescuers”; past the police, the press, the passersby, and thought about his question. Where were my troops? We appeared sadly outnumbered. Compared to the antis, we always were.

  The small, two-story abortion clinic under attack was situated between Third and Lexington Avenues. As the drama unfolded, business went on as usual. Dogs got walked, some people shopped, some stopped to chat, others rushed on to work, all going about their daily routines as if a war were not happening in front of them. My questioner had verbalized one of my private intellectual dialogues. But it was really not so private after all. The question of just where the feminist movement was now, where the feminist movement was going, whether the feminist movement was alive or dead, had become a popular issue around which media, politicians, and anyone who felt like it could instantly pontificate.

  Of course the “rescuer” had a far more literal interpretation of this question in mind. He was merely counting heads.

  Operation Rescue was bent on trying to publicly project the image of a groundswell of pious people against abortion through the media, and at this it was somewhat effective. It chose as its battlefront small, unprotected doctors’ offices rather than large well-known (and well-prepared) facilities. Considering that every day in New York City alone there were hundreds of women who terminated their pregnancies at any one of at least one hundred providers, Operation Rescue’s claim that they were on the way to eliminating abortion was more than slightly exaggerated.

  It reminded me of their other exaggerations and falsehoods: their shamel
ess self-comparisons to the likes of Martin Luther King, Jr., or their obscene claim that their movement was akin to the great civil rights struggle of the sixties.

  Many people bought their lies. During the reign of Reagan, “double-think” had become the accepted form of social and political reality. Nuclear missiles were “peacekeepers,” ketchup was a “vegetable,” and all Americans were “better off now” than they had been some time in the past. This sinister tactic of obscuring truth with wishful thinking was actively appropriated by much of the local and national press, which helped Operation Rescue and its participants by affording them a great deal of coverage and sometimes even positive reviews. Reagan himself met personally with Joseph Scheidler and publicly praised him, officially giving these terrorists the highest institutional backing.

  The New York City police, many of whom seemed to be politically inclined to Operation Rescue’s philosophy, were also caught up in the fantasy. Pursuing a policy of “selective enforcement,” police treated the anti-choice blockaders with kid gloves, using stretchers to take protesters away gently, issuing desk tickets, and releasing Operation Rescue “prisoners of war” soon afterward, allowing them to return to the blockade site once again.

  This treatment was in marked contrast to that given pro-choice activists, who were pushed, pummeled, and herded into small areas behind barricades. It took intense and pressured meetings with Police Commissioner Benjamin Ward to publicly shame the police into upholding the law and ensuring women’s access to constitutionally protected medical treatment. Going up against Operation Rescue, we faced the daily possibility of being physically hurt or killed. I almost got clubbed by police in one of the early actions outside of a doctor’s office in Queens.